The Confederates started it, but the Union finished it, finishing them finally at a great cost. Today, the South and its attitudes have risen again.
Graham also seems unaware that if we attack them, Iran will likely block the Strait of Hormuz freezing oil shipments worldwide. Not a good thing.
Today, some US personalities want a theocratic state here like the one in Iran. Our own fundamentalists, many end of timers, politicized into Christian right movements, the antecedents of today's Tea Party, fired up by vicious Islamaphobia.
Theocratic evangelists posing as TV commentators like Glenn Beck urge us to let God Rule, the message of some of Iran's Mullahs. George Bush denounced Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil" while they do the same towards us. There is a poster in the former Embassy building denouncing U.S. evils.
I know my Iranian hosts expected me to be excited by visiting the Embassy as a symbol of an embarrassing set back to US plans.
I wasn't.
I reminded them that when the Taliban took Iranian diplomats hostage, and threatened to kill them, Iran moved troops to the border, and was about to invade Afghanistan before we did.
The US government learned from the Embassy takeover not in terms of changing imperial policies but by investing in more security. It now builds vast and far more fortified "diplomatic" enclaves like Iraq's Green Zone. Secrecy has become our national security state's religion.
These symbols of our past conflicts have a way of blocking new initiatives and possible reconciliation. I am sure that the former Embassy building is on some target list for potential missile attacks on Tehran. Americans relish "payback" as much as Iranians.
Avoiding an escalation of tension will not be easy as Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister explains: "In both countries, deep and mutually paralyzing suspicion has poisoned relations for three decades. Negotiations in such an atmosphere are almost fated to failure."
Can anything be done?
On the plane back, I watched the movie SALT where Angelina Jolie stops a fictionalized nuclear attack on Tehran at the last second in a gun battle staged in the bunker below the White House.
Hollywood pictures the story as a plot by Russian renegades who want to use nukes to outrage the whole Muslim world and trigger a more apocalyptic jihad against the US.
At the same time, we are doing all we can to block Iranian nuclear ambitions, even as I told an audience in Iran about my own objections to nuclear power plans in favor of green energies--not a popular position.
There are legitimate non-fiction fears of a new war against Iran, another no-win conflict that will cause more death and sap more treasure.
The neo-cons are busy at work lobbying for just such a war, eager to replicate their "heroic victory" over Iraq. They are playing the fear card with lots of covert lobbying from Israel that claims Iran represents an "existential" threat.
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