Since I try to be as honest with my kids as possible, and try never to talk down to them, I sat down to try to sort out the Iranian “crisis” for myself before trying to explain it to them. More because of my own background as a kid than their current existence as kids, I was drawn back to the grand old days of Warner Brothers cartoons for my imagery.
I am wearied almost beyond expression at the ongoing arguments that essentially distill to “Do we kill Iran now, or kill them later?” It’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which the Pro-Murder crowd hopes we’ll screw up and declare “You do NOT have to kill Iran later. You must kill ‘em now! Shoot!” It’s Daffy Duck Diplomacy at its finest.
Senator Clinton voted in favor of a resolution calling on George Bush to take steps toward attacking Iran (“You do NOT have to shoot Iran now. You may shoot Iran later.”) In addition, of course, she and John Edwards sanctioned Bush’s attack on the people of Iraq, with Edwards having been a sponsor of the resolution (“Shoot Iraq NOW.”) Neither Clinton, nor Obama nor Edwards will commit to even having our troops out of the Civil War in Iraq by the time they leave office in 2013. Hardly sounds like a cadre of love-bead wearing, kum-by-yah-singing, lefty peaceniks, does it? It goes without saying that the Elmer Fudds on the other side, the Ten-Little-Idiots, as I like to call them, just want to kill something, ANYTHING. Wile E. Coyote comes to mind. The Sooooper Genius.
At the moment Iran gets a single nuclear device, they will be surrounded by: Pakistan, a nuclear power headed by a "brutal dictator who kills his own people," who is hanging on both to power and his own head by a margin thinner than the singed pintail feathers on Daffy Duck’s hide. Muslim fanatics aligned with Bin Laden want Musharraff’s head and the keys to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. These same fundamentalists are of a sect that loathes, despises and wants to kill as many Shi’a Iranian "heretics" as possible. If I was Iranian, I’d be more than a little nervous about that “Acme Nuclear Arsenals” van sitting in the Pakistani driveway.
At the same time, Iran will also have as a neighbor a nuclear-armed India, filled, again, with people who despise them for their particular flavor of Islam or for being Islamic at all (see India’s wars with Pakistan).
Also occupying space nigh to Iran is Saudi Arabia, the home and headquarters of Wahabbist (which sounds so phonetically close to a cartoon word I won’t bother with the image) Islam, the same variety that produced Osama and does the vast majority of Islamic proselytization around the world. Saudi Arabia is a hellhole in almost every sense of the word, but remains a close "friend" of the United States (rather like the “friendship” between Foghorn Leghorn and the Dawg) even though they're pouring millions of dollars of war-making materiels to the Sunni minority in Iraq, who, in turn, use those materiels to kill our sons, our daughters, our neighbors, nieces, nephews and friends who serve in that misbegotten, benighted place. Wahabbist Saudi Arabia also loathes the very air that Shi'a Iranians breathe. In Washington, though, where Saudi Arabia is concerned, it’s all “Home On The Wadi,” where “never is heard a discouraging word, and the sands are not flea-ridden all day.”
A short jet flight away from Iran is Israel (to whom I’ll make no cartoon reference at all, because of {a} my fear of being labeled an “anti-Semite” and {b} well, {a} is enough), who, of course, has never admitted its own vast nuclear arsenal but is known to possess nuclear weapons in the hundreds, if not the thousands and has as virulent a hatred of Arabs as Arabs do of them. Moreover, Israel has never foresworn the use of nuclear devices in a first strike capacity. To be fair, it’s hard to foreswear a first strike when you can’t even be honest enough with the world to admit your arsenal’s existence. It also goes without saying that, since Israel won't admit to having the bomb, they haven't signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Neither have Pakistan or India, despite, in the case of the latter, our best efforts at tropical fruit diplomacy, trading American civilian nuclear technology for Indian mangoes. I REALLY wish I was making this up.
It becomes abundantly clear, then, that Iran, should they develop a nuclear weapon even tomorrow, is effectively contained by its far more dangerous (not to mention Wile E. Coyote-insane) neighbors, and is more threatened by them than they are by Iran. It is also clear that if Iran obtains a nuclear arsenal of any size, that the purpose would be to deter its own nuclear-armed neighbors, many of whom are quite bellicose, if not, as previously mentioned, utterly religiously insane.
Also well worth noting, almost as an afterthought, is that the nature of a nuclear explosion is such that the fallout would poison the entire region, including the sites holiest to Christianity, Judaisim and Islam, as well as killing Arabs, Jews, and Persians alike, indiscriminately. It goes without saying that the atmospheric stuff blows all over the globe and could also wind up killing with cancer and the like, children thousands of miles from the heart of the matter, who don’t give a fig for Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem or any of the rest of that miserable, god-forsaken snakepit region; whose greatest delight lies not in driving Jews into the sea, eliminating the Shi’a heresy, pushing back against the Sunnis or re-asserting Christian dominion, but rather in frolicking on a playground in the warm sunshine; in other words: MY kids, and millions just like them.
Why then, we should ask ourselves, must we be constantly beset by all this sabre-rattling against Iran? Could it have something to do with the same reason we heard the very same sabre-rattling before we attacked the people of Iraq? It's worth remembering that, before we attacked and occupied Iraq, the proposed name of the Bush Administration plan was "Operation Iraqi Liberation." O.I.L. The Bush Administration caught that little miss-step right before the missiles and bombs began slamming into that sad, pathetic country.
Have you noticed that every time Iranian President Fuddmoud Ahmadinejad comes out and sings “Kill the Jew-Wabbit,” the price of oil goes up? Have you noticed that every time George Bush comes out to introduce his latest new-fangled Acme Iran-Eradicator, the price of oil goes up? And of course, there stands Vladimir Putin all done up in his best Marvin Martian attitude mumbling something in Russian that probably translates as “You humans make me very angry” and just waiting to take over the Earth.
Who wins when the price of oil goes up? It certainly isn't the American People or the Iranian People or the Iraqi People. Who wins if we manage to take away Iran's control of its oil? We took away Iraq's control of its oil, and the American People certainly weren't winners there. There's no reason to expect a different outcome in taking Iran's.
On the other hand, each and every quarter, the oil companies declare record profits. Not record costs. Record profits. To continue the Warner Brothers analogy, those are the guys with the Vincent Price voices, in the castle high on the hill with the giant, blinking light that reads alternatingly “Evil Scientist” and “Boo.”
To paraphrase Daffy for little children all across Iran: “They do NOT have to shoot us now. And I hope they won’t shoot us later.”
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
