This Foolishness With Iran
How Irrational Religious Fanaticism Will Kill Us All
If This Is A Fight, We Started It
The fact is it is we who harmed Iran, not the other way around.
Together with Great Britain, the U.S. forced the abdication of
Iran’s King, Reza Shahand, in 1941 and supported Shahand’s son,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, for 38 years until he was
deposed during the Islamic Revolution. The Shah of Iran was among
the most brutal despots who ever lived. He exploited Iran’s natural
and human resources, repressed religious freedoms and corrupted its
Old World values. Throughout his reign, the Shah enjoyed strong
relations with the U.S. and the U.K., which included covert efforts
to keep him in power.
It is those covert U.S. actions and foreign policy that is the root
of the growing tidal wave of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; a
wave broad in scope and growing ever higher in scale with each
passing day. Conservatives and fundamentalists on both sides love to
paint this as a fight between good and evil, between God and Satan.
The truth is there, for anyone willing to lay down their tribalism
long enough to do a half-hour’s worth of research: the United States
of America—the U.S. or us—started this fight. We enthusiastically
supported corrupt, sadistic dictators, especially in the Muslim
world. Now we claim innocence and naiveté, vowing “revenge” on those
who attacked us.
Which is not to excuse the 444 days Iranian students held U.S.
diplomats hostage back in 1979-1980. The hostage taking during the
Iranian Islamic Revolution, provoked in part by U.S. President Jimmy
Carter granting the Shah asylum in the U.S. to have emergency
surgery, painted Ruhollah Khomeini, a powerful Shia cleric who
returned to Iran from exile after the Shah’s departure, as America’s
arch villain. The Iranian Hostage Crisis is the core of America’s
ongoing characterization of Iran—and, by extension
Islam —as
evil. Ironically, most people under 50 likely don’t even realize
that. They’ve simply come of age in a world where Iran has been de
facto characterized as evil.
Is Iran actually evil? I suppose it depends upon your perception and
your values. Iran routinely supports some very shady activities in
the Mideast and across the globe and is considered a state sponsor
of global terrorism. Of course, to the Iranian Old Guard, what they
are doing is not terrorism but self-defense or jihad—Holy War.
American has conducted many Holy Wars—we just call them something
else. Islamic terrorists tend to use a corrupted interpretation of
the Holy Quran as justification for their atrocities. America has
and continues to do exactly the same thing; use a corrupted
interpretation of the Holy Bible to justify murder on an epic scale
and oppression of our own people. Who’s right? Why, we are, of
course. But that all depends on which “we” is saying it.
Look: terrorism is bad. Terrorists, no matter how noble they believe
their cause is, no matter how legitimate their gripe is, are evil.
Killing innocents in some kind of “Holy” war does not, in any sense,
please God, whether you call Him Jesus or Allah. Terrorists are nuts
and terrorist leaders, whether their names or Khomeini, bin Laden,
Bush or, yes, Obama, will someday have to stand before God and give
an account of innocent lives taken, presumably in His name.
The Boogeyman: The Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Would Jesus Make This Deal?
Conservatives want Obama to run out and kill a bunch of people. I guess
that would make them feel better. But, my guess is the president is a
student of history. The war hawks, including the underinformed armchair
Fox News junkies cheering on Donald Trump from their Barcaloungers, are
deeply ignorant people too lazy to read a book. If history has taught us
nothing else, it has aptly demonstrated nothing comes from violence but
more violence and war is not the answer to anything. President Obama, I
presume, understands he’d be throwing good money after bad and losing
the lives of young people by the hundreds if not thousands. There simply
is no viable military strategy against ISIS and even less of a viable
military option against Iran.
Which leaves only our arsenal of nukes. An arsenal that is all but
completely useless because we dare not use them without risking our own
annihilation. Our biggest fear about Iran is that Iran doesn’t care if
Iran is destroyed in return for launching a nuclear attack on Israel or
the U.S. I’m not convinced that’s true: I’m quite sure at least *some*
Iranians actually do care, actually don’t want nuclear war. But this is
where we are headed because, with every incursion it becomes
increasingly obvious America simply cannot sustain a conventional war on
so many fronts at the same time. This is the actual risk of the
president sending troops everywhere the Republican Congress demands:
failure. We risk failure, which the Republicans will politicize and use
to stop Hillary Clinton. We pride ourselves in being the world’s only
remaining super power, but our power is functionally inert. We have a
shaky economy, a public that is exhausted from decades of unending war
in the Middle East, an overstretched military and, yes, that useless
nuclear arsenal whose only real purpose is to prevent us from being
nuked by others.
In spite of that, the Republicans want war. They demand war. They fling
invectives at the sitting president, calling his policies “feckless,”
while not putting forth any actual policies of their own. Conservatives
rail against the Iran nuke deal, demanding we reject it while offering
absolutely no viable alternative. As with the Affordable Health Care
Act—which conservatives—all of whom have health care—continue to insist
on repealing: they have no alternate plan. We’re listening; America is a
sucker for good ideas and alternative plans. If these incredibly stiff
white men had a better solution to this foolishness with Iran, they’d
have laid that plan out by now. They have no plan, they just hate this
one. And they hate this one mainly because Barack Obama supports it.
Rip It Up, Start Over: They'll be back. The pipe dream Republicans are selling.
The Politics of Delusion
The saddest and most dangerous part of the Iran nuclear treaty debate is
that more than half of the American people are naďve enough—are stupid
enough—to believe that, should we reject this deal, that we’ll force the
Iranians to the bargaining table again. This is the bill of goods the
right wing is effectively selling: Tear It Up, Force Them To A Better
Deal. Destroying the tepid, half-a-loaf progress we’ve made will only
confirm in the minds of Iranian hardliners that America is not
trustworthy and, therefore, not worth dealing with.
This treaty can, therefore, either be a first step toward a shaky and
uncertain future or it can be the trigger for war. Conservatives, which
include most Republicans and, yes, conservative “Christians,” actually
prefer the latter, but they are selling this fairy tale that we can
reject our own peace plan, impose even harsher punishments on Iran, and
start the talks over; something only a child could believe. Going back
on our word will make America not only seem feckless but actually be
feckless and untrustworthy. No nation will ever take negotiations with
the US seriously because they know half of us are simply irrational
people out to sabotage any diplomatic effort in service of a grotesquely
distorted “Christian” esthetic: these people actually believe that Jesus
would prefer war to peace.
The other bill of goods, offered by the president and the liberal left,
is that this treaty fixes everything with Iran. It does not. Bottom
line: if Iran (or anyone else) is bound and determined to get a nuclear
weapon (and, I believe they are), there is little that anyone can do to
stop them. It is only a matter of time before some terrorist state or
terrorist organization gets its hand on a nuke, and only a matter of
time after that before they pack one in a suitcase and set it off in Tel
Aviv or, say, Brooklyn. This is the world we ourselves created, our
Hiroshima and Nagasaki chickens come home to roost. We, America,
invented this horrible thing.
Worse: clearly half of America believes—naively and stupidly—that this
problem has a military solution. A great many of us believe our military
is the answer to all our problems: just go bomb Isis. Go bomb Iran. Go
bomb Russia. This is the response of fat, middle-aged couch potatoes who
don’t have to do any of the fighting or clean up the mess. All of
America will end up paying the tab, both in blood and treasure, and if
the past decade has taught us nothing else, it has aptly demonstrated
the limits of American conventional military force. Rather than solve
problems, our every incursion, every military escapade, has only further
destabilized and further complicated global tensions while further
eroding America’s once-shining reputation for integrity, justice and
peace. With every bomb dropped, we confirm in the minds of the world
what idiots we are, how arrogant we are.
The conservative right demands a Pax Americana—peace enforced by
American weapons of war. They literally want World War III: America
fighting in virtually every area of the globe except Africa, which they
don’t care about because black people live there.
It utterly chills me, and should unnerve you as well, that conservatives
seem willing to play politics with absolutely everything. They will,
demonstrably, stop at absolutely nothing in order to block and vex this
president. They have slowed our economic recovery, blocking every piece
of legislation the president had supported—even to the extent of
abandoning their own proposals the moment the president agrees to
support them—while blaming Obama for literally everything.
The mission of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives most
egregiously, has not been to legislate or govern but to practice
politics, day and night, since this president was sworn in. They have,
repeatedly, put politics ahead of both the public good and the public
trust, and they are rewarded for destroying America’s credit rating and
nearly crashing the global economy by gaining a majority in both houses
of Congress. This phenomena is, as I’ve pointed out many times, largely
the consequence of the center and left’s ignorance; that we only seem to
show up to vote every four years, ignoring vital midterm elections which
is where older and more conservative voters come out and support
extremist, reactionary nut jobs. We sit and wonder, our mouths agape at
the sheer manipulative ignorance of guys like Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham
yet refuse to get off of the couch to go vote these nuts out of a job.
Good Cop, Bad Cops
So, here we are, again, staring into the abyss. On one side, an
imperfect agreement that, at the very least, slows Iranian progress
toward a nuke. On the other side: irrational people preying on the
ignorance of the uninformed conservative right wing. The goal of most
who oppose this deal is political: defeat Obama in an effort to put a
Republican in the White House in 2016. This strategy assumes there will
be a White House left in 2016. They are playing politics with nuclear
holocaust, trying to scare ignorant, uninformed people; it’s literally
all Republicans do: stir up mass hysteria; lie in an effort to frighten.
The absence of a credible, viable alternative to what I agree is an
imperfect deal fraught with problems casts the conservative right’s
opposition to the treaty as brazenly and obviously political. Which
makes me wonder who the real evil is: the Iranians or the Republican
Party;
Old Rich White Men more than willing to gamble away a
historic first step toward peace in a desperate grab for political
power. These truly, desperately evil people, lying to their gullible
followers, will politicize absolutely everything.
The God Is In The Details
Then Joshua summoned the Gibeonites and said, "Why
did you deceive us by saying, 'We live a long way from you,' while
actually you live near us? You are now under a curse: You will never
cease to serve as woodcutters and water carriers for the house of my
God." So Joshua saved them from the Israelites, and they did not kill
them. That day he made the Gibeonites woodcutters and water carriers for
the community and for the altar of the LORD at the place the LORD would
choose. And that is what they are to this day.
This is the result conservatives seem to be clamoring for: not a
reasonable agreement between sovereign nations but total capitulation on
the part of Iran or, more obviously, revenge against one of former
president Ronald Reagan’s “Axis of Evil” for America’s humiliation
during the Islamic Revolution. They don’t just want to win, they want to
utterly humiliate Iran—a sovereign nation we exploited for more than a
third of a century—in revenge for that nation’s having risen up against
us. I imagine most conservative Christians either don’t know or deny
America’s history of brutal exploitation of sovereign people (our own
Native Americans as the most obvious example). To them, Iran is simply
evil and our duty as Christians is to conquer evil [quote: Tony
Perkins].
Which is a complete lie. As Christians, we are not here to battle evil,
conquer evil or even to destroy evil. That’s God’s job [Romans 12]. Our
purpose is not to do God’s job for Him or “help God out” by organizing
politically in His name. I imagine it must deeply sadden God to see all
of these “Christian” zealots being motivated by hate, led around by
their own ignorance and practicing hatred in His name. Claims of being
God-led is at the heart of much (if not most) of the opposition to any
move toward peace with Iran, which is an utterly twisted, warped
interpretation of Christ.
Even worse, in addition to refuting the myth of this being a "Christian"
nation, America’s Old Testament racist tribal proclivities—her
thirst for vengeance and demand for the utter humiliation of her sworn
enemy Iran—misses a most valuable and important lesson of history: that,
pressed to extremes, a sovereign people would rather die on their feet
than live on their knees.
Christopher J. Priest
2 August 2015
editor@praisenet.org
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