444 Days
My parents saved everything. They were Depression era kids. Growing up nobody really had much of anything and if you did have something, by God, you would never throw it away even long after it became useless, because "you never know." On top of that my dad was a history buff, so he saved alot of historical arcana. So my mom calls me up the other day, tells me she's been cleaning out some of dad's stuff and asks if I want his collection of political memorabilia. "What's in there?" I ask. "Alot of buttons", she tells me. "Let's see, there's 'I Like Ike', 'Vote AuH2O', 'All the Way with Adlai', 'Fuck Iran', and 'Ayatollah Ass-a-hollah'.
Whoa! That jolted me back. Back to December of 1979 precisely. My parents hosted a Christmas dinner party every year and invited all of dad's high school buddies and their spouses. The Iranian Hostage Crisis was the talk of the day and one of dad's more irreverent friends, brought the 'Fuck Iran' and 'Ayatollah Ass-a-hollah' buttons to pass out. Needless to say, none of the lawyers, doctors, bankers or any of the three Jesuit priests in attendence donned the buttons, but as a kid I was captivated. 'Wow, curse words on a button,' I must have thought. Turns out these weren't obscure novelty items. If you walked down the street of any touristy part of Manhattan that Christmas season, you would likely pass several places (or people) selling them. Back then we seemed to understand that Khomeini & Co. were nut cases and deserving of our scorn and vigilence. It was OK. Clearly that is not the case now. Khomeini's proteges are building nuclear bombs, joking about the Holocaust and threatening to wipe another country off the map and the American public seems somewhere between not caring and skeptical of not them, but us! Perhaps the intervening years have dulled us, after all Iran has for the most part been off our radar screen for 20+ years. Our short attention spans don't help either. On the scale of history, the Iranian Hostage Crisis was basically yesterday and nothing has changed, but we don't see it.
Those buttons got me interested in what was going on, and as a kid, I asked the type of questions you would expect of a kid - simple, unburdened by nuance, perhaps inane to an adult yet clumsily trenchant. "Dad, why has the President let those people be held hostage for so long?" I don't know, son. "Dad, will our new President, the actor guy, help those people get free?" I don't know but I think so, and I hope so, son.
444 days. It was my first lesson in foreign affairs. One type of leader let it go on for 444 days. Would the other type of leader have let it go on that long? We'll never truly know, but history has given us about as close to certainty as we'll get - it was unlikely the cowboy actor guy would have let the situation persist.
So, will Iran get the bomb? I don't know, but I hope not. I would be more optimistic if I saw more of those buttons floating around the kiosks and street vendors in NYC these days.
Whoa! That jolted me back. Back to December of 1979 precisely. My parents hosted a Christmas dinner party every year and invited all of dad's high school buddies and their spouses. The Iranian Hostage Crisis was the talk of the day and one of dad's more irreverent friends, brought the 'Fuck Iran' and 'Ayatollah Ass-a-hollah' buttons to pass out. Needless to say, none of the lawyers, doctors, bankers or any of the three Jesuit priests in attendence donned the buttons, but as a kid I was captivated. 'Wow, curse words on a button,' I must have thought. Turns out these weren't obscure novelty items. If you walked down the street of any touristy part of Manhattan that Christmas season, you would likely pass several places (or people) selling them. Back then we seemed to understand that Khomeini & Co. were nut cases and deserving of our scorn and vigilence. It was OK. Clearly that is not the case now. Khomeini's proteges are building nuclear bombs, joking about the Holocaust and threatening to wipe another country off the map and the American public seems somewhere between not caring and skeptical of not them, but us! Perhaps the intervening years have dulled us, after all Iran has for the most part been off our radar screen for 20+ years. Our short attention spans don't help either. On the scale of history, the Iranian Hostage Crisis was basically yesterday and nothing has changed, but we don't see it.
Those buttons got me interested in what was going on, and as a kid, I asked the type of questions you would expect of a kid - simple, unburdened by nuance, perhaps inane to an adult yet clumsily trenchant. "Dad, why has the President let those people be held hostage for so long?" I don't know, son. "Dad, will our new President, the actor guy, help those people get free?" I don't know but I think so, and I hope so, son.
444 days. It was my first lesson in foreign affairs. One type of leader let it go on for 444 days. Would the other type of leader have let it go on that long? We'll never truly know, but history has given us about as close to certainty as we'll get - it was unlikely the cowboy actor guy would have let the situation persist.
So, will Iran get the bomb? I don't know, but I hope not. I would be more optimistic if I saw more of those buttons floating around the kiosks and street vendors in NYC these days.
posted by Donny Baseball at 2:43 PM
2 Comments:
If we attach Iran, perhaps bomb the nuke facilities, Iran surely would retaliate by striking Israel with missiles armed with WMDs. Even if it does not have nukes, it could use other WMDs, such as dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, etc. Does this mean the military option is out (at a minium, surgical air strike would be a dangerous gamble). If so, then it seems to me that there is no way to stop it from having nukes.
It seems that no one has done the proper analysis on the implication of a nuclear Iran. Since everyone uses the same 30 seconds analysis and reached the same conclusion, I assume that it has to be at least partially wrong. What are the alternative scenarios? Is it possible that there are ways to change the regime regardless of whether it has nuke or not?
I am not sure what you are driving at regarding the implications of a nuclear Iran. There is scant room, in my view, to regard it as benign let alone favorable. The best that can be hoped for is that they get the bomb simultaneously to the regime collapsing or about to collapse. These are long odds. People point to the Soviet Union as an historical exmaple but I am not sure this is apt. The Soviets were terretorially expansionist. Iran appears to be idealogically expansionist and relatively so in that losses of their idealogical foes are gains for their own idealogy.
There are things we can do to bring down the regime without taking military action but I am afraid we are not doing enough here. We should be waging a mini-Cold War against them. If they get the bomb, it should be an all out Cold War. Even then though, history doesn't necessarily play out the same way twice. Any retaliatory attack now would pale in comparisont to a nuclear attack later. Near term certain bad versus long term uncertain worst?
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