Horsing Around in the Hormuz

Once, one night in a parking lot in Delaware when I was young, I was an unwilling witness to an incident that started when a carload of teenagers, girls and boys, pulled up alongside another carload of slightly older but still young people and called them "blackheads."

One of the persons in the car thus addressed had already become something of a collector of racial epithets of the sort that he might experience, though so far he had only had a couple directed at him. So he could only smile, because just a glance was enough to tell him that the teenagers were only the kind of scatter-brained twits that he had seen many times before, in Maryland, when he had been a teenager himself, and they could have been no danger to anyone.

But the others in the car, five in all, were -- or pretended to be -- highly incensed, and they piled out of the car and advanced toward the teenagers in a threatening manner, whereupon the teenagers promply sped away.

The offended car took off after them, and after two or three blocks pulled up beside the teenagers at a red light.

The teenagers' response was completely unexpected. They challenged the offended car to a drag race.

Those in the offended car were so taken aback by that move that they could only stare, and the teenagers took advantage of that lull to zoom away again, and that was the end of it.

Long afterward -- and more than once -- the man who had been amused by the "blackheads" shot, which he had never heard before, was bitterly attacked by one of the others, the lone female, in the offended group, for having done no more at the parking lot than opening the car door and putting a foot out, while wondering what anyone in their right mind could possibly expect him to do in what he had had no trouble seeing as being nothing more than a piece of some nitwit theater.

The way that a "confrontation" in the Hormuz Strait a few days ago mirrored this most minor of incidents in the Wilmington of the zipgun era is an accurate indication of the importance of the former event, no matter how many parties hoped it could be whipped up into a first class international crisis.

The teenagers paralleled the Iranians darting about in their little motorboats, while the offended parties corresponded to the two U.S. destroyers that appeared to have been mocked and challenged, even if, with barely a twitch of their high-powered equipment, in seconds they could easily have reduced the several motorboats to a few scattered smoking fragments floating on the water. To their credit, however, the officers and crews of the U. S. warships turned out to have been more like the bemused non-participant in the Delaware "hostilities," while the U.S. news media and high Administration officials matched the woman who had hurled so much invective and egging on of the troops at the top of her voice, yet had never herself gotten out of the car.

You almost -- but not quite -- have to feel sorry for those American and Israeli hawks who have been yearning for years to get an excuse to deprive Iran of the nuclear capability that it might or might not already have, while the nations of which these raptors are such toxic citizens have long been bristling with so many nuclear weapons of their own that they are in the inevitable process of badly poisoning themselves with the costs of having and maintaining the things. And it can never be forgotten that these war-wishers also have the even more important though seldom admitted goal of depriving the Iranians of control over their oil.

Now, with less than a year left of their days at the buttons, the time is fast running out for the Bush Admin to do anything. Their only window for making the attack may be their last two months in office, if a Democratic President is elected, so that the whole ensuring mess could be thrown into his or her hands. I don't see how that could possibly play well anywhere, even in Israel, which has, I think I've read, a populace that is largely and wisely not quite in tune with its more bellicose leaders and theorists.