Bellowing Rights in the Middle East

It makes me smile to see how, lately, I've been posting almost more on Juan Cole's site than I have on my own. This is because a couple of days ago he penned a very interesting article on how U.S. generals have been trying to slow down the effort to drag the U.S. into even more of a war on Iran than it has already been waging with sanctions. And so, contrary to what I just finished saying was my habit, I've gone back there a couple of times to see what was happening, so important is that subject. Dozens of readers have chimed in, to the tune of 91 comments, before he stowed the article away under "Older Posts," though that article could still be under discussion for all I know, and up to a certain point they've explored numerous aspects of the Iran nuke thing -- except the one that interests me the most.

I keep being totally baffled by the failure of anyone to make explicit a good reason why Iran doesn't have a perfect right to have nuclear weapons of its own if it wants to, especially when the outcry against this comes from countries that have long had these weapons coming by the boatloads out of a certain part of their anatomy that a friend in the Air Force of long ago, unconsciously anticipating a certain conservative Presidential candidate of today, would have called their "gingies." Though I realize that Iran is a very uptight theocracy, I fail to see how that makes it a second Nazi Germany, as I have seen it described as being. They've been almost cuddly toward their neighbors, compared for instance to what the Israels have been toward theirs. Yet the idea of Iran developing those weapons is always spoken of as if nothing could be more obscene, and nowadays especially, many in the U.S. and in Israel have been beating the war drums as hard as possible, as if a pre-emptive military attack on Iran is not only absolutely justified but also imminent, as those neocons or whatever they are clamor to take the path already so bloodily and unsuccessfully hacked out by Saddam Hussein several decades ago.

The image that all this arouses and that I keep seeing in my head, probably inspired by the types of cartoons that have been run for years by Bartcop, is a long string of naked, paunchy males in their 50's and 60's, Americans, Israelis, British, French, and other European types, heading in a very determined single file with each man holding on to the one behind him by their ...bell ropes, down a steep slope toward a dark pit filled with endless carnage and oblivion.

I wouldn't be surprised, however, if the Iranians are secretly pleased by their ability to thus pull the chains of their foaming-at-the-mouth critics at will, and that actually they have no intention of developing nukes, any more than Netan-Lieberman have, or ought to have, of sending F-16's against Tehran. I like to think that the Iranians are canny enough to know that nukes are way too costly and injurious to make and to keep, for many reasons, even if they are never taken out of the box. And I also like to think that the outrage of the Lieberyahoos doesn't at all stem from fear of a Second Holocaust, but simply because they want to keep their present monopoly on having the loudest elephant bellowing rights in the Middle East, stemming from the nukes that they themselves are universally thought to have, along with always having U.S. Big Brother at their backs should they mess things up, which they feel at liberty to do all the time.