The News
Tucked into a corner of the front page of today’s Boston Globe (I know: I canceled it in disgust weeks ago. But they keep delivering it, no matter how many calls we make) was a small column about Iran’s successful testing of strategic missiles of a potentially nuclear sort. The main story is about unused baseball fields enmeshed in red tape.
That’s at least one reason I canceled this newspaper which, nightmarishly, continues to arrive.
The saber-rattling should be very frightening. Israel says it will be forced to do something (by whom?), and Iran says that any action will be seen as coming not just from Israel but from the US as well, and they’ll act accordingly. Notice how this is all predicated on the assumption that everyone is expected to ‘do something’.
I can make a suggestion. How about ‘we’ don’t ‘do’ a military action? How about we try and defuse the Isreal-Arab world’s tensions? Wars are expensive and clumsy and no one really wants one unless it can be a neatly circumscribed action of limited duration (which is what Bush wanted in Iraq, and didn’t get).
Iran clearly wants to feel strong because it currently feels weak and under threat from the US. But we also know that it really isn’t a strong nation after its unsuccessful decade long war with Iraq, and we know it suffers from religious divisions every bit as severe as Iraq’s. It is struggling to define itself as a coherent nation its citizens can feel attached to, no matter what their creed, and the easiest way to do that is to create an outside enemy against which they can unite. Do we really want to walk into that trap?
“The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance” as Prospero put it. A magician, yes, but also a person of realistic, practical ideas.
