Back in 1980 — what seems like ten thousand years ago now — I spent a year at the State University of New York College at New Paltz, about an hour north of New York City. It was a tumultuous year, the last of the Carter presidency, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the 
assassination of John Lennon, and — on a more personal note — the death of my brother Mark, a very excellent jazz pianist (among numerous other things), whose car was knocked off the road by some drunk up in Maine (a blood-alcohol brother of Dubya, no doubt… but I digress). It was also a full year of the Iranian hostage crisis, during which our nation was taken by a kind of hyper-nationalism hitherto unknown to me. Some may remember (amid the soaring gas prices) the jingoistic songs on the radio, the first bloom of yellow ribbons, and the like. I can remember walking through one of the classroom buildings at New Paltz and seeing some bulletin board graffiti that read, “Who needs the Ayatollah’s oil? We’ve got 15,000 Iranian students to burn.”
Those were indeed ugly times, as are these. But the madness of 1980 set the template for much of what followed, and we are still living with its repercussions. Iran remains official enemy number one — the “Great Satan”, in the parlance of the mullahs — their crimes against the U.S. a rap sheet that usually includes support for terrorism (mostly in reference to Hezbollah), nuclear ambitions, and posing an existential threat to Israel. Pretty thin gruel, as it happens. Yes, they give money and supplies to Hezbollah, but Hezbollah wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Israel’s hysterical use of firepower over their 19-year occupation of Lebanon and thereafter. Yes, Iran does seek to enrich uranium, but these activities are still within the legal parameters of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and they have not demonstrated the ability to produce anything approaching weapons-grade uranium… though with a consistently belligerent nuclear-armed state (Israel) threatening them from just over the horizon, I wouldn’t be surprised if they should move in that direction. As for the existential threat to Israel, see the previous sentence. The only credible existential threat is the one directed at Iran by the regional nuclear power and by the global superpower (us). Amadenijad’s fulminations about Israel carry little weight a) because he is not the supreme leader of Iran, and b) because Iran does not have the capability to even begin to destroy Israel.
Israel, on the other hand, has the capability to destroy any state in the Middle East, with hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons in their arsenal. And while the rest of the world is transfixed on the horror we’ve created in Iraq, Israel has taken this opportunity to kick the living hell out of the slum that is Gaza, firing missiles into densely populated residential neighborhoods and following their usual tactics. The IDF has iced so many children in the occupied territories that the western press hardly bothers to report on the phenomenon any more — it’s becoming remarkably unremarkable. All the while, our government — the only one that can effectively restrain Israel — is asleep at the switch, standing aside while the blood flows in Gaza, much as we did when Lebanon was savagely attacked last summer and when Jenin and Nablus were being pounded by the IDF. We have demonstrated in a multitude of ways how little we care about the lives and livelihoods of people in that area of the world. Repairing that will take more than a cosmetic changing of the guard at the Pentagon and some high sounding rhetoric.
In any case, twenty-six years of pointless enmity is enough. It’s time to start behaving like adults and make peace with the Muslim world like we did with Russia and China. Iran is a good place to start.
luv u,
jp
