Why We Shouldn't Bomb Iran

Aside from the fact that Iran is a sovereign nation and that airstrikes almost always kill innocent people, I would like to offer some observations that seem to evade the attention of many of us in the west, hoping to encourage more research and hence knowledge.

Contrary to those who seem to think education is superfluous, education is a way to increase your understanding of the people of a country, to dispell unbased notions and stereotypes and to make possible the chance for open communication. I am going to copy an exerpt from a long script for a performance work I am writing ... editing it for the general population of Patch readers:

"People with an opinion about Iran should get their mental ........ off their chairs and read the history, even recent, that brings Iran to its current 'evil' state.

Our allies in WW2, the British and the Russians — both attacked Iran in order to secure the oil.

Did you ........... know that? And, yes, Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, was pro-Nazi, but why would he ally with the British and Western powers when Persia had been raped by them for oil for thirty odd years?

In 1941 Britian and the USSR deposed and exiled the Shah and enthroned his 22 year old son as the new Shah of Iran.

When, after the war, Iran finally got a democratically elected leader, Mossadeq, Britains MI6 and the CIA, overthrew him in a coup.  Did you ........ know that? The bastions of democracy overthrew the first democratically elected leader of Iran! Moreover, they replaced him with a general that Britian had arrested during the war, due to his attempt to set up a pro-Nazi government! Google search Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi … the guy becomes Prime Minister in 1953. Why such lunacy?

Mossadeq’s "crime" was that he started to nationalize the oil fields.

The British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. was going to have none of that.

Churchill and Eisenhower decided to pull the plug on the government of Iran and while restoring the AIOC, also guaranteed that five American Oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell and the Compagnie Francaise des Petroles, would draw Iran’s petroleum after the coup.  They called the coup, Operation Ajax.

Mossaddegh was arrested and convicted by the Shah’s military court and his supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. That’s what they got for (messing) with western oil. This is not a poem.

This is the world — your world.

The Shah was then put in place and many saw him as a puppet of the Western powers and hated him despite the "westernization" of Iran.

That turned Tehran into a place nearly indistinguishable from Paris.

But the Shah had his SAVAC, the SS of Iran, and the people feared this merciless man.

And the west backed him.

I am sick of all the myopic nonsense that postures in a self-righteous attitude, on the part of the west, regarding Iran. 

The west has systematically .......... over the Middle East since oil was found beneath its sands. And I am not saying that the powers in the Middle East are angels either, but I am saying no one has an edge on virtue here and all these bastards are fighting for one thing: control of the black blood… oil."

First, a reason to avoid attacking Iran, is that, despite the hype, the only reason we have for attacking them is, once again, to attempt to control the flow of oil. If anyone still fears the "weapons of mass destruction" ruse that was used so effectively to gain popular backing for a multi-billion dollar war on Iraq, they should seriously have their heads checked. 

This idea that the Supreme Leader of Iran would use nuclear weapons against anyone, thereby guaranteeing the absolute destruction of his nation, is completely unsupportable. And the Supreme Leader, not the President, runs this country.

The President loves to saber rattle and talk tough. His anti-Semetic views are well known but being anti-Semetic and launching a nuclear strike on Israel are two different things. Nothing he does is done without the approval of the Supreme Leader. Of course he doesn't want to lose face in an exchange of threats ... or seem to cave to Western demands that they allow us to walk in and inspect all their top secret sites. And, yes, he might be crazy. But he is on a short leash. He is a puppet of the clergy.

The Iranian people meanwhile, despite their theocratic despots and macho Presidents, are, like peoples everywhere, peace-loving people. They do not want war. They suffered recently a horrendous war with Iraq, and lost millions of people. Why would they want war with the biggest bad boy on the block, the USA?

They are gracious, kind-hearted people in the main, love life, prioritize their families and have every right to live that you or I have, free of the threat, let alone the actuality of war. If you don't personally know Iranians, you are missing out on some very good friends.

What amazes me most about contemporary Iranians is the fact that they do not hold the actions of the past western adminstrations against us ... they seem to understand what many of us still do not: That peoples of a country, and their adminstration, are often very different, and that judging others by the actions of those in power over them, is irrational, ignorant and destructive.