The Whole Iran Issue

Friend: “hear anything new about what’s going on in Iran?”

Me: “Dawg, that was like SO three weeks ago! I’m over it.”

…or at least that seems to be the attitude of most folks. not so much terrible people, but terrible attention spans.

i don’t watch television, so the only news i get is the news i search for. that, or whatever a friend brings to my attention. to be fair, though, a number of my friends are former policy debaters and now are either lawyers or political players. but still,  i chose not to look into the Iran thing largely because of Iran’s political history. and my own.

i’ll start with me. (big surprise, right?)

Once upon a time i was a left-wing warrior critic of US foreign policy and clandestine operations throughout the world. and i still maintain that the reach of clandestine ops render democratic decision making in the US farcical. democracy CANNOT work without transparency, and we don’t know just how much we don’t know. some covert missions are fine and indeed necessary in foreign affairs, even domestic ones. it’s really the tremendous OVERUSE and OVERREACH of our nation’s shadow governments that i find unacceptable.

But alas, i retired my jersey as a revolutionary years ago. i found myself cultivating frustration and misery, unable to enjoy even the simplest things in life, and trying to convince myself that such a life was the only way to make any real difference. i was profoundly intolerant, insufferable, an unhappy. and though i did manage to do some good research and writing in those days, the deep passion for it all pretty much died when my girl died. and i have since found a different, healthier way to contribute to the world.

now, Iran.

are any of the political pundits talking about all of the ways in which we have been fucking with Iran’s government since the 50′s? i’ve still got a lot of that stuff committed to memory. in 1953 the US & Britain manufactured the “popular” overthrow of Mohamed Mosadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil fields. in his place we installed the Shah, a reluctant client, to rule with an iron fist and allow the CIA to continue working behind the scenes for our proxy war with the Soviets while the US and Britain continued to exploit the country’s location, infrastructure, and natural resources. in 1979 when the Shah was finally taken down, the people of Iran were chanting in the streets, “Death to the Shah! Death to the American Satan!”

Obama’s the first president to ever acknowledge US involvement with the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader in 1953. and now we have the unrest of the present.

the thing for me is this: had pocket video cameras been available in the 50′s, it would have looked a lot like what we see today. it hits people differently when they are confronted with up-close footage of young college-aged men with their brain matter exposed, or beautiful young women with their chest cavities blown open. it’s more confronting. but it doesn’t bring more clarity to the situation. it’s easy to get swept up in the emotion of it all and lose sight of the fact that foreign affairs is a chess game, not checkers. our government may be every bit as responsible for that boy and that girl as they were 56 years ago, before the advent of the camera phone.

unlike mainstream liberals who, for all of their good intentions,  get most of  their information/subsequent opinions from the same corporate interests that are being furthered in the Middle East by US hegemony, i AM at least somewhat aware of just how much i don’t know, and how much i can’t see. i know enough to know (and predict) what questions aren’t being asked, or answered, or taken seriously.

i once believed myself to be an abrasive reminder to good people with bad memories. and even now i ask myself how disconnected must we be as a nation from the realities of the world for the images of a single woman to stoke such flames among the responsive and upright masses?

i cried when the footage of Neda was brought to my attention. but the pain i felt was not unique in the slightest. i spent years, YEARS, crying (literally) and fighting for the memory of the Nedas in Chile, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Chiapas, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, East Timor, Congo, Sudan, Rwanda, ***IRAQ,*** (the war i predicted a week after 911) and many, many more places. and in EVERY, SINGLE, CASE, the US government was involved.

it’s right to be outraged when confronted with the displays of such an unjust, violent apparatus of control like the Iranian government. the outrage is very understandable. what’s not understandable are the conclusions and assumptions drawn from such displays. emotional upheaval has a way of lending itself to unsophisticated reasoning, like ‘girl killed = Iran bad.’ we weep for the one fallen tree, and then we accept whatever notions are given to us about the rest of the forest. this is why propaganda is so effective.

so much of my pain is born of the selective morality of the outraged masses, whose heart strings are only pulled around by the cable news camera crews. if it doesn’t make the headlines, it doesn’t seem to matter. but i’ve also lost sisters who did make the headlines, and while that was equally selective, i was glad for them to receive attention at all.

i cry for the pain of such a tragic loss. i cry for the reality of such a cruel & brutal world that so many are born into. and i hope my tears never cease to flow. i understand that killings such as Neda’s are how so many terrorists are made. people so hurt and desperate to do something, anything, that they gladly trade their lives for the cause, hoping that history will one day make their actions understood, or that god will know their hearts and embrace them in the afterlife.

i will remember Neda Agha Soltan’s name. Along with Rachel Corrie’s. Along with Marla Ruzicka’s.

but more than anything, i will remember the nameless, the voiceless, for whom these women are but symbols.

any death of the innocent deminishes me.

EDIT:

oh, and let me make it clear since i didn’t exactly spell it out directly: by this time next year, US troops will be in Iran. pending popular support, of course.

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