Fearing Iran

Watching FOX News the other afternoon (my favorite pastime if I feel like I need to yell at something), and despite Shep Smith's best efforts I just couldn't get rattled (granted, Shep Smith isn't quite the foghorn Hannity or O'Reilly are, but go with me here). As they went to commercial I became worried - was FOX actually becoming "fair and balanced?" Had my views of the world sufficiently shifted enough since graduating from the liberal brainwashing of BU and back to the bastion of enough for me to accept what FOX was telling me was true?

And then on comes this commercial paid for by United Against Nuclear Iran:



And suddenly all is in balance again.

Ignoring the fact that this ad TOTALLY IGNORES what is presently occurring in Iran and the resistance by it's people to Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, these people need to get straight about a couple intertwined things:

They're their own damn country, so respect that. Just because the U.S. is big enough to do things in the international sphere doesn't mean we have to. Sometimes you need to be a hero by not being heroic and sweeping in to fix things. Sometimes you need to let things play themselves out because, well, it's just the right and fair thing to do. Not to say a little soft power nudging isn't fair (case in point, the DoS and Twitter this past week), but the world does not revolve around the United States and how we feel about things. Iran has a right to nuclear energy that could, potentially, be as beneficial to improving relations with them and the Middle East as much as dangerous as the threat of nuclear holocaust at their hands is. This is fear-mongering, and detrimental to good, clear-headed policy-making.

Now, while it can be argued Iran does not have a good track record on pursuing nuclear power for peaceful means, one would think that after the events of the past week which so few Americans and westerners saw coming, we can give the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, we don't really have a clue about what the will and aims of Iran are. Ahmadinejad, sure; Khamenei, sure - but beyond them I don't think the majority of Americans have a real friggin' clue about what the Iranian people want, myself included. They don't hate us nor seem to fear us, so why should we them?

As usual, Jason Jones and The Daily Show comes through to show how ridiculous this view is:

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