Monday, February 21, 2011

A Look at Iran and The Bomb

This is the documentary Iranium:
a 2011 documentary film that explores the Iranian nuclear program as it pertains to strategic threats against the West, and Islamic fundamentalism in Iran


This video is pretty dicey. Some sound points, but some hysterical stuff in it.
  • The part about Hezbollah using Mexican drug cartel smuggling routes is just plain idiotic. No drug lord is going to be interested in working "closely" with religious nuts who are highly hated by the US. That's like putting on fluorescent orange vest and trying to "sneak" across the border. Nutty! Drug lords would view Hezbollah like a plague: nothing but trouble!

  • The idea that the West has a hard time "understanding" holy wars and being "relativistic" and reluctant to judge other civilizations comes across as pretty hysterically funny. The West has its Crusades against Islam. The Pope called for them! That by definition is a "holy war". And in the 18th and 19th century the standard Western "judgement" of other civilizations was that they were all hopelessly backward and in desperate need of a "helping hand" from the West, preferably by letting the West set up colonies to exploit them. Oh... and I would classify Hitler's war against the Jews as a "holy war". It was the holy war of a fanatic racist determined to remove a people that he found to be an "insult" to his deification of the "Aryan peoples".

  • The bits about Iran and its leaders being puppets whose commitment to an "end of days" interpretation of the present is laughable. If you want to put terror into people for that craziness in Iran, then you should be absolutely terrified of the US because it is full of fundamentalist Christians who believe we are living in "end times". But I don't think Iran is any more likely to launch an Armageddon nuclear strike than is the US. Sure there are religious nuts in both countries. But they don't get to hold the trigger to the weapons. To insinuate the Iran is more irrational than the US is simply a lie. There are fanatics in both countries.
All this saber rattling calling for "action" against Iran because it is developing weapons of mass destruction would be more credible if the US had not blown it by using similar "weapons of mass destruction" fear mongering to justify a war of choice with Iraq, a country that had no weapons of mass destruction. You lie once, and suddenly you can't use that same cry to lead people down the same road. Shame!

Where I do stongly agree with this video is the point that Obama and the US should have made it very clear that they opposed the stolen election and that they supported the Green Revolution. Sadly, Obama in 2009 acted like the Obama of 2011, i.e. tepid, uncertain, worried about "stability and security" and not interested in human rights and democracy.

No comments: