This is not a dictatorship: Bush on Iran

Since I was under the influence of moderate pain medications due to my freakish bad luck this past weekend, my last column probably didn’t fall into the coherent writing category. I hope to redeem myself with this piece, however.
This past Tuesday (April 11) Iran announced that it had joined the nuclear club. This frightens me very much, but something else frightens me a whole lot more. That something else is Bush’s possible plans for Iran.
The day before, I stumbled across an interview with reporter Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, in which he said that Bush is deliberating a strike against Iran because he (meaning Bush, of course) wants, in those infamous words, “regime change.” Oh, then we’re handling Iraq so bloody well? That memo must have come when I was in class, which means I missed it. Sorry, George. Bush wants to go into Iran because he considers Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a ruler in the style of Adolf Hitler.
I’m not crazy about the guy myself, but we do not have the right to run into yet another country and screw their lives up, too. Things were not perfect in Iraq before we got there and things needed to change -- in their own time, but why do we think we have the right to go into Iran and hurt innocent people again?
Hersh said that Bush also was considering a nuclear option to deal with Iran. Therefore, the way I understand it, we want to fight fire with fire, so to speak. The president that claims to be moral, ethical, and who grabbed plenty of votes simply because he prays just might be considering the most morally reprehensible option ever in dealing with Iran. Am I the only person who finds that statement sickening, if not disgusting?
When the hell did we get the right to have 12,000 of our own nuclear warheads, but at the same time tell every other nation that it would be “dangerous and immoral” (in the words of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria) for them to have even just a few warheads of their own? For my own sanity (or what’s left of it), I’m ignoring the obvious irony found in Zakaria’s use of the word “immoral.”
I don’t like the idea of Iran having the potential to make nuclear weapons. In fact, I don’t like the idea of anyone having the potential to make nuclear weapons. But where was it written down that the sovereign nations of the world have to obtain American approval to do things? The last I checked, it wasn’t written anywhere.
If you trust Hersh’s report, then it doesn’t look like Bush is going to stop until he starts World War III. But, I forgot, Bush has a mandate from God, since apparently he has God’s cell phone number. I bet Bush’s God is not a God I would be inclined to believe in, to be honest about it. Even a member of the House of Representatives said to Hersh at one point, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy [meaning Bush] has a messianic vision.”
I speak only for myself here, but there’s only room in my life for one messiah, and it certainly isn’t George W. Bush.

Does this one really have a point?

“But when you look back you must realize
That nothing in your life's divine
Everything that's ever befallen you
Happened simply 'cause it crossed your mind
You're crashing by design”
-- Pete Townshend, “Crashing By Design”

When something bad happens to you, what do you usually think? If you’re anything like I was this past weekend, you begin to think you’re cursed at worst or someone bad in a previous life at the least. But what you’re really doing is blaming someone else -- in these cases, God. As humorous as those musings tend to be, I don’t think they go much further than that as being truth -- except, maybe, being someone bad in a previous life. I’m beginning to think I was the schoolyard bully who laughed at all the clumsy, dorky children, because I became precisely that clumsy, dorky child.
I’m a big believer in free will, meaning that the choices we make have the most effect on what happens in our lives. I’m a religious person who personally tends to downplay the belief that God has every minute detail of our lives mapped out. (I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before; I’ll be wrong again.) It’s also the choices that others make for us that affect our lives -- whether we want them to have that kind of power or not.
As much as I’ve beaten the horse that is freedom of choice, the truth is we will never make every decision for ourselves completely by ourselves. Our parents decided where we’d live as children, what schools we would attend, which in turn, influences events such as the shaping of our personality, where we’d go to college (or if we’d even get the chance to go). That, in turn, influences the career we have, where we live, and so on. If you think about it, our parents really might not have made the choice of where they lived. It’s a long tangle, one that will take much more than 800 or so words to undo.
Well, I guess that the horse isn’t completely dead, because here I go again. Though there are elements on each side of the political spectrum that would eliminate the freedom of choice, it’s mainly the right that desires to take away our right to choose anything for ourselves. I bet if they had their way, we’d only be able to eat what they put on the plate before us. The government tries to choose who I can marry, who should live or die, what other countries can do, and so on. I’ve lost enough opportunities to my parents’ decisions; I don’t want to lose anymore. I think there is a proper role for government to make responsible choices on behalf of its citizens, but I don’t believe that, for the most part, our government can be called on to make responsible choices anymore. I used to be part of the so-called “moral majority” that advocated most of these government roles, but then I decided that I wanted to use my brain for something besides keeping my head inflated. I’m still a moral person, but I like thinking. Okay, before the hate mail starts to arrive, I know a few smart Republicans.
I had someone tell me once “I used to be a liberal when I was young and naïve; when I matured, I became a Republican.” Apart from the slap at my maturity level, I was intrigued and taken aback by this statement. Is it really naïve to desire equality for all Americans, not just the rich, white males? I suppose it is a bit idealistic, but I can dream, can’t I? It’s naïve to allow someone to make decisions for you without thinking for yourself. It’s naïve to trust someone’s judgment solely because they’re the president, solely because they’re your pastor, and so on down the line. I don’t trust the judgment of my president or my pastor. I don’t even trust the judgment of the leadership of the Democratic Party. That doesn’t mean that any of them are bad people or that they’re wrong simply because I disagree with them. It means that what you say has to pass muster with me and most statements never get that far.
Please don’t blame all your problems on someone else; take some responsibility. Most likely you’re the one who got yourself into this mess. And for crying out loud, don’t listen to me solely because I’m running my mouth in this column. Think about it, disagree or agree, it doesn’t really matter. Just think about it for yourself. Come to your own conclusions.