On the Brink
by An Iranian Educator

I’ve been on the edge of a sword all my life. When I was an adolescent in the late nineteen seventies, sadistic agents from SAVAK, the dreaded secret police of the Shah of Iran, stormed into our home, clubbed my father, cursed my mother, and threatened my brother and me. Father survived several months of unmentionable degradations as well as old fashioned starvation and beatings, and wobbled out of prison a weakened man who lived but a few more years. What was his crime at the university where he taught international relations? After decades of nationwide oppression by the shah, Father had sometimes told his students they didn’t need poisonous royal blood. They were better than their oppressors.

My mother and brother rarely discussed our tragedy with anyone and avoided trouble and eventually arranged to move to the United States. I on the other hand must have inherited my father’s academic and political passions and gained university unemployment as a professor of history. I didn’t interpret history the way Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his clerical and secret police henchmen did. I’d read too much about democracy and, in a business capacity, traveled to Europe and seen how free people lived. I nevertheless loved my country and warned we were becoming a pariah because of our repressive internal practices and aggressive foreign policies.

Representatives of the government warned me to stop. I did not. They then ordered me to stop, but I refused to bury the truth. They didn’t torture me as badly as the Shah had my father, but they were tough enough and eighteen months in prison were hellish and my current job as a cook in a lower-middle-class restaurant is at best dreary.

At home I’ve had two wives, one at a time, in case you were going to joke about that. My first had told me to shut my mouth about politics at school and in meetings that weren’t as secret as we attendees had thought. I refused and she left the second time police knocked on our door. My current wife is pleasant enough but uninterested in debating the powers that be, so we don’t talk much and that’s fine as I have time for reading and contemplation.

In fact, I bet I know more about Donald Trump than most Americans. After all, his guns are aimed at my neighbors and me, as well as some who live in Minneapolis or some other blue place that doesn’t embrace fascism. What I want to tell the people of the United States is that the bearded clerics and their acquisitive allies in the police and military are indeed odious and primarily responsible for recently slaughtering thousands of protestors in Iranian streets. But they are not solely responsible. Trump, lacking knowledge but overflowing with arrogance, had during his first run for the presidency promised to win and instantly get rid of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal, because it was a “bad plan.” He couldn’t articulate why it was bad. Maybe because Benjamin Netanyahu kept telling him it was the worst deal ever. In fact, it was a good plan when signed in 2015 because it dramatically slowed the momentum of nuclear development in Iran, which had always vowed that it wanted nuclear power only for peaceful purposes. The United States wasn’t going to believe Iranians about that since it didn’t want us to become another North Korea, in other words a nuclear armed butt kicker who the Yankees can’t bully around like Vietnam and Iraq and Panama and Venezuela as well as most countries in the Middle East that resist U.S. “democratization.”

Donald Trump lies about most things but not everything. As soon as he could he did strike an executive match and burned up the JCPOA, the best chance for peace the Middle East has had for decades. So where are we now? In American vernacular, Trump has his head up Benjamin Netanyahu’s ass, searching for money, and the Israeli Prime Minister delights in Trump’s myopia and the likelihood, if there is violence, that it will be the Americans who do most of the attacking and bleeding, not the small nation of Israel. If I were Netanyahu, I’d love President Donald J. Trump, a weakening man ever more easily manipulated.

Trump and his brighter but even more ruthless goons – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Nazi-impersonator Stephen Miller, and others – have presented the Islamic Republic of Iran with a short but devastating list of demands that must have been dictated by Benjamin Netanyahu while he listened to Wagnerian operas.

According to many news sources, these are the highlights:

1. Iran must “totally shutdown its nuclear program including all enrichment activities, dismantle all infrastructure, and destroy all of its stockpiles.”
2. There “must be strict limits on the range and number of ballistic missiles.”
3. Three, Iran must end all regional “support for proxy forces across the Middle East.”
4. In essence, the United States will use sanctions, such as those that have already crushed our economy and sent doomed people into the streets, and military power to enforce the mandates on this list.

There is, of course, lots of other type – some relevant and some officious – as in all treaties, agreements, and contracts. I’ll simply respond to the four points above.

1. The almost two hundred signatories of the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – including Iran but not Israel, which is usually exempt from internation law; hint, it’s because they’ve long had nuclear weapons – rests on “three pillars: non-proliferation, disarmament, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy.” Iran, under the JCPOA and regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, may have abided by those rules. Non-signatory Israel certainly has not abided by any rules.
2. Bet the farm that those “strict limits on range” of ballistic missiles would render them incapable of striking Israel, which attacks anyone in the region anytime it wants. This point is a crude and insulting nonstarter. Bare you throat Iran and beg Trump and Netanyahu not to slash it.
3. Point three is a good one, limiting “support for proxy forces across the region.” The United States and Israel, that is the warmongers who run them, certainly have not lived up to this pillar. Iran should promise to do so. Maybe it would help reduce tensions.
4. Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions – Donald Trump and his ilk are going to starve Iran and anyone else disagreeable. Iran should get ironclad promises, though they could easily be burned up, that it would be allowed to rejoin the international marketplace.

This returns us to points 1. and 2. Iran, like Germany and Japan, may be able to live safely without nuclear weapons, but those two countries are protected by the United States and its nuclear shield. I’m thankful I’m not making policy in any country, especially Iran.

Ballistic missiles… Iran and the rest of the world must explain to Trump and Netanyahu that all people and nations have the inalienable right to self-defense. Iran is not obligated to render itself defenseless because powerful war criminals want them to. The less-powerful war criminals in Iran must stop behaving nefariously as should the ever-preaching bad guys of the democracies.

Meanwhile the U.S. nuclear aircraft strike armada lurks in the Arabian Sea, supposedly out of range of Iran’s missiles, as an unstable fat man gobbles burgers and tries to decide whether lots of people are going to die. And what if things really get out of control? What if Iran is tougher than the bullies think and many Israelis die and the latter uses a nuclear weapon. What would Russia do? Or China? I don’t think this is Armageddon, not this time, but it’s a step closer.

What is President Xi thinking?

George Thomas Clark on Amazon