I sez about Iran

Everywhere I look these days I see stories about Iran.

We're going to bomb Iran they say.

Our "plan" is apparently to bomb them and then the people of Iran will welcome us as liberators, then rise up and "regime change" their leaders.

Oh brother.

Albert Einstein had the perfect response for that one:

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."



It is my view that we do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons for the same reason we do not let children play with guns. It is also true, however, that we have a president in the whitehouse that couldn't orchestrate the complicated insertion of a pretzel in his mouth without choking.

Yes. Iran's president is insane and would no sooner have a nuclear weapon than he would be threatening our ally Israel. However, we can't send deputy Fife to do Andy Griffith's job.

The Bush administration has been such a catastrophic failure that I view their motives as irrelevant. The more important the venture, the less I want them to take it on.

What I sez is:

1. We admit that this is about Israel and about oil. We defend our allies and we need oil and no more needs to be said.

2. We suggest that Israel join NATO. Iran will then know an attack on one is an attack on all.

3. Oil dependence and oil wars are linked. We should about-face and raise CAFE standards, put windmills on every cell-phone tower, give tax breaks for solar panels, decentralize our power grid, convert government fleets to zero emission vehicles, develop tidal sources of electricity, and point this nation to the inevitable future.

4. We allow existing nuclear power plants to be replaced with modern facilities that also produce hydrogen. If we're gonna have them, let's have them as safe as possible. We should also fund research into nuclear waste re-use and decontamination. Let's set a goal of say, 50 years before we either shut down what we have (because research hasn't eliminated unsafe waste) or expand what we have.

5. Let us be guided by our successes rather than our failures. Historically embargos combined with inspections do a terrific job of containment. That should be our plan for Iran.

6. We also need a carrot. The historical carrot is technology.

In short this plan uses historically successful methods to deal with the immediate problem and simultaneously addresses the underlying conflict by making America energy self-sufficient.

The day we no longer need a product that enriches our enemies is a day we start to breathe easier.