The Jerusalem Post today quotes Ayatollah Mahmoud Alavi, a senior cleric in Iran, as saying that Israel (which he calls “the Zionist regime” and “a cornered cat”) “will receive a crushing response from the Islamic Republic” if it tries to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities with air strikes.
The Post also reports that Iran is threatening to play its oil card:
Iran says it would respond to any attack by striking U.S. interests in the region and could close the Gulf to oil traffic, causing massive disruption to global crude supplies.
As for Israel,
Israeli media have speculated that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is seeking cabinet consensus to attack Iranian nuclear sites . . .
In terms of global politics, 2012 is looking nervy; a time when old men in power—failing once again at their most basic responsibility to leave a more peaceful and rational world for their children and grandchildren—fuck it up by their inability to talk and reason with one another, and default to Plan B: decide things with the clash of soldier boys.
What a stupid, stupid nuclear armed world we inhabit.
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Any thoughts on how to arrest the reins of power from the ridiculous and feeble? Or is the world condemned to a succession of Orwell’s Animal Farm animals in power ad nauseam?
The Brazilians have a saying about politics that goes as follows:
The flies change, but the shit is the same.
Maybe that’s too cynical. But I think the current Israeli-Iranian tensions are bringing the world, once again, to a very dangerous brink. After thousands of years of fighting over land and religion, we seem not to have learned a goddamn thing.
The below men were young once. What happened? When did the twin caterpillars of bigoted nationalism and sectarian religion first start consuming their hearts and brains?
Are we simply wired for war? Can it be different?
Prometheus Unbound 