Iran, Missiles and Pride

Iran is scaring the daylights out of lots of people these days. Rockets that could hold nuclear missiles and reach Israel and/or American troops in the neighborhood—ouch. The more we protest and issue threats the faster their nuclear program seems to go.
Hardly a man is still alive who can remember when the Iranians were our pet allies in the Middle East, no threat to Israel, a reliable source of fuel oil (after all, Iranian wells were where it all began about a century ago), governed by a pliant Shah.
During World War II, we and the British took over the southern third of Iran, the Russians took over the northern third, and the middle third was left to the Iranians. It became a vast highway for us to pump Lend Lease supplies into Russia to use against Germany.
When the Shah held a celebration of Iran’s first twenty-five hundred years as a world power in 1972, everyone else snickered. His leash was too obvious. But Iran HAS been around for thousands of years. Its people are terribly proud of their history.
They are aware that it was Persia that helped bring down the Assyrian Empire, squashed Neo-Babylonia and drove Marc Anthony into the sea and scared Cleopatra witless. They took Jerusalem and nearly wiped out Herod’s family a few years before Christ was born.
When Iranian Magi (high priests/astronomers/astrologers ) showed up for Christ’s birth, even the Bible admits they scared the wits out of their old enemy, Herod, and came with a large enough army to block his secret police from traveling six miles to Bethlehem.
Then there was a seven century cold/hot war with Rome, fought on respectably equal terms. During Europe’s Dark and Middle ages, great empires rose and fell in what is now Iran.
I’ve watched an Iranian embassy employee nearly spit over the term, “Gifts of the Greeks”. Iranians feel that what Greece gave to the West was largely what came to them from Persia—what they didn’t vandalize and destroy. Agree or disagree, that’s pride.
In fact the blond, blue-eyed Greeks of antiquity sprang from the same blood stock—as did the tribes who went north and destroyed the Roman Empire in Western Europe. Just change the Iranian tribal name, “Kerman,” through a lingual shift to “German” and you’ve got it.
Iranian becomes Aryan—“the noble”—or the “master race”. When Hebrews and Christians cast around for a way to describe their deity, they couldn’t come up with much better than the ancient name for Persian/Iranian kings: Shah an Shah (king of kings) and Aryan of the Aryans (lord of lords).
In case you’re missing my point, this is a PROUD people, even arrogant. Now that they are out from under the Western thumb, it would be silly to think that they would accept a world in which some other nations held monopolies on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Such weapons, in their minds, BELONG to a people that ground Roman legions underfoot as well as a whole lot of other first class troops. How annoying they find it when other nations who already have atomic arsenals tell them to be good world citizens and renounce their rights.
Iranians are no more likely to listen to such preachments from American officials than the United States would have listened to anybody who tried to limit us from our destiny back in our history. Remember when London tried to take away our dream of a coast-to-coast empire back in 1767? We took on the whole British Empire to make it happen. We were ready in 1821, 1846, 1864 and 1895.
Whatever we want to DO about Iran, we better figure we’re dealing with a people a lot like us. They have our kind of pride and they’re not easily going to be persuaded to quit. Nasty thought—Britain backed down in all four years listed above. Did they know something we refuse to see?
In any case, we’d be wise to take a better look at what and whom we are dealing with.