Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
What President Obama and his “advisors” seem to have forgotten is that Iranians are not like other people living in the Middle East such as the Palestinians or the Libyans. They’re not a motley bunch of towel-headed A-rabs waving AK’s in the air.
They’re Persians. They are the physical and intellectual descendants of the people who ruled the known Earth for centuries, under names like Darius, Xerxes and Alexander the Great. They are the religious descendants of the Umayyad Caliphate that conquered Europe as far North as Tours, nearly to Paris.
Giving them nuclear capability is not a mistake. It’s a blunder.
Joe Doakesd now mu
One of the reasons that other Arab countries – Syria, Egypt, Iraq and the like – have been such relative military pushovers against the likes of Israel and, in the case of Iraq, the US, is that none of them have a tradition of being anything but beaten senseless at war. The Egyptians and Syrians are 1-4 since World War II (their only wins coming as they sided with the US against Hussein in 1991); the Iraqis were a Tampa Bay-like 0-7, and seem to be headed for 0-8.
The Iranians – and to a lesser extent, the Jordanians (who are 2-1-2 since 1948 notching a win against Syria and another against Iraq, and a loss and two draws against Israel; they were beaten, but alone among Israel’s Arab foes never humiliated) have no such history. In addition to their storied history of dominance through history, Iran (fighting via proxies) fought Iraq to a draw in the Iran-Iraq war, and, fighting through proxies, have essentially conquered Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, and are in a good position to be the dominant power in Syria and Iraq today.
I think as a Macedonian, Alexander the Great probably wouldn’t want to be listed as Persian…directly or indirectly.
Alexander did marry into the Persian family of Darius III, so perhaps that’s what Joe was referencing…
What First Ringer says. The Greeks basically fought the Persians from Ahasuerus through the early Muslim conquests, a period of what–over a millenium? Calling a Greek a Persian doesn’t seem quite right in that light.
Agreed that the Persians do have something of a glorious history, but I’m not sure how that really works out in practice today. The best they can point to is fighting the Iraqis to a stalemate by using “human wave” attacks and sacrificing their youth.
You guys are right – Alexander is a bad example. He was a ruler of the Persian Empire but only after he conquered it. That’s not helping my point. My point was that Persians don’t think like Palestinians and it’s a mistake to treat them like scruffy street urchins. They believe they are the descendents of emperors and are destined to rule the world as soon as they bring about the next Caliphate. Giving them weapons of mass destruction is a serious misjudgment.