Iran claims that it has enriched uranium. Wow! The price of oil skyrockets, panic grips the populace, people start building bomb shelters again.
My own reaction? Ho-hum. So what else is new?
I could argue, along with many knowledgeable folks, that this is not a crisis, that Iran is three to ten years away from an explodable nuclear device. (A runaway pile a la Chernobyl, now that might be another question ...) But I have an even more basic question:
Who cares if Iran has nuclear weapons?
Well, but could the government of Iran (under Ahmadinjezad, or however he spells his name) be trusted with nukes? True, Iran's current president has evinced a desire to see Israel (or, more accurately, the "Zionist government" of Israel) be driven into the sea, but that doesn't automagically translate into a willingness to drop a forty-kiloton fission device on Tel Aviv, an act that would certainly earn Tehran a quick and effective slum-clearance program on the part of Israel or even the United States. There are governments out there (including that of Israel) that have had nukes for years and that I wouldn't have cared to trust with them; yet so far nothing untoward has happened. In fact, in the entire history of nuclear weaponry only one nation in the entire world has shown that it cannot be trusted not to use these devices on innocent populaces, and that nation was not Iran.
Of course, Iran might conceivably turn such weapons over to terrorists like Al Qaeda (probably not – Al Qaeda is a Sunni group, and the Iranians are Shi'ites) or maybe Hezbollah, which is apparently a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tehran. Really? Can you imagine any government, anywhere, delivering such weapons of mass destruction to some non-official group of loose cannons which was not completely, thoroughly and micromanagerially under that government's thumb? Giving such weapons to the Iranian military, yes, that I can imagine; giving them to Hezbollah – nonsense. (This is pretty much what Kim Jong-il was going to do with North Korea's fissile weaponry, but that seems not to have happened, either.)
If the Iranians want the bomb, let them build it, as their nearest neighbors to the east (Pakistan) and their feared enemy to the west (Israel) have already done.
Our local paper, the West County Times, is asking for people to comment on Bush's decision, back in 2003, to declassify certain information to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, apparently as a counter to Joseph Wilson's op ed piece pointing out that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had been engaging in the sort of nuclear hanky-panky that the administration had claimed as such justification.
Given that the current administration has carried secrecy in government back up to the limits of paranoia, it would be inconsistent (shall I say hypocritical?) of me to condemn Bush for declassifying anything. Let us therefore praise the man for this act of openness, perhaps with a few faint damns.
Or shall we damn with faint praise? It seems that Bush declassified only that material which would support his decision to invade Iraq, but not that which would have counterindicated such an act. It would seem that a more courageous and praiseworthy act would have been to declassify everything.
But maybe, you may protest, there was no evidence, at the time, to suggest that Iraq was not engaged in a nuclear buildup, in the development of biological weapons, in the readying of stocks of poison gas. Well, after the invasion we discovered that there was no nuclear program in Iraq, that there were no mobile bioweapons labs, that Iraq's sometime stocks of poison gas had been relegated to history. If we couldn't figure that out before the invasion – and look, guys, they weren't keeping this a deep, dark secret, but shouting it to the world! – then our intelligence services are in deep doo-doo, and we may as well surrender to the first micronation that comes along. But personally I don't believe that the CIA is that thoroughly incompetent, and if I'm correct in this then the president had to have had all the information he needed not to go to war. So what we end up with was a politically-motivated selective declassification of material, aimed at making a political point. And so I will not praise with faint damns, but damn with faint praise.
Every now and then someone, outside and even inside the Esperanto movement, steps forward and accuses those who promote the language of displaying "religious fervor" or engaging in "sectarianism".
I can't argue with the phenomenon, which I've seen, and even participated in, over almost half a century. But the description is, IMHO, not nearly accurate.
"Religious fervor," for instance, might better be called "I've-got-a-good-idea-and-why-aren't-you-listening-to-me?" fervor. "Sectarianism" would be better labeled "The-world-is-divided-into-two-groups-and-we're-one-of-them"-ism. As far as I can tell, these are normal human behaviors, not limited to any particular religion or to religion in general. You can find them among Jehovah's Witnesses, people who dress up in Starfleet uniforms and attend conventions, people who believe that the world would be better off with an easy-to-learn common language, and people who believe that smoking is bad for you.
So why do we normally associate them with religion? Well, let's grant that the labels I suggest above are a bit overlong, and let's also recognize that these modes of behavior are, in our society, most often manifested in a religious context. So it seems natural that we would automatically label such behaviors are religious; that is, after all, where we primarily notice them. But, again, let me emphasize that they are not restricted to religious enthusiasts and are, in fact, fairly normal reactions to a society that evinces (in the best case) indifference and (in the worst case) hostility to an idea that you know is a good one.