This past year, CNN's Christiane Amanpour reported editorialized about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu's address to the US Congress regarding the threat from Iran's ongoing efforts to develop nuclear weapons, opining that fear of her native land is overwrought:
It was a very dark Strangelove-ian speech painting a picture of a really dystopian world. Raising the specter of a genocidal nation, a genocidal regime spraying nuclear weapons to annihilate the whole world and the whole region. Now obviously many people are very concerned about Iran and there is a deep lack of trust. But surely the same was said of the Soviet Union all those years ago.In other words, she seems to be telling us, we learned to live with a nuclear-armed USSR, and so we can learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran; if her words were intended to reassure, they really need work. The prospect of atomic attack by the Soviet Union upon the West terrified mankind, and on several occasions the "Cold War" nearly became a hot World War III, even though Marxist-Leninist theory holds that the capitalist countries will come to an end all by themselves--this is one point of Red ideology that may prove correct--and that military conflict versus these states is therefore unnecessary. No such doctrine, moreover, is adhered to by Iran (or by post-Communist Russia, which possesses an atomic arsenal superior to that of the USA); indeed, many Muslims, including, reportedly, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believe that the coming of the Mahdi (Islam's messiah) can be hastened by annihilating the "Great Satan" (the USA) and the "Little Satan" (Israel), and some mullahs have predicted that this eschatological figure will appear only as the consequence of a nuclear apocalypse.
Now, wasn't this u.c. worth waiting for?
