Editorials / Opinion

What is this problem with Iran? I don't get it.

America and Iran are not neighbors. There is no West Bank to fight over between us. We have different theologies, and so what?

A threat? I grew up in the Cold War. I remember the Soviet missiles in Cuba, and President Kennedy's demand that the Russians take them out. There was a threat. People were scared. Nobody is scared now. Iran is a name in the newspapers.

"I want peace," said Mitt Romney in The Wall Street Journal Nov. 10. To that end, he proposed tougher sanctions and regular patrols of the Persian Gulf by a U.S. Navy carrier group — an action, from the Iranians' view, much like missiles in Cuba.

On Jan. 2, Iran test-fired a missile and threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz. Iran said it was responding to sanctions, which it called "economic war."

That's what sanctions are. They make people poor. In Iraq they were lethal. All the Republican presidential candidates, except Ron Paul, are hot for them — and more. In a debate in early November, Newt Gingrich called for "maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian [nuclear] program, including taking out their scientists."

On Jan. 11, someone took out Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, an engineer in Iran's uranium-enrichment works. A man on a motorcycle veered alongside Roshan's Peugeot on a street in Tehran and slapped on a magnetic bomb. Boom! Iran said it was an American job, or a "Zionist" one.

Probably.

Several candidates have promised to do "whatever is necessary" to stop Iran from having a nuclear bomb. That means war — another one.

Americans were told the Iraq war was about a weapons-of-mass-destruction program, but the program wasn't real. Here is another such program. Is it real? Iran admits to enriching uranium, but says the uranium is for civilian reactors, which it has. Well, governments lie. If Iran's government wanted a bomb, it might lie about it.

What if it had the bomb? Would it attack Israel? But Israel has nuclear weapons. No government would dare drop a nuclear bomb on Israel.

Americans wouldn't like Iran to have a bomb. We don't like it that North Korea has one or that Pakistan has, nor did we like it when Stalin and Mao had them. The world has lived with nuclear weapons for two-thirds of a century, and the only country that ever dropped one was the United States, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We might ask why the Iranians hate the United States.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was born in 1979 in a revolution against the Shah, a despot who had been installed in power by the CIA. Iranians invaded the U.S. embassy and held 53 Americans hostage for a year. Keeping hatred alive is useful to politicians, and for 30 years America has been Iran's Great Satan. Now our pols draw horns on Iran.

And Iran cooperates. It has just sentenced to death a former U.S. Marine, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, 28. Born in Arizona, Hekmati was in Iran to visit his grandmothers and was accused of being an American spy.

You blow up our scientists, we sentence your Marine.

Who benefits? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does. Gingrich and Romney do.

Obama tried diplomacy, but as outlined in Trita Parsi's new book, "A Single Roll of the Dice," he tried once and gave up. And sometime before November, our unmilitary president may need to demonstrate his manhood.

I get all that. But what does it have to do with us?

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His email address is bramsey@seattletimes.com