america fucking sucks

This talk of red lines and the Straits of Hormuz and terrifyingly everyday chatter about battle plans against swarms of armed Iranian speedboats is really upsetting me. This country of mine has got to stop making war on everybody. It's also got to stop being so damnably hypocritical. The US is obsessed with the idea that Iran is "rogue" and "opaque" and it's come to the point where this fucking country doesn't believe Iran has any reason at all, no instinct of self preservation. Everything it does is understood as Israel-swallowing crazy Muslim shit and never understood in the context of the constant nuclear threats against it.

One major absurdity underpinning the tension and terror is the insistence that Israel and the West can have nuclear weapons and they can't. It's not a crazy idea, Israel and the West are democracies and don't have a  tradition of threatening to obliterate countries. But wait, they do! This apocalyptic relationship might've been started by Iran (or not, I'm not sure), but it's definitely a give and take these days. I remember during the 2008 US election John McCain sang an insane ditty "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of Barbara Ann by the Beach Boys. Because it's the Beach Boys it's hard for us to realize that this is a preposterous and terrifying normalization of making war on Iran by a guy who represents a solid half of the United States. Iran may call us the great satan and have press releases in that tight, priestly rhetoric of third world dictatorships, but they only do it that way because they don't have our rich pop music tradition. Also, it's a kind of self defense to seem crazy (an explicit strategy of North Korea) when powerful Americans sing about taking you back to the stone age.

THEY'RE JUST LIKE US. THEY'RE RATIONAL. THEY AREN'T GOING TO CLOSE THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ BECAUSE IT'D BE ECONOMIC SUICIDE AS WELL AS ACTUAL BECAUSE WE'VE GOT A SPANKING ENORMOUS MILITARY AND A TRADITION OF HORRIFICALLY INHUMANE WAR MAKING (SEE JAPAN AND THE ONLY TIME ANY COUNTRY HAS BEEN EVIL ENOUGH TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS)

I haven't justified a conclusion of mine because I don't know enough and this is short and facile, but we have no more right to nuclear weapons than Iran. We just got here first and now we're bullying them. We should offer to get rid of all nuclear weapons anywhere near Iran, maybe just all of our nuclear weapons, with IAEA inspectors checking on us, in exchange for them dropping their program and letting in IAEA inspectors.