On television
recently, I heard Norman Podhoretz, an advisor to Republican
presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, advocate the bombing of
Iran, and it was clear that a drumbeat of opinion was pushing us
toward another war in the Middle East. I mentioned this to a
Portland friend who follows politics closely, and he told me to
worry about something else. “We Americans don’t go to war unless
Congress wants it and the public supports it.” He added that our
armed forces are stretched so thin that even the military couldn’t
stomach another war.
I might have breathed easier, except
I started thinking about a brave man named Gwen Coffin, editor and
publisher of the weekly Wallowa County Chieftain from the 1 940s to
the 1 970s. Although Coffin supported the war effort against the
Japanese and German governments, he insisted on looking at what the
war was doing to our nation and to his own small community in
Oregon. He praised Victory Gardens and the boys who served, yet
cautioned about war profiteers whose greed outweighed their
patriotism. He also told his readers in 1 943 that in years to come
our nation would not be proud of our Japanese internment camps. He
wasn’t much listened to decades ago, but he was, of course, right.
Years later, the Chieftain was among the first newspapers
to editorialize against the Vietnam War. Sure, it was one small
voice, but it was a voice reminding us that in a democracy there is
always opportunity for the minority view to become the majority
view. Love ’em or hate ’em, the press is the vehicle of witness and
the place where minority opinions gestate on their way to becoming
majority opinions.
I’m no expert on Iran, but I know some
things. First, I know that our CIA, along with British secret
agencies, engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected
government in Iran, and the reinstatement of a pro-western, pro-oil
company government under the leadership of Shah Reza Pahlevi, in
1953. This information was known by most Iranians but hidden from
Americans until recently. The records are now open and the story is
told in several books, including “All the Shah’s Men.” I spent a
month in Iran in 1968, when the Shah was at the height of his
power, but not his popularity. He was busy with preparations for
the celebration of 2,000 years of the Peacock Throne, an
orchestrated event that was to tie him — though the Pahlevi
dynasty was no older than a few generations –to fabled King
Darius. I was interviewing Peace Corps volunteers, many of them
engineers and architects, who chafed at building parks and statues
honoring and enriching one man and his family, while millions in
the country needed schools, hospitals and houses.
A few
years later, after the Iranian revolution, the British refused the
unpopular and physically ailing Shah admittance to their country
and hospitals, knowing there would be angry reactions in Iran. At
Henry Kissinger’s insistence, President Carter welcomed the Shah.
Not long after, the religious fanatics supporting Ayatollah
Khomeini beat back the communists and the middle-of-the-road
secularists and took the American hostages that, among other
things, turned Carter into a one-term President. Let’s also not
forget that our government gave aid to Saddam Hussein during the
brutal war between Iraq and Iran, a war that left millions on both
sides dead, maimed or displaced.
So now we have President
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor
and some in the Israeli government saber-rattling at Iran, some of
them talking openly about bombing Iranian bomb factories. Knowing
now how little we knew before 70 percent of Americans supported
President Bush in going to war against Iraq, knowing how many Iraqi
civilians and American soldiers have been killed and injured and
jarred from their homes and normal Iives, knowing that Iranians
have reason to distrust and dislike us and that Iran has three
times the population and more technology than Iraq had a decade
ago, knowing how many people have left our military because they
cannot agree with current policy and cannot live with the stresses
on their families, and remembering Gwen Coffin, I feel compelled to
raise my small voice to say “no.” Even if Iran joins the nuclear
club, which already includes India, Pakistan, Israel, China, and
North Korea, I still say “no.”
My Portland friend is
right: There are a lot of other things to worry about. But I want
to weigh in now with caution as our government inches toward a
decision to bomb Iran. I believe that if enough small voices
counter those with loud voices in high places, we can pull back
from engaging in another war in the Middle East.
Rich Wandschneider is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in
Enterprise, Oregon, where he directs Fishtrap, a nonprofit
organization promoting writers and writing in the
West.
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