The last rational man

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime being alternately denounced for choosing to be himself by converting from Catholicism to Islam while young -- and also being admired as one of the most exciting, skilled, and durable basketball greats ever. Meanwhile, he's gone about his business of trying to be a thoughtful and rational man in an irrational nation and world.

As he does about most doings of his country, he has opinions about Iran and the Orange Toddler's war:

... When you step back and look at the full arc of the Islamic Republic, a pattern emerges. This is a regime that has survived by manufacturing enemies abroad and crushing dissent at home. It has used religion as a shield and a weapon, not as a source of compassion or justice. It has turned a country with immense human and natural resources into a place where young people dream of leaving, where talent is exported and fear is imported into every home.

The cost, both to Iran and the United States, has been staggering. Americans have lost loved ones in bombings and wars shaped by Ayatollah’s hand. Iranians have lost children to bullets, prisons, and gallows. The region has been destabilized by proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Millions of refugees have been created by conflicts in which the Islamic Republic has played a central role. And inside Iran, generations have grown up under a government that treats their aspirations as threats.

Iran is an ancient civilization with poetry, music, science, and philosophy that have enriched humanity for centuries. The problem is not Iran; the problem is a regime that has hijacked Iran’s name and used it to justify violence and repression.

A world without the Islamic Republic as a governing system would be a world where American families wouldn’t have to learn the names of distant cities only because their sons and daughters died there in attacks planned in Tehran. It would be a Middle East where one of its largest, most educated populations could participate openly in building regional stability instead of being used as cannon fodder in ideological battles.

And yet, in spite of all that, the U.S. cannot be the country that begins wars, or even conflagrations. We cannot become the world’s attack dog. We cannot simply march into a sovereign nation and take out their leader or system of government. 

Have we done that in the past? Have we begun and even sustained conflicts without going through the proper channels, also known as congressional support?

Yes we have. And it has never, ever turned out well. ...

Kareem puts me in mind of The Last Rational Man, a poem by Margaret Atwood. 

Yet cry out against war we must.