We Are the World

And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion.

-Sir Marmalade Jellyknees Aloysius Ginnifer Hitchens, Escutcheon of the Upitstay, on Iran

This sentence leers like a drunk in the middle of an article on Iran's "primitive" paranoia, and one wonders why it was included at all. Caveats don't sit well in polemics, and anyway, like the saying goes, just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Yes, Iran has concocted a veritable treasury of foreign devils, ever meddling in their internal affairs. So too has the United States and its satellite Airstrip . . . with far less reason or historical justification. You can blame the Anglo-Saxons for the Shah, but you can hardly blame the Mullahs for Margaret Thatcher.

In the meantime, Christopher says:

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons.

Our affairs indeed.