I saw this post at Memri the other day (if you don’t read that site, you should) and couldn’t recall why Bushehr was so familiar. Then I remembered the 2006 Dan Simmons short story I’ve linked to before. It’s entertaining and prescient. A man is sitting home minding his own business when a time traveler pops in from the future. The traveler presents his bona fides by naming several major events that will happen over the next year, then comes back a year later to talk. Go. Read. It’s really quite excellent. But here’s the part that I recalled – on his second visit the traveler lists more words for upcoming events.
“Ahmadenijad,” he said softly. “Natanz. Arak. Bushehr. Ishafan. Bonab. Ramsar.”
“Those words don’t mean a damned thing to me,” I said as I scribbled them down phonetically. “Where are they? What are they?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” said the Time Traveler.
“Are you talking about . . . what? . . . the next fifteen or twenty years?” I said.
“I’m talking about the next fifteen or twenty months from your now,” he said softly. “Do you want more words?”
Simmons wrote that in April, 2006, so he’s actually not far off, time-wise. The Obama administration seems to have resigned themselves to a nuclear Iran, and may even – given the strong anti-Israel sentiment of quite a few high officials in and around the cabinet – think it’s not entirely a bad thing to have another nuclear country to oppose nuclear Israel. It’s been obvious for a long time – well before the Obama administration – that Iran is our enemy and that they intend to have nuclear weapons. Like the Time Traveler, it perplexes me that the last few decades of our leadership can’t figure out any way to stop it or effectively oppose Iran. But what used to be a small problem is certainly snowballing into a very large one.
