Americans are increasingly exasperated over how the White House is handling Iran’s recent disclosure of a second nuclear enrichment facility. The frustration, though, comes not from questions of sanctions on Iran’s oil supplies, nor the Obama administration’s willingness to negotiate without preconditions.“Let’s look at the recipe,” New York cabbie Raji Rawl, expressing the sentiments of numerous Americans, began. “A Middle Eastern Country with a madman for a leader, weapons of mass destruction, and a nation whose first three letters are IRA… where have I heard that one before?”
“I understand that the Bush administration started this script,” Boise homemaker Dana Jenkins explained, “but I expected a little less laziness from the Obama administration when it came to fabricated pretenses for pre-emptive strikes. I mean, c’mon. Where’s Iran getting their enriched uranium? Niger?”
“Don’t misunderstand us,” Mitch Reynolds, mechanic in Lansing Michigan, explained. “The whole WMD’s was a brilliant pretense for an unnecessary quagmire in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein made for a great megalomaniacal adversary for Bush, especially with the father / son Bush war motif. But it feels clichéd the second time around.”
“If my son has to die in our nation’s third Middle Eastern war, can we at least get a little originality in the false pretense for the invasion?” Karen McGregor, a secretary in Pheonix, grumbled. “How about a eugenics project to produce super soldiers? Or perhaps the country has acquired some extra-terrestrial technology that they plan to use to enslave America? If the president would just put half the effort into overextending our military as he has for getting the 2016 Olympics to Chicago, I might be willing to succumb to the war fever.”
Not every comment about how the administration was handling the Iranian issue was critical, though. Stanley Brelworth, a stockbroker from Virginia, complimented the administration on one point: "At least this time they're up front in saying the country currently has no WMDs. I don't want to relive IAEA inspectors again informing us that our intelligence was wrong."
Still, most Americans agree that they will support the war, false pretenses and all, as long as our military is there to win, we have a good exit strategy in place, and we don’t have to see the Iranian civilian casualties.
