Iran and Funny?

It's Wednesday here in NYC, and the weather has gone from unseasonably warm to seasonably cool. This is a typical weather pattern for the North Atlantic states, where we have to worry about snow up until Easter. Meanwhile, I'd like to thank the South for the warm weather pattern we enjoyed last week (and also for biscuits and gravy, which is nummie-good). Also, whenever I have to write "wednesday" I have to pronounce the "d" to remind myself it's there, so I try not to write that word very often. Because I feel stupid.

Now one of the things we try to do here at the Fortress of Solitude is educate. I believe it's important to teach, to leave something behind for future generations, to better my fellow human beings. And to mock. I don't know what Superman does in his Fortress of Solitude (I imagine it has something to do with making sculptures out of Wonderbread), but here in my Fortress I like to mock. It makes me feel better about myself. I'd briefly considered teaching you about the personalities unique to New York City, but then my friend Patrick Goodman challenged me to make the current situation in Iran funny. And I don't back down from a challenge.

For those of you not in the know, Iran has been pursuing the atomic bomb for years now. They say that they want to enrich uranium for their domestic energy consumption, but Russia -- the fine, upstanding citizens of the world who have been building a nuclear power plant for them -- hasn't given them the formula needed to make fuel for the reactor. So this is like saying they're making the formula for New Coke before Coca-cola has finished building the bottling plant, and telling them they no longer make New Coke.

Their president, Mahmud Ahmedinejad (motto: stealing elections since 2009), likes to come out and threaten Israel with annihilation every once in awhile, presumably with his non-existent, domestic fuel uranium that doesn't actually exist. Really. And, for a non-military, non-weapon program, the Iranians have gone to great lengths to hide it. They've spread their nuclear sites all around the country, placed them in the middle of population centers, and buried them far underground. Completely normal. Nothing to see here.

It's the multiple sites buried underground that is the most interesting, to me. See, in order to take out this completely peaceful, non-military program that will wipe Israel off the map, you would have to hit all the locations simultaneously and you'd have to do it with bunker busting bombs. So we here at the Fortress have been following the news pretty closely, because, believe it or not, the government tells you exactly, precisely what it has in mind. If you piece the stories together in the correct order.

That's why we have analysts at the CIA pouring over newspaper stories and listening to foreign broadcasts. Amazing what you can learn from an innocuous story about grain production in the Ukraine and reports of troop movements in Beloruss. Oh, and don't forget the electronic intercepts through the NSA; those often confirm suspicions. If you ever actually listen to them. Now I've lost my security clearance, but I think I can do this pretty well without those. Three things interest me:

1) Israel has been conducting massive air attack training missions over the Mediterranean Sea. These include bombers, the attendant air support (the planes protecting the bombers), and air refuelling tankers. That's a lot of airplanes in the sky at any one time. They practice attack runs on Cypress. Now, the only people who care about Cypress are the Greeks and Turks; I don't think Israel is planning to invade Cypress any time soon. It only makes sense once you realize that the distance between Cypress and Israel is exactly, precisely the same as the distance between Israel and Iran.

2) Last year, Bibi Netanyahu and President Obama had a meeting where they both declared Iran's obtaining The Bomb to be unacceptable. Obama said it had to be resolved by the end of last summmer; Bibi said it was more like the start of the autumn. I'm not sure what the difference is between the two, but I think it was a case of them saying the same thing different ways. Granted, nothing happened by the end of last summer and the beginning of last autumn. I'm not sure why. But there seemed to be an agreement in principle of a date certain to do "something."

3) We have recently prepositioned 379 bunker busting bombs on the island of Diego Garcia, which is perfect for, say, supplying someone in the Persian Gulf region. Now I'm not sure why the number is 379; why not make it an even 380? Did they need that last bomb someplace else? Anyway, you need bunker busters because they're designed to tunnel underground before they go boom, and the Iranians have buried most of the important nuclear sites underground. You don't need these babies to hunt Osama, so it seems our friend in the Pentagon are setting us up for a showdown with Iran.

Not that I think we have the cojones to do it. If the Israelis do it, they'd have to inform us first. Because they'd have to fly over Iraq, and we get testy when 75 airplanes fly over our heads without a warning. We may be supplying them with the bombs, too. So we don't get plausible deniability here. I just can't see President Obama signing off on this one. But if we did, I'd think we'd have to go for regime change as part of the mix.

Next time, I'll discuss just what "regime change" entails. For more shits and giggles. In the meantime, we here at the Fortress are planning to buy oil futures so we can hit it big on the commodities market. Never let it be said I don't take advantage of an opportunity.

There, was that funny enough, Patrick?