Fri Apr 1/05
Iran away 

So now we know, to the extent of this Iranian doctor's credibility anyway, in just what manner Zahra Kazemi died, and a more brutal one it's difficult to imagine. I am somewhat more outraged now than I was when I thought she had been more quickly dispatched, but equally resigned that nothing will change. Hem and haw all you want and Canadian-Iranian relations will still eventually level off, just as Canadian-Vietnamese relations leveled off after Nguyen Thi Hiep was executed on a patently ludicrous charge. This isn't exclusively a Canadian thing: for better or for worse, this is how diplomacy works among the middle powers (or, ahem, I guess also between a middle power and a non-power), and one dead person isn't going to change that.

But we should hem and haw, because even by those cynical standards, Graham, Pettigrew and Co. have been shockingly weak on this file, and what's worse, they have appeared weak. In that vein, I'm pretty much on board with everything Bob Tarantino says here. Our foreign service appears to have been replaced with some kind of sick joke, and how could it realistically be otherwise? There is very little vision, and almost no backbone, anywhere in the Canadian public sector.

We can't invade, nor would we even if we had the means. Again, in five years, nobody should expect this still to be an issue, especially since it's Iran, which has far bigger fish to fry. But it raises a rather important point: Iran is a piece of shit. What, exactly, are they holding over us?  Why not just cut off all relations? Why not expel their ambassador and recall ours, and cut off the 25 bucks of trade we conduct every year? Nobody's going to object to such a manoeuvre — I sure as hell wouldn't, even though I recognize its inherent futility. Would it be such a horrible thing just to take one stand, on one little thing, at least once per election cycle?