Sticking Our Noses Where It Hurts

My father once rescued a black and white mutt named Tip, who turned out to be an excellent pointing and retrieving dog for grouse and ptarmigan in thick cover in central Alaska, where we lived.

Except for one thing: Tip harbored a relentless desire for revenge upon porcupines. One fine fall day among the high bush cranberries growing under paper birches, Tip coursed upon a porcupine going about its business of getting from one tree to another. Tip attacked. The porky bristled. Tip came up yelping and bleeding, with a snout full of quills that it took my father, brother and I several hours to remove. End of a good hunting day.

Ever after, no matter how many grouse might be under his sensitive nose, if Tip caught the faintest scent of a porcupine, off he went after it, no matter how many signals to stop and curses thereafter. End result: Tip with a bloody snout full of quills. End of another hunting day.

I thought about Tip last week when I listened to G.W. Bush, president of the United States, say that well, even if our CIA and other intelligence guys know what they’re talking about and it’s true that Iran ain’t making nuclear bombs, “they might learn how.” And, says the genius in the White House, we couldn’t tolerate that. Have to do something about it.

I’ll let pass that anybody with a set of good encyclopedias can learn how to make a nuclear weapon and do it, provided he’s got the scientists, engineers, industrial capacity and billions of dollars.

No, what grabbed me is Bush’s yen to mix it up with the Iranians when he’s already given the country a snout full of quills by starting the Bush Family revenge war in Iraq next door. American ground forces near exhaustion just hanging on there, in hopes something might chance from it: Maybe the Iraqis will kill enough of each other off to exhaust the remainder into a tired truce.

But have us invade Iran next door? With what? By calling up the Boy Scouts?

With just a year to go in office, G.W. may be thinking of a little bombing. After all, we’re maintaining a giant, costly strategic air force that’s not good for anything much: Nuking Iran would give them some live practice for a change.

Maybe he’s thinking that starting a new Republican war might galvanize the public to vote heavily again for chest-thumping Republicans.

Whatever he starts in Iran, G.W. won’t deal with it after January, 2008. Or worry, if he ever has, about the good of the country. Or the guys burning and bleeding because of his hates. He’ll be back in Texas cutting brush and brushing up his new library. It’s bound to have something in it new to him: Books.

Tip the dog never learned. G.W.’s just the same. Except with him it’s the rest of us and a bunch of innocents overseas who suffer getting the quills pulled.