News and Commentary

What Iran Could Have Been…

   DailyWire.com

In Ankara, hundreds of thousands of Iranians are chanting Death to America!

Am I the only person in the world who went from shocked to horrified to angry to worried and now bored?

It’s a common staple of many of the science-fiction stories I grew up with to deal with alternate histories. The best of these, by far I think, is Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder.

You know you have written something with impact when it warrants a Golden Era Simpsons episode, because by tinkering with a broken toaster, Homer accidentally goes back in time in their annual Treehouse of Horror Halloween series, episode five:

Terrified, he looks around at dinosaurs and volcanoes

HOMER: Okay. Don’t panic. Remember the advice your father gave you on your wedding day…

A thought balloon containing grandpa in a tuxedo appears above his head.

GRANDPA: If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything! Because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can’t imagine.

A Sound of Thunder was written in 1952, and it was one of the stories I read in school when I was very young.

Set well into the future, in A Sound of Thunder, amateur hunters pay enormous sums to travel back in time to get a chance to shoot the most fearsome big game animal of all: Tyrannosaurus Rex. Time scouts have determined that this particular specimen had died off at a very specific instant, meaning if they get their shots in just before that moment, no harm will be done; that T-rex was going to die then and there regardless.

And so they construct a floating path, suspended above the jungle floor. They do this because even the slightest change in the past could lead to unknown, dramatic changes in the present. But one of the hunters falls off the path for a moment, scrambles right back on, and they return to find a dystopian future – their world gone horribly, terribly wrong. Looking down at his muddy boots, the man who fell off the path has stepped on an insignificant butterfly, which was destined to be food for something else, then something else, then something else…

Now that’s a lot of copy to get to Iranian multitudes shouting Death to America!

“America and Trump cannot do a damn thing. We are ready to sacrifice our lives for our leader” says a young Iranian man. He may get his chance.

In A Sound of Thunder, and many, many similar stories of time travel, characters go back to the distant past, then either accidentally or purposefully change something, and that change leads to a horrible alternate reality where everything has gone wrong.

Many years after first reading this transformative story, I was struck with a sickening feeling: What if this is the horrible dystopian timeline?

Look back on the last half century or so, and ask yourself the what ifs?

What if Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, had not been allowed to return to Iran from exile abroad? What if America had not propped up the corrupt Shah in order to prevent Iran from going communist, not Islamicist? What if there had been an immediate and vigorous US military response the instant the hostages were taken? What if the Iranian uranium centrifuges were taken out in an air strike launched by Americans, or Israelis, or both?

What if the Iranian-backed bombing of the US barracks in Beirut in 1983 had been met instantly with a declaration of war by President Reagan and the removal of the Islamist regime? What if Barack Obama had given even the slightest support to the Iranians dying in the street for freedom in 2009? What if Obama had not lifted sanctions and shipped this mortal enemy – who has been at war with the United States since 1979 whether we are at war with them or not – $400,000,000 in cash for the release of US sailors, but rather coordinated cruise missile strikes at Iranian military assets?

Look back at pictures of Iran after WWII but before 1979: women in surgical scrubs rather than burkas; young people kissing as they sit in bikinis and trunks at poolside, listening to rock and roll. Look back at the pictures of a Western society, a wealthy society, a happy society, and then tell me that someone did not step on a butterfly somewhere and destroy that prosperous, free Iran that could have been and instead gave us – and most especially gave them – this brutal, primitive, death-loving, people-hating theocracy, the primary sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world, which will most likely cause a multitude of deaths and horrors for their people, and ours, in that part of our path we have yet to travel.

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