‘Radioactive dreams’; Spare Region ‘Another War’
by Amer Al-Hilal
Reprinted from Arab Times (24th April, 2006)

Dear President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,

Please allow me to interrupt your latest preparations for the bizarre “Holocaust: Myth or Fact” conference and congratulate you on your active and vibrant Presidency. Iran continues on its path of enlightenment, its respect for human rights, combating terrorism, its support for freedom of speech, the Middle East Peace Process, security in the Gulf and the international arena by continuing to thumb its nose at the West and the Gulf countries by pursuing a nuclear program.

During the Kuwait invasion, Saddam “I Invaded Kuwait But All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” Hussein torched over 700 oil wells, literally making us live through Joseph Conrad’s Darkness at Noon, local lax environmental regulations on factories and the oil industry, leading to an increase in asthmas rates and cancers.

So Mr. President, you are just speeding up the inevitable; we are now on the path of an uninhabitable Kuwait, one shrouded in cancers and innumerable deaths due to the radioactive smorgasbord – due to a potential earthquake, human error a la Three Mile Island or a smart-bomb attack – from your strategically-placed-on-the-Kuwait-border nuclear reactors.

Of course placing such reactors around Teheran or your major cities would have alarmed citizens, so they got moved to our neck of the woods (ie the Busher plant).

You were well aware that our Ministers would run to you with open arms, with their gleaming, toothy smiles, and hug you and treat you like a visionary head of state when you visited us. You knew we’d make statements “supporting peaceful nuclear work.”

We also embraced your envoys (ie. Rafsanjani) but what use will their words of reassurance be when people are getting chills and fever due to environmental radiation?

You actually went one step beyond an invasion. This won’t be seven months of torture, rapes and killing (featuring over 600 POWs missing); rather Kuwait will be uninhabitable, not for one month, or seven months or three years, but for decades. It’s genius. You will actually manage to do something Saddam never dreamed of: create a ghost town – fueled by alarming cancer rates and innumerable deaths – where human life is worthless and billions in revenue whether earned (oil) or spent (infrastructure, investments) will be worthless. The history, heritage and land of a country will be erased, not in name but in reality. Who would want to live here under those conditions? Mr President if you don’t believe me, I’ll try to make this easier for you: watch Stanley Kramer’s 1959 motion picture ‘On The Beach’ (you can order it from Amazon.com). Listen to Fred Astaire’s monologue.

Oh, I just realized that you – as a former American hostage-taker during the Iranian revolution – are probably not “cool” with the idea of watching Western films, unless they are ‘Wag The Dog’ or ‘Fahrenheit 911.’ Take the Russian deal. And spare the region another war. Kuwait is tired of being in the eye of the storm every decade. We’ve had enough. Otherwise its welcome to Radioactive Dreams, Mr. President. And that will be all due to your sheer genius and respect for human life.