Happy New Year

By Douglas MacArthur
Regime Change [Surely, War? – Ed.] Correspondent

While we breathlessly await enlightenment about things we don't know, let's just stop for a second and celebrate something we do know: Nowruz.

Nowruz?  What's that?  you ask.

We sent our interns out to discover what Nowruz was and here's their exclusive report:

The first day of the Iranian calendar falls on the March equinox, the first day of spring, around 21 March. In the 11th century CE the Iranian calendar was reformed in order to fix the beginning of the calendar year, i.e. Nowruz, at the vernal equinox.

House cleaning and shopping House cleaning, or shaking the house is commonly done before the arrival of Nowruz. People start preparing for Nowruz with a major spring cleaning of their homes and by buying new clothes to wear for the New Year, as well the

Those eggs aren't going to survive a direct hit
(Tasnim News Agency)

purchase of flowers. The hyacinth and the tulip are popular and conspicuous.
Parsis adorn their houses with different auspicious symbols; namely, stars, butterflies, birds and fish; and on the day of Navroz, they dress in their new and best clothes and put on gold and silver kushtis and caps. They decorate the doors and windows with garlands of roses and jasmine, and use colored powders for creating patterns known as rangoli on their steps and thresholds. Fish and floral motifs are a favourite among rangolis and considered highly auspicious.^{[citation needed]}

Visiting family and friends During the Nowruz holidays, people are expected to make short visits to the homes of family, friends and neighbours. Typically, the young people will visit their elders first, and the elders return their visit later. Visitors are offered tea and pastries, cookies, fresh and dried fruits and mixed nuts or other snacks. Many Iranians throw large Nowruz parties in as a way of dealing with the long distances between groups of friends and family. 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nowruz.

Well done, interns.  Now for your next educational experience, I need you to call up every tire store in New York and get the best price on four new radials for a Audi A6 and summarize your research, because there's no f***in' way I'm paying $1,200 for 4 [Surely, you are working on an important tire-related story? – Ed.] 

Sounds like a good time for all.  And, according to the talented writer and comedian Mitra Johari, it is:

Today’s Iranian new year (nowruz) and I’m lookin at photos from my most recent trip and missing my family a lot. Being Iranian means a lot of things to me and my relationship to it changes and intensifies as I get older and visit my family there more and learn more.

— Mitra Jouhari (@tweetrajouhari) March 20, 2019

OK, so maybe if you are stuck in a windowless room on a back lot in Burbank with a bunch of nerds and you're missing your family and friends back in Iran, your feelings are a little bittersweet.  But no matter, it reminds you of kith and kin, which in Ms. Jouhari's case, means lots of folks back in Iran:

But the thing I’ve always known is that Iran is a beautiful place full of ppl who are kind, fun, loving, smart, hardworking. It’s a culture centered around hospitality & showing people how much you love them & want to take care of them. I really can’t think of anything better.

— Mitra Jouhari (@tweetrajouhari) March 20, 2019

Now Ms. Jouhari can call Iranians kind, fun, loving, smart, and hardworking.  But other folks who are none of those things have another term for those living in Iran.

That term is “targets.”

To the reactionary warmongers in Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh, the millions of people busily preparing for Nowruz festivities by cleaning their houses and buying their clothes would be better advised to dig bomb shelters in the backyard.  John Bolton, Bibi Netanyahu, and Mohammed bone Saw are once again beating the war drums, eager to show the world who's large and in charge.

For years, Bibi has been trying to shame the United States into bombing the crap out of Iran in a futile but impressive effort to stop Iran's nuclear program.  When President Obama did stop Iran's nuclear program by negotiating a deal to give Iran its own money back, Bibi went, um, ballistic.

But now he's installed his kind of stooges, like President U Bum and war criminal John Bolton, in office in the United States and they are ready to do Bibi's bidding.

Here's Jason Rezaian, describing their thinking a year ago:

To those who claim that the nuclear deal isn’t working, regime change remains the only solution. For the MEK, and Bolton, if his words are to be taken at face value, the only path to that could be war. The group has long been prepared to do whatever it takes to see that happen, including presenting fake intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program.

But you'd expect such hysterical talk from a leftist Iranian stooge like Rezaian [Is this the same guy who was held prisoner by Iran for over a year? – Ed.]  It's not like John Bolton, whose sophisticated two-page foreign policy playbook of trash talk and war has led to one brilliant success (e.g., Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela) after another, has already scoped out military options for an attack on Iran, is it?

National Security Adviser John Bolton had his team request options from the Pentagon to strike Iran late last year — a move that worried top defense officials that a possible new war in the Middle East was imminent.  (Vox, Jan. 14, 2019)

 And since then?

That clamor has only intensified. “President Trump told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid,” Bolton said last July. During the Warsaw event, he released a short video with a not-so-veiled threat to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: “I don’t think you’ll have many more anniversaries to enjoy.”. . .

But Bolton, the most bombastic of that group, is now whispering in President Donald Trump’s ear, and the United States is heading down a familiar path. In Trump, Bolton has found someone focused not on national security but on dismantling presidential actions that preceded his term. Trump is not interested in the nation of Iran, the Iranian people or any Iranian threat. He merely abhors former President Barack Obama and the  . . .  Iranian nuclear deal that the Obama administration negotiated. 

The author of that piece expressed concern that the price for Bolton's war lust would be paid by American troops, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But we know already who will pay the butcher's bill for the neocon/Likud/Saudi dream of war on Iran:  Mitra Johari's friends and family who live at ground zero for Bolton's and Netanyahu's bombing runs.  And if the civilian death toll in Iraq is any indication, the only certain result of attacking Iran is that there will be a lot of kind, fun, smart, loving, hardworking Iranians who won't live to see another Nowruz.

Happy New Year.