American Hikers Setenced to eight years

Just read the headline at MSN: US hikers jailed, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, sentenced to eight years in Iran. These boys are not spies. Stupid, yes, but not spies. Stupid? Why…? Because they were “hiking” right next door to a country with a really stupid and paranoid leadership: Iran. Oh, wait, there were three in the beginning, when they got caught. I forgot they had a girl with them. I’m not going to spend a lot of time looking up old news stories. I will go on memory. After all, this is an opinion piece.

For awhile, I don’t remember how long, but the girl was held too. And then they let her go, as I recall, with orders to come back for the trial, I think. Yeah, right, like she was going to go back for the trial. I don’t think she did and I don’t blame her if she didn’t. But, if she didn’t, it just gave the Iranian “justice?” system one more strike against the two boys.

I call them boys because that’s what they are/were. Boys sometimes do dumb things, and hiking next door to Iran, or even most places in the Middle East these days, was/is a pretty dumb thing. But they were on an adventure. Right, something to tell their grandchildren. Maybe, with a squad of marines and a couple armored vehicles, they could have gotten away with it. But they didn’t get away with it. And now they will pay.

And it isn’t just these two boys. Your general American can do some pretty dumb things too. It used to be that Americans were loved everywhere, that we could treat most places in the world as just another segment of Disneyland. We still are loved in quite a few places, but in quite a few other places, no, we are not loved. The Iranians grabbed these two boys and one girl and probably jumped for joy—Yea! More propaganda to use against the Ugly Americans!

I’m talking really bad about Iran right now, but don’t get me wrong. Iran used to be our friend and I’m pretty sure many, many, Iranians, are still our friend. But their leadership, the radically religious ayatollahs, and that blockheaded, severely-retarded, so-called president, Mamoud Ahmadinejad (or, as Jay Leno of NBC’s The Tonight Show calls him: “I’m-a-nut-job” always mistakenly, of course) (I mean, just try to look into that man’s eyes once—my god, there’s nothing there!) Really got sidetracked there. What I was getting at, the leadership of Iran is not our friend.

I’d like to see a rescue of those two boys but of course that will not happen. We tried to go on a secret rescue mission into Iran back in the eighties, during the embassy hostage crisis. It didn’t work. I’m not saying it couldn’t work because it probably--no, most definitely, could work. But we aren’t going after those two boys. Doing so would send the message to every American planning to try something stupid to just go ahead and do it, cause if you get caught, Uncle Sam will rescue you.

No, those two boys are just going to have to sit there for the next eight years, unless there’s a radical change in Iranian leadership, and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that. It’s a pity, though, those two boys look like nice young men, and they probably had—maybe still have—many life plans and goals. Eight years won’t be too long for them to wait to get started. Notice I said men rather than boys, because they’ve now had that major wakeup call that most of us get at least once in our life. Now, to survive eight years in an Iranian prison they are going to have to be mature men.

I just hope one thing, that they can stay together. Good luck, guys, and God be with you.