I remember years ago being in a workshop where we split into two opposing armies.  We prepared to fight a pitched battle, one soldier with another. The weapons in the game were paper, scissors, and rocks.  (You remember paper, scissors, and rocks, right?)

Now wouldn’t it be great if Bush and Ahmadinejad could duke it out in the desert that way?

Well, the real point of my story is not how we fought.  It is that we were required to choose a leader for each side, but not by time-consuming democratic means.

As it happened, I ran up to the front of our army and shouted, “I am your leader. Sit down!” And everyone sat down. It worked. That was all it took.

Ah, if only I had what it took today.

But I don’t. I am not strong enough, enlightened enough, or whatever it takes to unite Americans to  stop all work immediately and not return to work until assured that a war with Iran will not happen. Or any other kind or version of it.

I am not strong enough to urge all Americans to take to the streets immediately and stay on the streets until assured that no war with Iran will take place.

I wish I was.

Because if we go into a war with Iran, here is what will happen: You may as well turn to the person on your left and right and kiss that person goodbye.

In three days of shocking and awful bombing, a war with Iran will dump perhaps more than a thousand tons of depleted uranium (DU) into the atmosphere.

DU kills. And it goes on killing, without any way of turning the clock back, for 4.5 billion years.

A ton of DU dumped on Iran does not stay in Iran. It migrates to Israel where it deforms babies, gives leukemia and cancer to the whole population, and hangs around forever.  DU doesn’t give a tinker's damn for AIPAC or Congress.

There is no way of preventing the inhalation of DU – no gas mask invented will keep it out. There is no treatment for DU poisoning – nothing can undo the damage that radiation does. It cannot be cleaned up. It travelled from Tora Bora to England in 7-9 days.

Radiation experts don’t know if the Earth can handle another thousand tons of DU before it stops being a habitable place for human beings.  

If reports of a post-Labour Day Iran War are correct, then we are perhaps a week away from the end of Spaceship Earth.  No, it won’t end with a bang, but a whimper.  The whimper of a deformed child. The whimper of a soldier dying from radiation exposure.  The whimper of a semi-conscious person in a hospital bed bursting with untreatable tumors.

We have perhaps a week left of sane life on Earth.  Then the moving hand will have writ and not even an executive order from the President will call it back or erase a word of it.

All other issues - what the market is doing, what the greenback is doing, what your neighbor is doing - will recede into the background.  We will all have despair on our faces - like Edvard Munch's The Scream.

This could be the end of the play, short of turning out the lights.

I wish I were what I’m not.  I wish I didn’t know what I do.