(AFP Photo)

I used to be a nut for airplanes, particularly fighters, so when I saw this photo on Common Dreams this morning, I was taken back to the Sixties: these are F-4 Phantoms, a mainstay of both the US Air Force and Navy for a decade or so during the Vietnam War and beyond, more or less. The trick is that these craft are operating for the Iranian Air Force, likely having served since before the 1979 revolution. I suspect that they were part of the arms largesse lavished on the Shah and got left behind. It’s a head-scratcher that they’re still flying, and I would have to say that it’s a tribute to the ingenuity of Iranian flight support crews that they might still get off the ground, or to the wiles of arms dealers that they can still find spare parts. It’s also a bit of a laugh that Iran finds itself ranged on the same side as the US in the current struggle against Sunni ISIS. We must fight religious fanaticism, mustn’t we? Oh, wait, it’s the wild and crazy Christians and the Fundamentalist Shi’ia in pitched battle against the Extreme Wahabist Sunni. Not much to like in any of these poxed houses, but I’ll wish them a Pax (real, not Romanus or Britannicus) on both their houses, or, perhaps we could gift them all with F-22/35s, in which case the whole conflict could just grind to a halt as one warplane after another crashed and burned.

Once again, I have to harken back to reading Catch-22 in my much younger days: this is not a satire, it’s a user’s manual.