BALTERS: Iran-Cuban Missile Crisis comparison holds little truth

For more than several years now, I've had the recurring misfortune of hearing time and again from various sources one of the most inaccurate bits of foreign policy analysis currently plaguing our population's commonsense: the nuclear standoff with Iran is this generation's Cuban Missile Crisis.
No matter how you look at it, Iran isn't in any way friend material, nor should we just lackadaisically let it bully other kids on the bus. Hopefully, though, most people have an implicit understanding that there can be vast differences between taking a situation seriously and the pants-soiling panic that was well warranted during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proceeding from this assumption, it's relatively easy to show the incongruences of the aforementioned comparison.

It's become a cliché, when discussing just about anything that happened in the ‘50s or ‘60s to describe it as "the height of the Cold War." The Cuban Missile crisis, however, is the only event that satisfies that phrase. During no other time did we come closer to really waltzing with the Russians. While the nation held its breath, Kennedy was practicing that mad dash to the steel-reinforced bunker, and our pilots sat on runways in Guantanamo Bay, engines running, tactical nukes as their payload.
It didn't get more real than that week and a half in October of 1962, and by "it" I mean the potential nuclear annihilation of more than 75 percent of the United States. This is a critical dimension of the conflict, and the current stare down with Iran produces no parallel. Those that would make the comparison in question must subconsciously ignore that vast discrepancies between the two situations regarding the danger to the U.S.

Furthermore, if we define the term "critical dimension" as an aspect of a phenomenon or event which gives it or adds to its uniqueness, we see a whole slew of critical dimensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Iran nuclear situation cannot even come close to claiming.
Near the top of this heap is the Cold War itself, a clash of military competition between the two greatest empires the world had seen thus far. Each foe possessed the ability to destroy the other no matter who fired first, and planting missiles in the Caribbean was an attempt to tip this feather-sensitive balance. Nothing remotely comparable to this balance exists in the current conflict. In 2007 our very own intelligence organizations made it explicitly clear Iran was still 10 years out from throwing together even the crudest of erector-set missiles.
But even if they had one tomorrow it would pose no need for brink-of-nuclear-war alarm. When was the last time you heard concern over China's nuclear program, which is far more advanced than anything Iran is close or even 10 years close to achieving? It seems the simple logistics of the two conflicts make it clear that to treat Iran like the Soviet Union is to belittle the Cold War. Our parents hid under desks in anxiety over an army of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles slingshotting through space, not some basic blueprint of a missile in the making that could barely reach the Mediterranean.
Moving beyond logistics we still find crucial incongruences, mainly with regards to the fundamental differences between the nature, intent and goals of the two adversaries being compared. Let's not forget the Soviets were so dangerous because they were willing to carve up the Earth almost solely on the basis of ideology (no doubt we were, too). But the important thing is that they threatened our way of life because they saw their way of life as a natural triumph over ours.
At this point the conservative hawk plays the "Islamofacism" card in an attempt to hurl the same accusation at Iran, namely that they are uncooperative and attempting to subvert the West solely because of who we are. But this claim crumbles beneath the weight of any comprehensive, 20th-century history book. While it's certainly clear Iran's adherence to a hard line religious doctrine drives much of its domestic and foreign policy decisions, abstract theological principles aside, Iran has concrete reasons to shake its fist at us.

We deliberately deposed a democratically elected, popular president of Iran in the ‘50s, all to provide a monopoly on Iranian oil to British Petroleum. In the ‘80s, we supported, funded and supplied Iraq as it gassed the Iranian countrymen defending their homes. And of course in 2002 we consigned them to the "Axis of Evil" (even though none of the 9/11 hijackers were from Iran), failing to comprehend both the political denotation of an axis, and any respectable, metaphysical understanding of the notion of evil.

The point is they have legitimate claims to calling us assholes, which seem to hold more weight than any cosmological foundation for despising us. When picturing America in their head, instead of seeing a monolithic threat to Islam, a suitable target for a Jihad, it's just as likely they see in full illumination Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Concrete events have the potential to promote bad blood far more effectively than an interpretive ideology. While an abstract doctrine must be manipulated and implementive very delicately, the physical effects of imperialism require no such pampering. People tend to know when they're getting hustled. Iran's unwillingness to comply with the West can be, and in the name of parsimony, should be explained simply by our actions.
In the same fashion, the Cuban Missile Crisis allusion and the lingering anxiety it could potentially promote are unnecessary as well. It's almost irresponsible. Historical comparisons are exceptionally useful when analyzing the current political situation, but they must be made with accuracy as the priority. Otherwise, one risks both demeaning the past and preventing the population from putting the present in the appropriate context.