If Hillary Rodham (we use the maiden name these days) Clinton is in charge of holding off nuclear tragedy, you'll find me at the bar, trying to get down enough beer to make high temperature disintegration seem like just an unexpectedly loud part of the evening. Draft beer is all I can afford in the days of Barack (we NEVER use the middle name) Obama. Under George W. (just the initial, please) Bush, I was still trapped in draft beer, but at least I felt like I could drink too much and still become a world leader.

I say this because I see in Hillary's eyes the desire to punish, if not the errant husband, then those of us who kicked her health plan out from under her — or maybe just we panicky fear-monkeys who would not make her president.

Hillary is just now punishing the Iranians and, by extension, at least some guys I used to know. She says their plan to swap enriched uranium for reactor fuel is a "transparent ploy." Hillary likes U.N. sanctions, which is what Americans like just before we like carpet-bombing your unprepared army.

I went to the University of Missouri at Columbia, where Iranians were our largest flock of foreigners, a collection of engineering students with huge sideburns who dressed for disco, hated the then Shah of Iran ("of" was his middle name) and sometimes took me along to their political gatherings, where the politics were straight-up communist. In fact, when Iran chose "religious loony" as its form of post-royalty government, I was shocked, since none of the Iranians I knew in college were at all religious.

I was a bad representative of America, I suppose. I taught my Iranian fellow students how to shoot dice. For money. I encouraged them to teach me to swear in their language. When they handed around petitions to "Get the CIA out of Iran," I signed "Joe Louis" or "Brian Wilson."

I remember sitting on the floor at one of their political meetings while they showed "The Battleship Potemkin" as the evening's propaganda film. It's a 1925 Russian movie, a silent movie, and it's as communist as anything produced by American moviemakers in the last 15 years, which is saying a lot. I wondered if, when the Iranians had their revolution, they were going to do it all without talking, like the people in the movie.

The answer was that the Iranian revolution involved a lot of screaming and a lot of loud praying. For years, "Death to America" was on the Iranian Slogan Top Ten. With a bullet.

Or a bomb.

When college was over, I went back to my hometown. I'm sure most of the Iranians did, too — or at least some of them did. And, since most of them were engineering students, it's a safe bet that some guy I used to chase girls with is crawling around in the skeleton of a reactor, waiting for the hot stuff to arrive so he can make electricity or a bomb, depending on whom you believe.

I'll tell you one thing I believe. I believe that if Iran ever makes a nuclear bomb, they'll use it on Israel first. The Iranians I knew in college were smart and easy to get along with, but they talked about Jews the way a Klan member in 1908 Alabama talked about black people. You could be talking in agreeable lust to your Iranian buddy about how you both thought Beth across the quad was hot, and if you told him she was Jewish, he'd start talking about world domination and the Palestinians, and pretty soon you'd swear you saw a little bit of mad dog foam at the corners of his mouth.

These days, my dentist is Iranian-American, and he thinks my ability to swear in his language is kind of cute, the way you think it's cute when someone teaches a green parrot to swear.

Iranians have a strong streak of fun in them, and I'm willing to bet half of them like Hillary about as much as half of America likes her, which is to say a little bit less than most of America likes Iranians.

My advice to Hillary? I shot dice with a lot of Iranians. They were good gamblers once they learned the game. And they can't fistfight, not even a little bit.

Like I said, I was a bad representative of America.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.crreators.com