We were going to bomb Iran back into the stone age, but instead we blew them a massive confetti cloud of dollar bills, lifted the sanctions, did nothing to hinder their hardline apocalyptic dreams or march toward nuclear arms. The surrender the vice president would like everyone to just shut up about turned out to be the United States to an emboldened, even more conservative religious leadership that has remained very much in control. But fine, sure, whatever, can we please now just resume the flow of oil tankers through the Strait of Hermuz? Pretty please and maybe new fees on top? America since the turn of the millennium has had a way of making the world a little better for Iran and harder for the rest of us. Witness taking out Iraq, that buffer to Iran’s expansion of influence we breached on bad intelligence for no good reason. Today it’s an Iranian satellite state. This was only outdone by our military bro culture seizing the day and woofing about superiority, but proving unable to back up the tough talk against a developing nation that has some teeth. Not unlike bro culture generally. Big muscles, little strength, all show. So a Colossus is humiliated in a modern David and Goliath story, the damage wrought to our economy rubbed in by our spike in gas prices while we shower the victor with green cash and unlocked oil markets. But there are cage fights now on the White House lawn, a triumphant arch on the way, a secretary of war proud of his pushups. On a state scale, this takes us to Box Elder County and I guess the specter of the Chinese, if you believe the celebrity developer. Who else in otherwise compliant Utah would call BS in any big way on that data center dream? Bad enough a county commissioner unwisely told his own constituents to grow up and accept the darned thing near the northern shore of the fast-shrinking Great Salt Lake. Worse, the Utah political power core was exposed as so nakedly sniffing for dollars even over the dying icon of their state. Now MIDA, key catalyst to Deer Valley’s East Village and useful scissors for local red tape everywhere, is under perhaps existential scrutiny over its use in Box Elder County. The military basis of the economic fixer was already secondary, a thin thread of afterthought. Now that’s nowhere to be found under the leadership of Senate President Stuart Adams, even with his ferocious backpedaling and sudden concern again for water in the lake. Oh yeah, that. The governor, like Adams an early and eager supporter of the data center, has only done what the governor does: Offer some nuanced pretty talk and oh so civil reversal, Dignity Index in hand, of a moral position remarkably in line with each gust in the political winds. Unlike the taffy logic employed to at last endorse the again-president in his own election year, he landed this time where at least I think he should have been all along. The proximity of the data center to the lake provides all the symbolism needed here. He’s no courageous protector of core values, to be sure, but he’s also not the first governor to lead by following — cash, votes, political risk assessment, whathaveyou. Probably, what the person inside actually believes in is not that important, as the Christian nation has attested aplenty with sufficient elective force.    Adams, if belatedly, is trying out that follow thing with Box Elder. And crowing now about how he sure told off the data center’s developer, sure enough. Cut the project proposal by 75%, we have a lake to think of, he wrote in a furious letter to the developer whose full plan he supported a few weeks ago. Let’s just be glad the big guys are thinking again about the lake, however they got there, right? But if Iran doesn’t completely expose the U.S. administration as at best extremely reckless, and the Box Elder follies for state politicians looking out for themselves first, what then? The what then is kind of playing out across the Wasatch Back. I’m thinking about the state Legislature and governor’s mania for building homes, lots and lots of homes, across Summit and Wasatch counties along with the rest of Utah. The damage from building all this in our region is no less than giant data centers in the sage. Thousands of little cuts, or sips of water, will do the same as big gulps. There are no dramatic epiphanies like a failed war or symbol of a giant data center near the imperiled Great Salt Lake to make this point quite so plain. No one is really raising a fuss so far besides a few squawky Democrats in Summit County. Wasatch might yet prove more interesting, being as red a county as Summit runs blue. Summit, at least fighting, is losing this war at a slower pace than Wasatch County, which is growing and projected to continue at the highest rate in Utah. For now, it’s just houses — mainly the lux ones most favored for their profit potential — but lots of them filling in the landscape parcel by parcel, in phases, incremental, creeping across to the East Side and filling in the Heber Valley.   The local governments are wards of the state in Utah, helpless little Iraqs however feisty, and our state’s political leaders covet development enough to overstep. This looks like a MIDA with no connection anymore to the military, legislation that provides for “provisional towns,” and other thumbs firmly on the scale to blunt local notions about stopping, um, progress. The consequence equates to the effect of bombing. The Wasatch Back is on track to become indistinguishable from the Salt Lake Valley. Sure, with some chair lifts and ski slopes rising from metropolis, and open space chunks breaking up some of the checker board. That might sound like exaggeration until one looks at what’s already in the books to build, along with what’s on the horizon next, and not a crazy projection after that for state leaders who came up with the means to override local wisdom in favor of Browns Canyon towns each nearing populations of 10,000 and Hideout’s sprawl to Richardson Flat. Is it consolation these would take years to build out? This is a good deal more than the most giant data center at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Local governments in the Wasatch Back have much less recourse than backward countries in the Middle East. Reckless leaders in the State Capitol show little awareness of the fragile gem on the other side of the Wasatch, and less interest than that in stewardship, even with the next Olympics on the horizon. Yeah, I’m wringing my hands a little here and hoping I’m just another pundit exaggerating wildly. But do you see any responsible leaders in power between here and D.C.? Any at all? Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. The post Journalism Matters: Reckless leadership runs from Iran to the Wasatch Back appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less