made me smile
you nailed the voice, too

It took me a few moments, but I got it. There’s a confliction with the source material, however…

Despite the length of the pieces on this site, most take less time to figure out, as it were, than they do to read.

This story is shorter than most and, possibly because the voice is so strong (and therefore that seems like the point at first – an experiment in mimicry) the actual sense of it takes a while to come through.

On the phonetic-type spellings, Iran stands out next to Ay-rab for me – I look at it and expect Iy-ran, or something along those lines.

Oh, yes, that be nitpicking right there.

Yeah, I tried to come up with an alternate spelling for “Iran”, but I had trouble since the pronunciation would be closer to the spelling than the “correct” pronunciation, so I left it. “Iraq” would be easier to spell out, but would be less incorrect.

Maybe “Eye-ran”, kinda like the already accepted “Eye-talian”?

That sounds about right to me; seems consistent with the rest of the speech.