“Humans take a lot of killing,” wrote Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes. As bleak a phrase as it is, McCourt was talking about resilience, how much poverty and abuse a person can withstand and still survive. But the other side of human capacity for pain is how much can be forced upon us and normalised. It is bewildering how war – shocking and intolerable at first – quickly becomes a matter of fact. Few conflicts have demonstrated that more vividly than the war on Iran. Now a matter of low-grade strikes, hot and cold rhetoric, and near conclusions to the hostilities that never come. Meanwhile, sharp crisis turns into grinding hardship and upheaval.
Over the past week alone, Donald Trump has announced strikes on Iran, and his desire to take Kharg Island, which handles 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports. He then declared that the US had ended the war on Iran in a “great settlement”. The markets did their customary flicker in response to the announcement of a deal, but the rest of us, not invested in oil futures, would be forgiven for not registering a reaction to imminent peace – he has made the same promise almost 40 times. In press conferences, social media posts and interviews over the past few months, Trump has said relax, it’s almost over. Just how not over it was can be traced by the strikes and counter-strikes across the region, the closure of the strait of Hormuz, general global economic upheaval, and specific Middle East destabilisation.
As Trump fails to secure the most beautiful peace deal you’ve ever seen, Arab countries catch retaliatory strikes from Iran, which sees them as enabling allies of the US and proxy belligerents. As the ceasefire between Iran and the US crumbled last week, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain came under Iranian fire. This is in addition to the weeks of strikes on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar that claimed lives, energy infrastructure and shattered a sense of peace that it will take a long time to restore.
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Political systems and economies stagger on, caught in a liminal space where life returns, is suspended, then returns again. Always under constant flare-ups of strikes and drones, and the larger ultimate nightmare threat of a full-blown US military offensive in Iran. Meanwehile, 17% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas global supply is gone. The closure of the strait has immediately reshaped Saudi Arabia’s economic priorities, diverting money towards building infrastructure like ports and datacentres. Dubai is under pressure, with major airlines continuing to suspend flights, and with a severe contraction to its economy anticipated.
Beyond the economic tithes, there are the more abstract, less measurable tolls: the destabilising impact on millions of people who now essentially live in wartime, their economic, professional and personal lives unsettled by the rapid reconfigurations brought about by the destructive, belligerent partnership of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Together they have decided to pursue their agendas in the Middle East and to hell with the consequences for those who actually live there.
In the absurdist “ceasefires” across the region, the very meaning of war is being redefined. In Gaza, nearly 1,000 people have been killed since the ceasefire in October of last year. In Lebanon, since the April ceasefire, Israel’s killings, ejection of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes and pummeling of parts of Beirut continue. Around 1 million remain displaced. In the last two months, the death toll of almost 1,500 amounts to a third of the total fatalities since the escalation of the conflict in early March. More than one in four of those dead are children. And since the ceasefire between the US and Iran in April, the two have traded strikes, including recent US attacks on cities in southern Iran.
A whole lexicon has emerged to describe this state of war denial – truces and ceasefires are “fragile”, “tenuous”, being “tested”, “challenged”. All while missiles and drones and killings and invasions continue. And, around them, a dance that is all too familiar now – claims of an imminent permanent truce with Iran that would include Lebanon, and then the inevitable sticking points. How the reopening of the strait of Hormuz will be managed, Iran’s uranium enrichment, and limits on Iran’s missile programme are but a few of the gnarly issues that will need to be ironed out for total peace to return.
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Even timings are never agreed upon.The US, along with mediator Pakistan, suggested that a peace deal could be announced on Sunday, but the Iranians, at the time of writing, disagreed that everything had been ironed out, then threatened to pull out of talks altogether after Israel struck the outskirts of Beirut.
Even if a peace deal were to be signed, there are still phases of it that need to be worked through. Not to mention the matter of an Israel which now occupies nearly 20% of Lebanon’s territory, and an Israeli prime minister who appears to defy Trump and strikes Iran unilaterally.
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The problem with war is that, the longer it goes on, the more it creates new realities on the ground, and new, diverse agendas that cannot be wrested back to what preceded the conflict. Netanyahu will probably wish to press his advantage in Lebanon under the guise of vanquishing Hezbollah, while harbouring no interest in a peace deal with Iran that would stabilise a regime that he had a chance to bring to its knees. Trump is embarrassed and exposed by the defiance and response of Iran, and promises peace while in the same breath threatening to wipe out Iran’s “entire infrastructure”.
Meanwhile, as we wait for rational outcomes from the most irrational of players, war has become the norm and a reality, whatever term you decide to choose to describe its intensity.
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Lebanon will not be resolved overnight; its millions of displaced citizens will not return and rebuild the moment a deal is signed – Israel is not known for its wise de-escalatory appetite for relinquishing seized land. Gaza remains an open wound. The Iranians still retain the power to seize up the region and the global economy with strikes and control of the strait of Hormuz. Arab countries remain in a holding pattern of insecurity, hostage to the impossible balance between Tehran, Tel Aviv and Washington.
And the sense that this is how it is, and how it always has been, will settle, as people continue to try to make lives during the biggest regional conflict in the Middle East in contemporary history. Because humans take a lot of killing.
