On: Iran war: Peace talks on hold, what's next?

Diary Entry

They call it a “ceasefire.” A good, solid, military-sounding word. It suggests a pause, a deliberate halt, a breath taken before the next logical step. What it means, if you scrape the varnish off, is that for the moment they have stopped dropping the bombs. They have stopped, and the people under them are no longer being torn apart. That is all. They have made a silence where there was noise. This is not peace; it is merely the absence of a particular brand of violence. And they have the nerve to call it a “roadmap” that is “elusive.” As if peace were a tricky bit of countryside you needed a special chart to navigate.

“No direct talks took place.” Of course they didn’t. The sentence is in the passive voice, which is how power speaks when it wishes to sound like an event of nature. Who did not talk? The American and Iranian negotiators. Why did they not talk? Because one or both found it more useful, for their own purposes, to not talk. To let the silence of the ceasefire speak for them, while they calculate the next move. “Lasting peace remains elusive.” It is not elusive. It is inconvenient. It would require admitting things, giving up things, looking weak in front of one’s own people. A lasting peace is a concrete thing: it is open borders, it is trade, it is families visiting, it is the dismantling of propaganda machines on both sides. They do not want that. They want the situation.

So they meet in Islamabad, or they do not meet. They issue statements about the “process.” They will form a committee to study the formation of a sub-committee. And all the while, the real work - the work of hatred, of arming proxies, of drafting the next round of accusations - continues in offices with locked doors. The ceasefire is not a step toward peace. It is a piece of administrative theatre, allowing everyone to say they are for peace while they prepare for the next chapter of the war. The most terrible lies are not the ones shouted in anger, but the ones murmured in conference rooms and printed in bulletins like this one. The lie that not killing people, for a scheduled interval, is the same as choosing to let them live.