On: Iran war: US to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz

August 14th, 19xx

The news this morning speaks of ships, of a strait, of escorts. “Project Freedom,” they call it, a name that echoes with a certain hollow grandeur. It is a map, of course, this project, laid over the territory of the Strait of Hormuz. But the map, in its ambition to “free up” the ships, creates its own labyrinth.

I recall a passage, perhaps from the Lexicon of Apocryphal Geographies, volume III, under “Hormuz, Strait of,” attributed to a certain cartographer, one Al-Idrisi the Younger, writing in the 13th century. He describes a similar situation, not of ships, but of currents. The currents, he posited, were so numerous and so intertwined that any attempt to chart them all resulted in a chart that was itself subject to the very currents it sought to represent. The lines drawn to denote flow became, in effect, new currents, altering the sea itself. The map, in its desire to encompass the reality, became part of the reality, and in doing so, invalidated its own initial premise.

This “Project Freedom” seems to suffer from a similar recursive affliction. The act of escorting, intended to ensure passage, is perceived by one party as a violation. The solution, therefore, becomes the problem it sought to solve. The path taken, that of intervention, creates a phantom path, equally real, where non-intervention might have led to a different, perhaps equally insoluble, set of circumstances. The decision to act, to draw a new line on the map, does not resolve the bifurcation; it merely shifts the point of divergence. We are left with two parallel realities, both equally plausible, both equally inaccessible to direct experience, yet both undeniably shaping the present moment. The escort, then, is not merely a physical presence; it is a conceptual one, a line drawn that defines not only a passage but also its own potential obstruction.