On: Iran war: 100 days on, a costly stalemate
The numbers - 7,000 dead, cities in ruins, the air thick with the stench of burned oil - lie there like the scattered bones of some forgotten war, yet they are not forgotten. They are the debris of a storm that was supposed to be a gust, a wind that was supposed to clear the air but instead carries the dust of the past into the future. The president called it Epic Fury, but what is epic in this? The scale of the destruction? The way the bodies pile up like kindling, ready to be burned again? The word itself is a lie, a commodity term for what should be called something else: a reckoning, a recklessness, a reckoning without mercy.
I think of the angel of history again, his face turned toward the wreckage of the past, his wings spread wide against the storm that blows from Paradise. This storm is not the wind of progress - it is the wind of the apocalypse, and it carries with it the fragments of a civilization that believed it could wage war without consequence. The photographs from the front lines - smoke rising over Teheran, the faces of children with dust in their eyes - these are not mere images. They are the dialectical images of this moment, where the past collides with the present in the form of bombs and bullets. The past is not dead; it is alive in the bodies of the dead, in the ruins of the cities, in the silence of the displaced.
And what of the United States? It stands there, a nation that has spent decades teaching the world how to wage war without end, how to justify the unjustifyable. The numbers are not just statistics; they are the tally of a civilization’s self-destruction. The war does not end; it only changes form. The stalemate is not a failure - it is the natural state of things when the world is a battlefield and the people are the collateral.
I collect these fragments: the names of the dead, the names of the streets that no longer exist, the names of the politicians who speak of peace while the bombs fall. They form a constellation, a pattern that was invisible until now. The question is not what happens next - it is what has already happened, what has been forgotten, what has been buried beneath the weight of the present. The past is not a timeline; it is a minefield, and every step we take is a detonation.
The war is not over. It has only begun.