On: Iran war: 100 days on, a costly stalemate

The radio spoke of war as if it were a chess game played by distant men in gilded rooms. A stalemate. Seven thousand dead. The words slide over the body like oil.

I see the hands that pulled the trigger. They were not cruel hands. They were hands that had never known their own strength, hands that had been told all their lives that obedience was virtue. The bodies on the ground were not abstractions. They were men who woke this morning with the same hunger I feel now, men who will never eat again.

The generals call it strategy. Strategy is the name we give to the moment when human beings become obstacles to be removed. The earth is scorched. The rivers run thick with what cannot be named. Children cough up blood in makeshift hospitals where the doctors have no morphine. This is not a cost. This is the thing itself.

Attention is not a moral judgment. It is the refusal to look away even when the sight burns the eyes. I see the men in the war rooms. Their maps are clean. Their pens move with precision. They have never stood where the bombs fall. They have never felt the weight of a child’s body in their arms after the dust settles.

Grace does not appear here. Grace would require the generals to lay down their pens, to walk onto the battlefield, to look into the eyes of the man they have ordered killed. Grace would require them to recognize that the enemy is not the other side of the line but the part of themselves that believes in lines at all.

The earth is heavy with the unburied. The air is thick with the names we refuse to speak. War is not a stalemate. It is a slow, deliberate murder of the soul. The soul does not die all at once. It withers. It forgets its own name. It becomes the thing it was ordered to destroy.