US and Iran exchange strikes raising fears of wider conflict
The policy takes effect on Monday. For the people it affects, Monday will begin with the specific, hollow ache of a stomach that has not known fullness for three days, and the sharp, metallic taste of fear that sits at the back of the throat. The distance between the press release announcing a “limited strike” and the sensation of concrete dust coating the lungs of a man hiding in a basement is the distance this analysis attempts to close.
We are told that the United States bombed radar and drone sites in Iran, and that Tehran responded by attacking a US air base in Kuwait. These are clean words. They are the words of men who sit in air-conditioned rooms, looking at maps where countries are colored shapes and soldiers are icons. But the body does not read maps. The body knows only the shockwave. It knows the vibration that travels up through the soles of the feet before the sound arrives. It knows the sudden, violent reorientation of the world when the ground, which you trusted to hold you, decides to throw you off.
I have walked the streets of the East End, where the system of poverty is a physical weight on the shoulders. I have sailed the Pacific, where the hierarchy of the ship is enforced by the lash and the lash of the wind. I know that when a system is designed by those who have never been inside it, the result is not efficiency; it is cruelty disguised as order. The military-industrial complex is such a system. It is a machine built to process human beings into data points, and then into casualties. The designers of this machine - the generals, the politicians, the strategists - have never felt the cold of a trench, nor the heat of a burning city. They have never had to calculate the caloric cost of running from an explosion. They design from above, viewing the battlefield as a chessboard. But the pawn does not see the board. The pawn sees only the square he is forced to occupy, and the hand that pushes him into the fire.
Consider the radar site in Iran. To the strategist, it is a node in a network, a vulnerability to be exploited. To the technician who maintains it, it is a job. It is a source of income for a family that is already struggling under the weight of sanctions and inflation. When the bomb falls, it does not just destroy equipment. It destroys the future. It turns a livelihood into a crater. The body of the technician does not understand “national security.” It understands the sudden absence of bread on the table. It understands the silence that follows the scream of the missile.
And consider the US air base in Kuwait. Here, the soldiers are not fighting for their own soil. They are fighting for a system that requires their presence in a desert that offers them nothing but heat and hostility. They are cogs in a machine that demands their endurance. When the missiles come, they are not heroes in a narrative; they are men in a bunker, listening to the whine of incoming projectiles, wondering if their training will save them or if their luck will run out. The class gap here is vast. The men who order the strikes have never slept in a tent in the Middle East. They have never felt the sand in their teeth, or the exhaustion that comes from being on alert for months on end. They send the bodies of the working class to die for the interests of the ruling class, and they call it duty.
The escalation of military strikes risks a wider conflict. This is the language of the abstract. But what does “wider conflict” feel like? It feels like the constant, low-level anxiety that keeps the heart rate elevated. It feels like the inability to sleep because every shadow might be a threat. It feels like the erosion of trust in one’s neighbors, because the system encourages suspicion. The body adapts to this stress. It becomes hard, calloused, unfeeling. This is the true cost of war. It is not just the dead; it is the living who are forced to become less human in order to survive.
The survival inventory of the people inside this system is grim. In Iran, the people survive by hiding, by moving quickly, by trusting no one. In Kuwait, the soldiers survive by relying on their equipment, by following orders, by dissociating from the reality of their actions. Both groups are trapped. Both are processed by a system that does not care about their well-being. The system cares only about its own preservation. It feeds on conflict. It requires enemies to justify its existence. And so it creates them, or finds them, or manufactures them.
The specific texture of this violence is the dust. It is everywhere. It coats the skin, it fills the lungs, it settles in the corners of the eyes. It is the physical residue of the system’s operation. It is the evidence that the policy documents cannot contain. The policy says “limited strike.” The dust says “destruction.” The policy says “regional stability.” The dust says “chaos.”
Who designed this system? Men who have never been cold in the way the poor are cold. Men who have never been hungry in the way the hungry are hungry. Men who have never felt the terror of the unknown. They design from a place of safety, and their designs are flawed because they lack the data of the body. They do not know what it feels like to be inside the machine. They only know how to turn the crank.
The gap between the designer’s experience and the user’s experience is the analytical payload. The designer sees a tactical advantage. The user sees a ruined life. The designer sees a strategic necessity. The user sees a senseless death. The body is the evidence that policy documents cannot contain. It is the truth that statistics cannot convey. And it is the only truth that matters.
We must look at the system from the inside. We must feel the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion. We must understand that the machine is not abstract. It is a set of physical facts acting on human bodies. And it should be described that way. Not as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a physical assault. Not as a strategic calculation, but as a bodily experience. The body knows the truth. The body remembers. And the body will not be silenced by the lies of the powerful.
The dust settles. The silence returns. But the body remembers the shock. The body remembers the fear. And the body waits for the next strike. This is the reality of the system. This is the truth of the machine. And this is the story that must be told.