I remember when the Gulf War started, and I was 16, I think, watching news reports endlessly with a sense of confusion and anxiety: what was happening? Why was it happening? Was this the start of another world war? Would it ever end? Although I was years away from being 18, I imagined a world where National Service — the British version of the draft — was reinstated and I went to war, entirely unprepared and unwilling, unable to avoid it. It was a nihilistic time, not least because I was 15 and didn’t know any better, but the war war war of the media at the time felt like it was projected directly into my brain, and I didn’t know what to do about any of that. (What I did was start reading Kurt Vonnegut; so it goes.)
I thought of that this past weekend, waking up on Saturday and finding out that the US had launched a war with Iran while I was asleep. Relaunched a war with Iran? Rebooted it? Whatever you want to call it; it feels like the US has been at war with Iran for years and this is just the latest episode. It was at once unthinkable and entirely unsurprising, and left the same pit of confusion and anxiety in my stomach that I felt more than three decades ago.
I spent much of Saturday looking at the news, checking back in over and over as if doing so would somehow uncover a layer of common sense and morality I knew wasn’t really there. It wasn’t as if anyone in the US Government was going to suddenly realize they were breaking international law and care about it, after all, and even if they did, what could be done about what was already happening? It’s not as if an apology and promise not to do it again was possible. There’s no use crying over split milk, or hundreds of dead kids because you bombed a school, as they saying famously goes.
There’s an element of political watchers who look at what’s going on and say, the cruelty is the point, or he’s only doing this to distract from the Epstein files, and both of those things are almost certainly true and I understand that, but also — there’s a point where you have to ask yourself how much that matters, in the practical sense. Whatever the motives, however bad and inhuman and cynical they certainly are, people are dying and it’s 1991 again, 2003 again, and on, and on, and on.