“Humans take a lot of killing,” wrote Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes. As bleak a phrase as it is, McCourt was talking about resilience, how much poverty and abuse a person can withstand and still survive. But the other side of human capacity for pain is how much can be forced upon us and normalised. It is bewildering how war – shocking and intolerable at first – quickly becomes a matter of fact. Few conflicts have demonstrated that more vividly than the war on Iran. For months it was a matter of low-grade strikes, hot and cold rhetoric, and near-conclusions to the hostilities that never came. Sharp political crisis manifested as grinding hardship and upheaval for the people.
We have a peace deal now, for that be thankful, but think what preceded it. Over the past week alone, Donald Trump had ordered strikes on Iran, and expressed a desire to take Kharg Island, which handles 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports. He then prematurely declared that the US had ended the war on Iran in a “great settlement”. The markets did their customary flicker in response to the announcement of a deal, but the rest of us, not invested in oil futures, could have been forgiven for not registering a reaction to imminent peace – he had made the same promise almost 40 times. In press conferences, social media posts and interviews over the past few months, Trump had said relax, it’s almost over. Just how not over it was can be traced by the strikes and counter-strikes across the region, the closure of the strait of Hormuz, general global economic upheaval and specific Middle East destabilisation.
