Tara Alami

On February 28,  the US and Israel launched coordinated strikes across Iran. Among the first sites hit was a girls’ elementary school in Minab. The building was destroyed. Nearly 170 children were killed there. A US military investigation, now facing photographic evidence of a US missile, is ongoing. There is a way of reading the current moment as a series of unconnected emergencies: a war in Gaza, Israeli incursions in Lebanon, strikes on Iran. Each has its own actors and logic of escalation.

What lengths men will go in order to carry out, to their extreme limit, the rites of a collective self-worship which fills them with a sense of righteousness and complacent satisfaction in the midst of the most shocking injustices and crimes. Much of what can be said about Iraq overwhelms the mind; it’s hard to even know where to begin. Like so many in the Middle East, people see what happened in Iraq as a civil war, perhaps even as a struggle against a dictator.