Strange Meeting

 Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Israel's war with Iran—with its constant focus on equipment, ordinance, and geopolitical strategy—it can be easy to overlook the human reality of what it means to have bombs falling on a city with roughly the population density of New York. 

The New York Times has helped to rectify that gap. In a piece yesterday, they told the stories of some of the civilians who have already lost their lives in the bombing: a 24-year-old poet; a Pilates instructor; an equestrian; an eight-year-old child. People who had lives to look forward to, just like us. 

"Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also;" as the dead "enemy" tells Wilfred Owen, in his poem "Strange Meeting." Or, as Thomas Hardy put it in "The Man He Killed": "quaint and curious war is! / You shoot a fellow down / You'd treat if met where any bar is, / Or help to half-a-crown."

Many people in the U.S. are saying: such is the price of war. But this was a war that never needed to happen. It was a blatant act of aggression—or at the very least, of unilateral escalation. Iran was not imminently about to build or launch a nuclear weapon, based on what we know so far. 

Of course, the thought of the Iranian theocracy possessing nuclear weapons is a scary one. The bombing may cut off that future—or at least, set it back. But there's an infinite number of hypothetical frightening futures that are cut off by death—an infinite number of positive futures too. 

The Times story told us some of those positive, hopeful futures—which now can never happen, because the war silenced them forever. An eight-year-old's future life. A poet's future work. A Pilates instructor's future achievements. An equestrian's future dreams. All are gone forever. 

Rather than the price of war—then—the bombing reveals only the pity of war—as Owen called it in the same poem; "the pity war distilled"—the "undone years / The hopelessness." That is what I thought of, when I saw the photos of the dead Iranians—the dead "enemies" killed with U.S. support: 

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now . . ."