The Lovely War

A Note on the Instrument.

Martin Amis understood that certain horrors cannot be approached frontally. You do not walk up to the monstrous and describe it. You circle it, you find its vanity and its comedy and its terrible banality, and you render those with such precision that the horror assembles itself in the reader’s mind, more completely, more durably, than any earnest denunciation could manage. He called it the problem of the inconceivable: that atrocity, reported plainly, produces numbness; but atrocity rendered through style, through the exact comic register, through the sentence that is simultaneously funny and devastating, produces something closer to understanding. Not comfort. Never comfort. Understanding, which is the precondition of resistance.

Trump is an Amis subject. He always was. The gold, the appetite, the weaponised vulgarity, the way catastrophe bends around his ego like light around a collapsed star, this is the territory Amis mapped in Money, in The Information, in his late essays on the nature of evil dressed as stupidity. He did not live to write the Iran chapter. So the rest of us, working in his shadow with whatever instruments we have, must try.

What follows is offered in that spirit: not as a formal imitation but as a working homage, the use of a master’s tools on the problem he would have recognised immediately and refused to look away from.

The Lovely War

Donald Trump threatens Iran the way he once threatened a recalcitrant steak: same wounded, flinty, infant-king fury, as if the cosmos itself had sent back the wrong order and the maître d’ was clearly in on the swindle. “We could take the whole country out in one night,” he announces, specifying the menu. Power grids. Oil wells. Desalination plants. As though a civilisation were just another dish he could reject and send straight back to the kitchen. Bomb it “like they’ve never seen before,” he adds, while the cable-news brass strikes up something jaunty and the Pentagon keeps perfect time. Left-leaning analysts call it escalatory bluster. The rest of us taste the metal and know it for what it is: the language of a man who has been played for a patsy by MBS and Bibi and now, stuck in an unwinnable war of their making, wants to punish the nearest other patsy he can reach.

He swears the nukes won’t be used. Naturally. The threat is the point: a spiritual munition, cheaper than ordnance and twice as effective at keeping Tehran awake, the domestic base frothing, and the allies in nervous applause. Nuclear options drift overhead like uninvited guests nobody dares to eject. The abyss has been downgraded to a bargaining chip, something you dangle, then tear up for the cameras. The sword of Damocles has been rebranded as a negotiating tool, and the man holding the thread is laughing.

This is not a new performance. The infant-king has always understood, at some sub-rational level beneath the gold fixtures and the cable-news worship, that the threat of harm is more useful than harm itself, and that cruelty, deployed with showmanship, is the most reliable currency he possesses. He flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express when the passenger manifest was a social register of the powerful and the predatory, back when Epstein’s island was the place you went to confirm your own untouchability. That world made Trump. Money without accountability. Appetite without consequence. Power as the permanent suspension of ordinary moral law. He did not stumble into the company of Epstein. He belonged there. Both men understood that the purpose of wealth, at its furthest extreme, is the freedom to cause harm to the powerless and call it pleasure.

That understanding has not left him. It has simply found larger theatres.

Domestically the instrument is his secret police: ICE and its associated apparatus, now operating on a budget that has swollen toward six billion dollars and is climbing, a goon squad deployed not merely against undocumented migrants but against anyone who might, in the estimation of a frightened officer with unchecked authority, resemble one. Brown skin in the wrong neighbourhood. An accent in the wrong supermarket. A name that requires a second glance. The cruelty here is not incidental; it is the architecture. The suffering of the detained, the disappeared, the deported-to-the-wrong-country is not a regrettable side effect of border security. It is the policy. It is the point. The infant-king’s base requires the spectacle of punishment, and the infant-king delivers, because delivery is the one thing he has always understood.

General Dan Caine sits in the middle of this vaudeville apocalypse, loyal technocrat and reluctant understudy to Armageddon. He explains, with the quiet desperation of a man who still reads the manuals, that smashing Iran’s electricity and fresh water might not end the world, only the version of it where people prefer to drink and stay alive. Munitions are thin after the last three forever wars; blowback is certain; years, not nights. Yet he remains in post, mouthing the usual pieties about options and no rush, while everyone understands that rush is the only language the president truly masters. Caine has not resigned. Resignation would be too clean. He simply looks, in the flickering clips, like a man auditioning for conscience with no lines written for him.

In Minab, a girl of nine named Parisa Sadeghi survived the first wave of strikes by crawling into a drainage culvert while the school above her was reduced to a cairn of pink brick and desk-legs. She emerged to find the water tanker that served her street was gone. Vaporised or fled. She has been drinking from a plastic bottle her uncle refills every third day from a well an hour’s walk east of town, whose salinity level, according to the one engineer still in the district, is already past the threshold for safe human consumption. She is not yet sick. She is waiting. The infant-king, meanwhile, is on Truth Social specifying target lists and taunting a proud civilisation with the promise of bombing it back to the Stone Ages, he says Ages, plural, as though one stone age were insufficient, and the cable news is running the ticker, and somewhere in the Pentagon a man who still reads the manuals is calculating blowback in units of years.

What distinguishes this from ordinary martial bellicosity is the evident pleasure. Watch the clips carefully. When Trump enumerates the targets, power plants, water facilities, the infrastructure of survival rather than the apparatus of war, there is a particular quality to the delivery, a savoured loosening, the same loosening you see when he describes a deportation flight or mimes a political opponent’s humiliation. This is not the grim satisfaction of a commander who believes in the necessity of force. This is the pleasure of a man who has discovered, late in life, that he can cause suffering at scale and that nobody with the power to stop him will. The cruelty is not the means. The cruelty is the product.

This is the music-hall war: jaunty tunes over industrial slaughter, the brass of the briefing room, the drum-roll of presidential posts, the sing-along casualty list. The only update is the target list. Desalination plants instead of dugouts. Dialysis machines instead of bayonets. The lovely war is not about dying heroically in the mud. It is about living thirstily in the dark while the infant-king keeps the applause going.

The real scandal is not that he might one day press the button. The scandal is that he hardly needs to. He has already bombed Iran with sanctions, drones, and the ceaseless low-grade terror of the bomb that hovers but never quite falls. He has weaponised the idea itself, kept it shimmering, so that opposition stays cowed and the world stays anxious. State terrorism does not require detonation. It requires the permanent, shimmering possibility of detonation, maintained just below the threshold where the world would be forced to act. All because MBS and Bibi turned him into their patsy, and now, trapped in their unwinnable war, he reaches for the nearest other patsy and prepares to blast it to kingdom come, while the actual instrument of harm, the slow suffocation of a people through blockade and contaminated water and blacked-out hospitals, proceeds without a single warhead leaving its silo.

Messianic delusions flicker across his rhetoric like cheap special effects. He picks a fight with the Pope, not out of any deep theological quarrel, but as the purest diversionary tactic: a sideshow to keep the evangelical base in line with its sauve-qui-peut theology, every man for himself, God helps those who help themselves and damn the rest. The infant-king, cornered, lashes out at the nearest symbol of old-world moral authority because it costs him nothing and distracts from the mess he has made. It is the same gesture as the Epstein flights, the same gesture as the goon squads, the same gesture as the taunting of Tehran: find something that cannot fight back on his terms, and perform dominance upon it for the cameras.

His rhetoric is style turned against itself: language that converts apocalypse into banter, treaties into restaurant receipts, and war into a shopping list. The degeneracy is total and the horror is real, and the only decent response is to describe it, sentence by merciless sentence, before the infant-king changes the channel.

So we hum along, in the key of dread, to the old refrain: oh, it’s a lovely war, who wouldn’t be a soldier, eh? Only now the soldier is the president himself, marching in place on every screen, issuing threats that sound like threats, promises that sound like threats, and victories that sound like defeats rehearsed for the wrong audience. The Lolita Express has been upgraded to Air Force One. The island has been upgraded to a hemisphere. The logic is identical.

The score is not music.

The score is the register of casualties.

And somewhere in Minab, Parisa Sadeghi is waiting for the water. She is nine. It is her birthright. The infant-king has other plans.

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