in today’s world, the Sentence of War begins without capitalized letters and ends without punctuation

A January gust of suspicion landed 5 questionable Iranian diplomats in US habeas-corpus-free holding cells in Kurdistan, Iraq. While they hush and sleep behind the obscurity of their detainment, political banter recreates them insurgents and impostors and victims of heavy-handed dictators, all in one breath.

Hoping to prove its place amongst the big boys, Iraqi officials squeak that they’ve got it from here. But the US, the world’s ever-protective parent, the well-intended T.S. Garp, isn’t sure if they’re ready to take off the training wheels just yet. Daddy’ll just make sure to keep the bad guys close. You, baby Iraq, shouldn’t talk to strangers.

On the other side of the poker table, Iran has called the American’s posturing by scooping up its own symbolic subversives under the guise of criminal policing. Three Iranian-American velvet revolutionaries were blinding the country’s people to their own greatness and unraveling the will god and their good president had for them. They were unpatriotic, guilty of espionage and maybe worse. In this way, the silhouettes of these 3 scholars and activists were splashed in by political painters via televised leaks and paraded confessions.

Yet, to the public, both governments maintain that these 8 people are just plain criminals. Human beings who have made undisclosed human mistakes. Certainly, they’re not weights on an ideological scale.

The trouble is, somewhere in the file cabinet of foreign policy, when both countries’ beliefs were sufficiently swollen, they allowed themselves to confuse dissidence with the delinquence. And one day, both became criminal. Hence, ideology faded to the background of government, forever etched, never noticed.

Being as it is, we have no war, but we’ve got the prisoners anyway. Sure they’re just criminals now. But if shove ever comes to war, they’re perfectly good bilateral bargaining bodies, guilty of the same crimes.

But by that logic, if the crimes of doing disagreeable things within eyeshot are already being punished, hasn’t the war already begun?

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