Dual Disappointment
Why the same war produces incompatible meanings — and why, for some, those meanings don't split across a debate. They split inside a single mind.
I had seven tabs open. Oil futures, a live map of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a thread tracking damage assessments from the strikes, a backgrounder on how targets get selected and how interceptor systems work — Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, THAAD — and two news feeds: The Financial Times and The Times of Israel. I told myself I was trying to understand what was happening. That was partially true.
The coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes came on February 28th, 2026, hitting military sites and the regime's senior leadership. Iran retaliated within hours — missiles and drones across Israel and U.S. bases in the region. By the following morning, the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed. About a fifth of the world's oil supply moves through that waterway. Oil prices crossed $120 a barrel. The numbers were clean and measurable, and I found myself focusing on them with something close to relief.
Underneath the data, something else was happening.
We had been negotiating. That's what made it land differently than other escalations I had followed. For months, the U.S. and Iran had been in active talks in Geneva. Negotiators were reporting progress. Another round had been scheduled. The day before the strikes, the Omani foreign minister, who had been mediating the talks, said a deal seemed within reach. I had read those dispatches with the specific kind of hope that comes from believing institutions can still work — the same hope I felt in 2015 when the JCPOA was signed, when it seemed like the logic of diplomacy had briefly won out over the logic of confrontation. I supported that deal. I believed in what it represented.
Then the strikes happened before the next round of talks.
One interpretation assembled itself almost automatically: this was a story I already knew. Power asserting itself before accountability could catch up. Diplomacy used as theater while the real decisions were made elsewhere. It had a shape I recognized. The more powerful party negotiates on its own timeline, escalates on its own terms, and frames the outcome as having been forced upon it. The weaker party, regardless of its own conduct, absorbs the consequences and is told it brought them on itself.
I have carried that interpretive frame for a long time. It arrived through years of reading history, through conversations with people who remembered things that didn't make it into the curricula I was taught, through a kind of pattern recognition that forms when you pay attention to how power actually moves rather than how it describes itself moving. When I read about negotiations cut short by strikes, that frame activates before I've finished the sentence.
At the same time something else activated too.
I thought about the Iranian state. About what it is, not what it represents to people who see it primarily as a target of Western aggression. The regime's relationship to its own population. The repression. The specific cruelty of governments that invoke Islam and resistance while reserving the most systematic violence for the people living under them. I could not hold the postcolonial frame without it being complicated by this — by the discomfort of defending, even implicitly, a state that I would never defend on its own terms. The strikes interrupted diplomacy. That was real. And the regime being struck was not simply an innocent party to its own history. That was also real.
Both of these things sat in me at the same time. Not alternating. Not one qualifying the other in a balanced-essay kind of way. Just both, present and unresolved, each feeling true and neither feeling sufficient.
I noticed it wasn't only me.
In the conversations I was reading and listening to the same split kept appearing. People who would, in most contexts, share a politics, suddenly reading the same sequence of events through entirely different lenses. One person seeing a government that had been negotiating in good faith, cut off before a deal could close. Another seeing a regime that had spent years stalling while expanding its nuclear program, finally facing the consequences of its own brinksmanship. Same timeline, same facts, incompatible meanings.
We tend to think of disagreement as something that happens between groups — the West versus the Muslim world, hawks versus doves, one country versus another. But what I kept observing, and kept feeling inside myself, suggested the divide ran somewhere else. Not between people, primarily. Through them.
This essay isn't an argument about who was right. It's not a policy piece, and it's not a verdict on the strikes or the diplomacy that preceded them. It's about something more basic: why the same event, watched by people paying close attention, produces meanings so incompatible they seem to come from different realities. And why, for some of us, those incompatible meanings both exist in our own minds.
What I felt in those first days was personal, but the structure underneath it isn't.
There's a story that gets told about people like me — Muslims who grew up in the West, or who live here by choice or circumstance, navigating between two worlds. The story is usually flattering in a way that quietly diminishes: you are a bridge, it says. You understand both sides. You can translate. It positions us as inherently diplomatic, naturally moderate, constitutionally suited for mediation.
I don't think that's what's actually happening.
A bridge connects two separate things from a position between them. What I'm describing is different. It's not that I stand between two worlds and can see across the gap. It's that both worlds are inside me — fully, not in fragments — and they don't resolve into a stable position. This isn't being between things. It's being inside multiple things at once.
The narratives I carry aren't partial versions of each other. They're complete. Each one has its own internal logic, its own account of history, its own way of determining who is legitimate and who isn't, what counts as aggression and what counts as defense. The postcolonial narrative — the one that reads the current moment as continuous with a history of domination and intervention — isn't a feeling or a bias. It's a fully developed interpretive system with centuries of evidence behind it. The liberal narrative — the one that evaluates states by their treatment of their own populations, that holds institutions and accountability as non-negotiable — isn't naïveté. It's also a fully developed system, with its own considerable evidence and its own internal logic.
These aren't identities I chose. I didn't decide one day to be shaped by the memory of what colonialism did to Muslim-majority countries, or by the civic language of rights and institutions that saturated my education. Those frameworks arrived through different channels — through what was in the books I read, what was in the stories my family told, through the experience of living in a country whose foreign policy I watched with a kind of doubled vision. You absorb these things before you're old enough to evaluate them, and by the time you can evaluate them, they're already doing interpretive work.
The crucial thing is that they don't merge. I used to think, when I was younger, that with enough thought and reading and honesty, I would arrive somewhere stable — some position that took everything into account and resolved cleanly. I don't believe that anymore. The narratives coexist. They sit inside the same mind, process the same events, and arrive at different conclusions, and no amount of intellectual effort makes them synthesize. The tension isn't a problem I haven't solved yet. It's what it actually feels like to take more than one framework seriously.
When something like the Iran strikes happened, all of that activated at once. Which story did those events enter? The same sequence of facts gets processed differently depending on which narrative receives it first, or receives it most forcefully. And for someone carrying both, the processing happens in parallel, which means the confusion isn't about facts. It's about meaning.
The same images were circulating everywhere. The same timestamps, the same footage of smoke rising over facilities in Iran. Information was being shared. What wasn't shared was what that information meant.
Through one lens: the strikes were another chapter in a story that goes back decades, or further. American and Israeli military power determining the architecture of the Middle East, preemptively, on terms they set unilaterally. Negotiations that were reportedly progressing, cut short. A government — whatever its internal character — targeted before diplomacy could run its course. From inside this frame, the sequence read almost inevitably: the talks were always decorative, force was always the real instrument, and the stated commitment to a negotiated solution was useful until it wasn't. There was no anger in this reading, particularly. Just recognition. This is how these things go.
Through another lens: the Iranian regime had been given frameworks and good-faith negotiations before and had used the time to expand its nuclear program anyway. A state that systematically represses its own citizens does not become a sympathetic party by being the target of military action. The negotiations may have been close, or they may have been close in the way that certain kinds of governments are always close when it serves their purposes and never close when it doesn't. From inside this frame, the strikes weren't a violation of an ongoing peace process. They were the conclusion of a process that had already failed by other means.
What made my situation particular is that I didn't read those two framings sequentially. I wasn't first sympathetic to one, then persuaded by the other. They arrived together. I found the anti-imperial critique compelling in a way that didn't require me to defend the Iranian state — and at the same time, I found the Iranian state's conduct genuinely indefensible in a way that didn't require me to accept the strikes as necessary or legitimate. The partial agreement on each side didn't add up to a position. It just produced a kind of suspension.
There was a third thing. Among the targets on February 28th was Khamenei himself. Whatever you believe about the strikes, killing him revealed how badly the planners had misread the society they were targeting. Present-day Iran runs on martyrdom theology — Karbala as template, sacred suffering as political currency. The regime had spent decades teaching that dying for the cause is proof the cause is just. Killing Khamenei didn't decapitate that ideology. It completed its favorite narrative: the righteous leader struck down by the imperial enemy. The strike handed the movement exactly what martyrdom theology requires. Neither frame I was carrying had prepared me for that — it was a failure that belonged to the logic of power itself, independent of which narrative you used to judge it.
This is what I mean when I say the disagreement isn't only distributed across communities. It's also inside them, and inside individual people. The same person can find the anti-imperial argument persuasive without wanting to defend a theocratic government's right to whatever it was pursuing. The same person can find the argument for institutional accountability compelling without being able to ignore the history of who gets held accountable and by whom and on what terms. These aren't contradictions that dissolve once you think clearly enough. They're what happens when you're being honest about more than one thing at once.
If the same event genuinely does produce different meanings depending on which framework receives it, then the question stops being about the event itself. It becomes a question about the frameworks. How do they work? What do they do to the same set of facts?
What I've been calling narratives aren't just stories in the soft sense. They're interpretive systems. They come pre-loaded with definitions: what counts as aggression, what counts as defense, who has standing to make certain kinds of claims, what kinds of evidence matter. Before any specific fact is processed, the narrative has already organized the categories into which that fact will fall.
Take the detail that negotiations were ongoing and reportedly progressing when the strikes came. That's a fact. But notice what each frame does with it.
The postcolonial frame says: this confirms the pattern. Diplomacy was real enough to be used as cover, not real enough to be honored. The existence of negotiations is evidence of bad faith, not good faith — a stage-managed appearance of due process before a decision that had already been made.
The liberal frame says: negotiations are only meaningful if the party you're negotiating with is negotiating honestly. A government that has systematically violated previous agreements and used negotiating periods to advance its program is not a partner in good faith. The talks may have been progressing, but that doesn't tell you anything about what they would have produced, or whether the progress was real.
Both interpretations are coherent, grounded in things that have actually happened, and both are being advanced by serious people with access to the same information.
This is what makes policy thinking so consistently insufficient in these situations. Policy thinking assumes, usually without examining the assumption, that people who see the same facts will understand the same problem. That disagreement, if it exists, is about solutions — different priorities, risk tolerances, interests. So the policy solution is: more information, better arguments, clearer communication, stronger institutions.
However, if the disagreement is actually at the level of meaning — if people aren't disagreeing about what to do but about what is happening — then better arguments don't resolve it. You can't solve a narrative conflict with a policy solution. The conflict isn't about outcomes. It's about the interpretive system that determines what an outcome even means.
For someone carrying multiple narratives internally, this plays out in a particular way. The same decision feels different depending on which framework you're inhabiting when you encounter it. It's not that you're being inconsistent. It's that the evaluative machinery you're running it through produces different outputs depending on which part of you is doing the processing. And when you're trying to be honest about more than one framework at once, the outputs run in parallel, and you don't get a clean answer.
When the same internal fracture exists across millions of people who share a broad community but not a unified interpretive frame, the disagreement looks irrational from outside. It looks like people refusing to commit, or hedging, or performing outrage strategically. It is actually something more specific: the experience of taking two frameworks seriously and discovering they don't collapse into each other.
When those narratives live inside the same person, the disagreement doesn't go away. It relocates.
I've spent time thinking about what it actually means to carry two frameworks in the way I've been describing, and I keep coming back to the same formulation.
The postcolonial frame pulls toward solidarity — with Muslim-majority populations broadly, with communities absorbing the consequences of decisions made without their participation, with the argument that the history of intervention is a continuous story and its latest chapter shouldn't be read in isolation from everything that preceded it. There's an instinct in this that runs deep: suspicion of the way the powerful describe themselves, attention to the gap between stated rationale and actual effect.
The liberal frame pulls toward accountability — maintaining that human rights aren't a cultural export to be applied selectively when convenient. The JCPOA mattered to me in 2015 as evidence that deals could be real. When we withdrew in 2018 and the deal began collapsing, what I felt wasn't just political disappointment. It was something more personal. A specific kind of hope had been shown to be fragile.
Both of these orientations came from real things. The postcolonial narrative asks you to take seriously the experience of people who have been on the receiving end of power's self-justifications for a long time. The liberal narrative asks you to take seriously the experience of people living under governments that invoke those same self-justifications to avoid accountability for what they do domestically. Both are asking to be taken seriously. Both have standing.
The problem is not that these two orientations contradict each other in a logical sense. It's that reality keeps failing both of them.
American foreign policy, when I evaluate it against what America claims to be — a constitutional system, a country organized around rights and rule of law, a democracy with the institutional capacity to course-correct — falls short in ways that aren't incidental. The withdrawal from the JCPOA, the timing of the strikes, the pattern of treating negotiations as tactical rather than principled are part of a record. I am not accusing anyone of bad faith in some global conspiracy sense. I am saying that if we take the civic claims seriously, the distance between those claims and our conduct is real, and it costs us something to keep ignoring it.
On the other hand, the Iranian state, when I evaluate it against the ethical framework of Islam — a framework organized around justice, accountability of rulers to something larger than their own interests, and the imperative to protect the vulnerable — falls short in ways that are also not incidental. The repression, the specific targeting of people who tried to organize or speak or simply exist outside the regime's preferred categories is the product of deliberate choices. A government can be targeted unjustly and still be unjust. Both things are true.
So the tension I carry isn't between two loyalties. I'm not torn between America and Iran, or between the West and Islam, in the sense of having emotional allegiances that pull in different directions. The tension is between two ideals — what America claims to be, and what an Islamic ethics actually requires — and the persistent, discouraging distance between those ideals and what actually happens.
It's not dual loyalty. It's dual disappointment.
What I'm describing isn't bitterness or disillusionment in the sense of having been naive and been corrected. It's more like: if you take both frameworks seriously enough to hold yourself accountable to them, you will regularly find yourself disappointed by the movements and governments that are supposed to embody them. That's not a failure of the frameworks. It might be the most honest thing the frameworks can produce. The more clearly you see what each ideal demands, the more clearly you see where the reality falls short.
I came back to my tabs.
Oil prices, still hovering around $100. Shipping traffic through the Strait, still sharply down. Satellite imagery of the strike sites. A military brief walking through how a handful of naval mines could force even escorted tankers to halt or reroute.
I told myself I was trying to understand what was happening.
The Strait of Hormuz is approximately sixty meters deep at its navigable channel. That's a fact you can measure. It tells you how large a vessel can transit, what draft limitations apply, how a military blockade would work in practice. It tells you nothing about why it matters — to whom, at what cost, in whose name. The depth is the same regardless of what you believe about the strikes that preceded the closure, or the negotiations that preceded the strikes, or the deal that collapsed years before anyone was talking about this particular sequence of events.
I was doing what a lot of us do when the tension becomes difficult to hold: retreating into the measurable. These things are true, and they feel like understanding, and they are a way of sitting with the complexity without actually addressing it. It is easier to understand how something works than to sit with what it means.
The deepest disagreements about this war aren't about the depth of the Strait or the price of oil or the range of the missiles. Those can be measured. What cannot be measured is which story those facts belong to. Whether the strikes were the failure of diplomacy or the product of its absence. Whether what happened was an act of domination or an act of deterrence — and who gets to decide, and on what grounds, and with whose history as context.
I keep the tabs open. The numbers keep updating. Underneath them, unresolved, the tension remains exactly where it lives.