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There is a special kind of obscenity reserved for empire’s inner circle when they start competing for credit. This week in Washington, Netanyahu eulogised the late Senator Lindsey Graham as “Israel’s number one friend,” and Trump corrected him on the spot: no, actually, I’m israel’s number one friend, Lindsey was only ever number two. Two men who between them have overseen a war on Iran, a permission structure for continued strikes on Gaza, and arms sales to a NATO member Israel considers hostile, spent a public moment jockeying over a rivalry medal. That is what passes for statecraft at the top of the imperial core: theatre about loyalty, staged for cameras, while the actual violence those loyalties produce goes on without commentary.

Ali Khamenei is dead, and the two things happening on either side of that fact are not the two things Western coverage keeps trying to merge into one story. On one side: PMOI Resistance Units launched a nationwide campaign of defiance on 10 July, following what the same outlets describe as lavish, militarised state funeral ceremonies for a man whose regime spent decades disappearing and executing its own dissidents. On the other side: the United States is now nine consecutive nights into a bombing campaign that has nothing to do with Iranian civil society and everything to do with a strait oil needs to move through. These are not the same story wearing two faces. One is Iranians deciding, on their own terms, what comes after a dead theocrat. The other is a foreign military using the resulting instability as cover to keep dropping ordnance on Bushehr and Jask.