“Beirutification” should become a word if it is not already. By that, I mean the slow normalisation of periodic attacks on a city by a capricious and violent state, until blasts and death become woven into the fabric of urban life. It is urban death by a thousand knives. It is the suffocation of imagination and the thwarting of any civil attempt at a better life, and the gradual dilapidation of a nation to the point where it can no longer stand again, condemned instead to rot in exhausted silence. That is what years of war have done to Beirut. Now something similar is unfolding in Tehran.