SEPTEMBER 22 — Here’s the scene: a press room with cheap coffee, tired cameras, and a podium that has seen more lipstick than a karaoke mic in Patpong. The official steps up, clears a throat polished by decades of “we are cautiously optimistic,” and sells you a combo meal — peace with a side of fries. Ceasefire soon. Normalisation imminent. Both sides valued equally. Path to statehood, irreversible — today’s special. And you feel that old American jingle in the background, the one that says history bends toward whatever Washington says it does. Except it doesn’t. Not here. Not now. Not in Gaza, where every “soon” ages like milk in the sun.

You could call it spin, but spin assumes there’s a centre. This is ritual: a catechism of optimism repeated because it used to work on someone — voters, donors, Europeans, or the mirror. The words have that soft-serve texture: sweet, melty, instantly forgettable. Meanwhile the facts are gristle. Talks stall. Truces break. The convoy gets turned around. The bombs do not.

If you want to know what real leverage looks like, it isn’t a statement. It’s a switch. Military aid on or off. But that switch is bolted to the wall, and everyone knows it. So the announcements keep coming: “We care equally; we’re doing everything; the deal’s close.” And the region, familiar with both hunger and honesty, shrugs and gets back to surviving.

The truth is older than this war. The United States didn’t wake up one morning and decide to fib its way through the Middle East; it trained for this like a marathon. For decades, Washington played marriage counsellor while wearing one partner’s varsity jacket. The “peace process” often functioned like one of those airport moving walkways — you step on it, and it gently moves you nowhere. Democracy and human rights? The talking points were anthropologically fascinating: invocations offered with straight faces to men who run prisons like empires and empires like prisons.

You can get drunk on intelligence briefings. I’ve seen chefs sniff a truffle with less reverence. The raw intercept, the secret memo — my god, the aroma of certainty. Except it lies to you in a subtle way: not by saying the wrong thing, but by convincing you it’s the whole thing. Again and again, the US read the menu and thought it had eaten the meal. Camp David in 2000: “Arafat can’t refuse this”, and then he does, and walks home a hero. Palestinian elections in 2006: “The moderates have it,” and then they don’t. Syria in 2011: “Assad’s finished, any day now”, and any day now becomes any year now, until the whole map tilts and breaks and still no one can agree who’s winning. Afghanistan: “We’ve turned the corner”, said so many corners the place became a cul-de-sac.

None of this would be remarkable if there were learning — real learning — the kind you buy with blood and humility. But America’s Middle East school is pass/fail, and somehow nobody ever fails. The result is a trick of the mind: self-delusion calcifies into habit, habit into policy, policy into those press-room mantras about being “on track” when the track is a cliff’s edge. Over time, it gets hard to tell where the optimism ends and the con begins. Maybe there isn’t a line.

Power, real power, doesn’t talk this much. It doesn’t need to. The more Washington found itself ignored, the louder it got, and the region — God bless its brutal clarity — tuned the volume down. On the battlefield, militias that were supposed to be dismantled adapted like cockroaches in a neon kitchen. Sanctions piled up like unpaid bar tabs, each new round a confession that the last round didn’t do squat. If pressure works, you need less of it over time, not more. This isn’t a morality play; it’s physics.

And when Washington did swing, it swung like a tourist at a street-food stall, pointing at everything at once. Libya: remove the tyrant and the country becomes a choose-your-own-adventure written by men with too many guns. Syria: arm the “moderates”, only to watch crates drift into darker hands. Egypt: cheer the uprising, then learn the new boss believes in the old habits. Each time, the words were heroic, the exits a shambles, the lessons filed under “complicated”.

So when people in the region looked at the White House and then at their street, they preferred, perversely, the guy who didn’t pretend to love them. Better the blunt dealer than the poet who won’t pick up the check. You don’t have to admire a man to understand why his honesty — cruel as a snapped bone — can feel like relief after years of smog. The moral vanity of “we care” without the courage to do what caring demands — that’s worse than indifference. That’s betrayal dressed as compassion.

The American myth factory kept running anyway. It printed a universe where sanctions tame the Houthis, where “moderates” bloom like spring herbs with a little US sunlight, where a “responsible centre” in Israel emerges on cue to sign documents that mean something. In this universe, ceasefires are around the corner, justice is blind, and double standards are a slander invented by cynics. There are consultants who can sell you slides proving it. There’s always a slide.

But step outside — into the heat, the smells of diesel and cardamom — and the other universe hits you in the teeth. The one with mothers counting bread, with cousins sending location pins, with politicians speaking only the language of pain that their base understands. The one where the map is written in revenge and memory, and peace is not a word but a cost no one is willing to pay. In that universe, US statements are background noise, like a radio in a kitchen banging out oldies while the cooks handle the real business of burn and carve.

Let’s talk about the lie again, because it isn’t all the same lie. There are useful lies — the kind that end a missile crisis because you move your hardware quietly and let the other guy keep his dignity. There are the big, bad ones that start wars. And then there’s this other species: the lie that convinces no one but becomes habit anyway, the ricotta of deception — light, spreadable, flavourless. “We remain committed to a two-state solution”, said long after the bulldozers have made a mockery of the map. “Normalisation is within reach”, while the people you need most are digging in their heels and daring you to prove you’re serious.

You want to know the weirdest moment? When the mask accidentally slips and the honesty peeks through — a president admitting that the strikes won’t stop the Houthis but will keep happening anyway. That’s not strategy; that’s inertia wearing aviator shades. That’s the kitchen where every plate is a re-fire, the service never ends, and nobody will tell the guests the restaurant’s been closed since last year.

The anatomy of failure here is almost culinary. Step one: misread the ingredient — think you’ve got thyme when you’re holding mint. Step two: double down, add more mint. Step three: stare at the ruined stew and call it “a complex profile”. Step four: plate it anyway. Step five: blame the eater. The eater, like the region, learns. It gets sceptical. It smiles at the maître d’ and orders something else down the street.

The cost of all this isn’t only body counts and broken states; it’s the evaporation of authority. Influence is the art of shaping choices. When you say “don’t” and the room keeps doing, you’re not influential — you’re a podcast. The US still has the biggest kitchen on earth, with the sharpest knives and the coldest freezers. But knives don’t cook by themselves. And the staff — the allies — watch how you work the line. If they see theatre instead of craft, they head to a place where the chef still burns his fingers.

Here’s the gritty, unflattering coda: the region will survive you. It has survived empires more humourless than yours. It will outlast your talking points the way a cast-iron pan outlasts diet fads. People will keep waking, bargaining, burying, rebuilding. Hard men will keep speaking softly into microphones about peace while their cousins draft the next operation. You will announce an initiative, give it a logo, and find yourself, months later, attending another press conference in the same room with the same coffee — the eternal return of the stale donut.

What would honesty look like? Not sainthood. Just a menu that matches the pantry. If you won’t condition aid, don’t pretend your statements are binding. If you want normalisation, say what you’ll pay and what you’ll force. If you don’t plan to force anything, stop selling dessert before the main course exists. Speak less. Mean more. Learn the difference between intelligence and understanding, between leverage and hope, between quiet and surrender. Retire words that have lost their power from overuse — “process”, “framework”, “credible pathway.” In kitchens and in countries, there’s a law: anything that can’t be seared, simmered, or served is garnish. Pretty, useless, edible lies.

But that would require humility, and humility is a dish American policy rarely orders. It prefers the chef’s tasting menu of inevitability: history bends, democracy spreads, moderates appear, enemies tire. In this telling, time is an ally. In the real world, time is a butcher. Leave meat too long on the counter and it rots, no matter how poetic your labels. Leave people too long in limbo and they curdle into something harder than grievance.

The longer Washington clings to its alternate universe, the more the actual one will mock it. The street already has. When leaders in the region rolled their eyes at empathetic statements not backed by action, they weren’t choosing cruelty; they were choosing reality over pageantry. The irony is brutal: genuine cynicism can be more honest than counterfeit compassion. That’s not an endorsement; it’s an autopsy.

So yes, keep your podiums and choreography if you must. Practice your lines. The cameras will come; they always do. Just know that somewhere nearby, a mother has a list of prices for flour, onions, cooking gas. Somewhere a man is calculating the distance between his nephew and the nearest checkpoint. Somewhere a kid is learning a new word for loss. None of them care that you are “encouraged by recent developments”. They care what you do. And if you do nothing, they will go on without you. They already have.

In another life, I’d end this with a toast: to the stubborn, to those who cook on when the lights flicker, to the quiet hands that make things real. Here, I’ll settle for this: turn the burner off if you’re not going to stir. Stop promising a feast when you won’t buy ingredients. Fewer statements, more switches. Less garnish, more stew. And if you can’t manage any of that, at least give the microphone a rest. The kitchen is loud enough.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.