But the sense of turbulence here has not diminished. It is as if the city and the country are bursting at the seams with tragedy after tragedy. A large number of passengers on the Ukrainian flight were dual citizens of Iran and Canada. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, forthrightly noted, “I think if there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families.”

Many fear that tragedies like the shooting down of the airliner would pale compared with the horrors a war between the United States and Iran would unleash.

Iran is in the midst of a decisive argument with itself. The people who poured out into the streets in November because of the sharp jump in the price of gasoline, the people who choked the streets of Tehran, Ahvaz, Mashhad and Kerman mourning General Suleimani while shouting anti-American slogans, the people who again came out this week to protest the shooting down of the Ukrainian jetliner and the false statements by officials before an admission of error by the Iranian government, they all are Iranians engaged in a struggle for the soul of a nation.

It is uncharted territory for every one of them, exacerbated by the unbearable threat of a war with the United States that may diminish at times but never goes away.

What Iran does with itself is ultimately the business of Iranians. They don’t wish President Trump to rub salt into their recent wounds as he tweets about the “brave, long-suffering people of Iran.” Nowhere has this been more evident than a statement by the protesting students at Amir Kabir University who, while condemning internal suppression, let it be known: “During the past few years, America’s presence in the Middle East has produced nothing but increasing insecurity and chaos.”

And in the cafes, on social media, in universities and on the streets, average Iranians as well as state officials are torn between thoughts of revenge and bereavement, dissent and extinguishing the current internal and external crises.

Salar Abdoh, an Iranian writer, teaches at the City College of New York. “Out of Mesopotamia,” his novel about the war in Syria and Iraq, will be published in the fall by Akashic Books.

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