Peace has been announced in the Gulf more often than it has been kept. A ceasefire arrived within weeks of the first Iranian strikes on Gulf territory and did not survive the spring. A memorandum followed in the summer and was dead inside a month. Each pause was announced with more confidence than the last and ended the same way: drones over power stations and desalination plants, another chokepoint closed, the bombing resumed days after it was suspended. Envoys still shuttle in and out of Tehran. The governments in Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi do not regard that as an…