Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you see an out for Khamenei et al? They can’t credibly dismantle their nuclear deterrent and expect to keep their heads. Israel and America cannot accept it, particularly now that its conventional defences have been shown ineffective Honestly, I don’t think the American people have the stomach for another Middle Eastern war, and Israel has shown in the past that if you recognize their right to exist in some form…
> the American people have the stomach for another Middle Eastern war, Sure they do. It's another faraway TV war. Trump is just pretending like he s hesitating to ease his fundamentalist MAGA base into it.
Nobody wants war. We've re-labelled military maneuver with words that aren't spelled W-A-R. Because, in a perverse way, both "preëmptive strike" and "genocide" are less loaded--emotionally and historically--than war.
But it's still war. War means you die. War means everything you love will die. The things you spent a lifetime building, from paintings to companies to relationships with neighbors and children and pets. They will all die. War means the entropy we ought to have bequeathed to our successors gets spun up to-day.
Then it's over. New generation. Nobody remembers. The drums start beating again. Almost as if by design. Pulses of competition, if one had to be generous.
If there is a single adjuvant to reviving these martial tones, it's the notion that this time is different. That everyone, this time, is just pretending to want to kill each other. That the consent is manufactured. It's not. It's real. We're singing it together.