On: US carries out new strikes on Iran military site

Diary Entry

Another dispatch from the theatre of war arrives at my breakfast table this morning, and I find myself reaching for my pen with the same uneasy fascination that accompanies the examination of a troubling case history. The latest strikes against Iran - this “negotiating on fumes” business - remind me of nothing so much as the physician who mistakes symptoms for causes and treats fever by bleeding the patient further.

One strike is an anecdote; a series of them forms a case file. And what does this particular file suggest? That we are witnessing not strategy, but reflex - the twitching muscle of pride more than the steady hand of policy. The professional military man, like the physician of old, is prone to the same fatal vanity: the belief that because one can act, one must. But the true diagnostician knows that intervention, untempered by data, is butchery dressed in uniform.

I have seen this before - in the wards, where the proudest surgeons left the highest mortality rates. Their knives were sharp, their reputations sterling, and their patients dead. The correlation was not lost on those of us who kept the records.

And so I wonder: who is keeping the records now? Who tallies the strikes against the responses, the provocations against the escalations? Or are we, like those overconfident doctors, too enamored of our own prowess to notice the pattern forming in the ledger?

The breakfast table grows quiet. The newspaper rustles. Somewhere, a decision is made - not in the cool light of evidence, but in the heated glow of professional certainty. God help us all.