Middle East: Iran says it targeted US bases in Gulf

The news from the Gulf, if it can be called news, is of drones intercepted and sirens sounded. A catalogue of actions and reactions, of machinery sent to destroy other machinery. They speak of targets and bases, of radars and interceptions, as if these were the essential facts. They are not.

The essential fact is this: men in rooms, far from the sound of the sirens, have traded away their morning’s peace - the observation of a dew-laden spiderweb, the first call of the whippoorwill - for the privilege of moving symbols on a map that represents other men’s homes. They have exchanged life for the abstraction of a “base,” a “target,” a “strategic interest.” What is the cost, in life, of a drone? Not its monetary price, but the hours of human existence spent in its manufacture, the anxiety sown in its flight, the peace destroyed by its very existence? The ledger is never balanced.

Here, by the pond, the war is between the hawk and the mouse, and it is conducted without malice, without rhetoric, and leaves no lasting bitterness in the air. Its necessity is plain and its economy complete. What a vast and wearying complexity of hatred we have built, layer upon inherited layer, because we lack the courage to ask the simple, stripping question: Is this necessary? I hear the distant thunder of their engagements, and I plant my beans.

I saw the dispatch from the Gulf today. The Persians claim they struck at the bases of the Athenians - no, the Americans. The names change; the structure does not. They say they targeted the bases. The Americans say they shot down the drones. Kuwait intercepts, Bahrain sounds its alarms. The incident is clear enough. But the cause lies deeper.

The true cause is not this strike or that interception. It is the slow shift in power, the fear of the stronger being challenged by the one who seeks to rise. The Americans have their fleet, their bases encircling the Persian sphere like the Long Walls around Athens. The Persians see this, and they test the walls. They send their drones like triremes probing for weakness. They must show their own people - and their allies - that they can strike back. Not to win, but to prove they are not powerless.

The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must. But sometimes the weak calculate that a well-timed provocation, even if it fails, is better than silent submission. They know the cost. They know the Americans will shoot down their drones, strike their radar sites. Yet they do it anyway. Because the real audience is not the enemy, but their own. And so it continues. The structure dictates the action. The rest is noise.

The muleteer tightens the strap on his beast’s harness, the leather creaking like the joints of an old man, and I think - here we go again, another day of men adjusting straps, men who do not ask why the strap must be tight, why the beast must pull, why the road must lead to the same dusty plain where other men in other uniforms adjust their own straps and tighten their own belts. The drone falls from the sky like a sick crow, its wings torn by the iron beak of an American missile, and the muleteer does not look up because he is counting his coins, because he is hungry, because he has learned to ignore the sound of wings breaking. The air-raid siren in Bahrain wails like a woman in childbirth, a sound that has echoed through every generation since the first city was built on the backs of those who tilled the soil and those who dug the ditches, and the woman in childbirth does not stop to ask why the child must be born into a world where men still believe in borders drawn with blood and ink.

The generals call it deterrence. The economists call it risk management. The mullahs call it divine justice. The muleteer calls it Tuesday. I see the boot in the mud, the same boot that has marched from the Euphrates to the Nile, from the Indus to the Danube, always claiming to bring order, always leaving the same pattern of crushed grass and broken men. The radar site burns, a pyre of silicon and steel, and the men who manned it are now corpses or prisoners, their faces painted with the same ash that covers the faces of the soldiers who shot them, the same ash that will soon cover the faces of the children who wake to find their schools reduced to rubble. The children do not ask why the sky is full of fire. They only learn to run.

Is it right that the earth should be carved into pieces, each piece guarded by men with guns, each gun pointed at a man in a different uniform who is also only trying to feed his family? The strap is tight. The beast pulls. The road is long. The siren wails. And the muleteer walks on, because what else is there to do?