On: 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.