On: US, Iran hit each other again as hopes for quick peace deal fade

It is the peculiar madness of our age that men who cannot keep peace for three months presume to lecture the world on how to achieve it for three centuries. The latest exchange of blows between America and Persia (for I shall use the old and better name) resembles nothing so much as two children throwing rocks across a fence - each convinced that the other started it, neither remembering who first climbed into the orchard.

What strikes me is not the violence - violence is, alas, as old as Cain - but the dreary, mechanical predictability of it. The modern statesman, having forgotten why borders were drawn or treaties signed, now wishes to redraw them all in a fit of abstraction. He does not ask why the fence exists; he only knows he dislikes its placement. And so he tears it down, only to find the orchard overrun, the road impassable, and the children bruised from their own reckless demolition.

There was a time when even enemies understood that certain lines, however arbitrary, were better left standing - not because they were sacred, but because the alternative was chaos. The fairy tales knew this: the troll under the bridge, the dragon at the mountain pass - these were not mere obstacles, but warnings. Remove them without understanding their purpose, and you do not get freedom, but an open road to greater tyranny.

And yet our statesmen, in their haste to be rid of old grievances, have forgotten that the quickest way to prolong a quarrel is to insist on ending it at once. Peace is not made in the space between explosions, but in the quiet recognition that some fences, however crooked, still mark the difference between a garden and a battlefield. - G.K.C.