Sparks: US strikes Iran, drawing retaliatory attack on American base

The men who debate the principle of sovereignty in Philadelphia never write to ask whose sons will bleed for its enforcement in some foreign desert.

A man who believes he can control violence by administering it in careful doses is already drunk on the very poison he claims to measure.

Fear of a rival's growing influence, not any treaty violation, is the truer cause for the attack, though the public speech will cite only the latter.

A nation that celebrates its own revolution as sacred condemns as terrorism the same violent resistance when practiced by those it seeks to dominate.

Watch the dockworker in Baltimore lose his livelihood when the shipping lanes close, and you will see the true cost of a statesman's principle.

To define this action as defense requires the prior definition of their action as aggression, each position leaning on the other for its own existence.

You speak of liberty while your bombs birth new orphans, and I must ask if your freedom looks anything like the freedom I marched for.

This calculated escalation, planned in sterile rooms far from the front, reveals more about the state's fear of its own restless people than any foreign threat.

In Isfahan, the bazaar merchants already adjust their prices and routes, a practical calculus of risk that renders the princes' lofty causus belli a mere logistical nuisance.

You do not light a lantern in the woods if you wish to move unseen, nor throw a stone at a hornet's nest if you seek a safe path.

The memorandum clearly stated that Tuesdays were for diplomacy, but as the retaliatory strike arrived on a Thursday, the scheduling conflict was really quite unforgivable.

Before tearing down the fence of a ceasefire, one ought at least to remember why every sensible gardener has always built fences in the first place.

It is altogether admirable how civilized men, over excellent wine, can arrange for other men to be dismembered in distant sands for the improvement of the world.

This fever in the body politic, this heat that calls for more fire, mirrors the imbalance of choler over phlegm, a sickness requiring coolness and restraint.