Sparks: Middle East war live: US military says it intercepted Iranian missile and drone attacks

From the desk where I draft letters I know will be ignored, I see that the missiles we shoot down today only teach our enemies how to build better ones for tomorrow.

The hard missile, launched to destroy, is itself destroyed by the soft, yielding interception, proving once more that force exhausts itself against emptiness.

Hadrian’s wall and Trajan’s conquests are dust, and soon this latest exchange of fire will join them, forgotten by all but the scholars of future folly.

All I know is what I read in the papers, and it appears we’ve gotten so good at shooting things out of the sky we’ve forgotten how to keep them on the ground.

The interception of a missile, like the appointment of a provincial governor, is but a temporary measure that merely confirms the permanence of the power it seeks to check.

A general announces the successful interception from a brightly lit podium, while far below, a young technician stares at a radar screen, already imagining the next blip.

We trade the colonial master for a hemispheric protector, exchanging one form of dependence for another while the dream of true sovereignty drifts away like smoke.

You celebrate your cleverness in thwarting my attack, Father, but you only teach me the precise capabilities I must overcome to finally reach your door.

Observing the spiral of a falcon’s stoop and the calculated arc of an interceptor reveals the same brutal geometry of pursuit and evasion.

A factory worker assembling the circuit board for a defense system wonders if her taxes will now rise to pay for the next, more expensive model.

In Cairo, the scholars debate the ethics of a preemptive strike, while in Isfahan, the engineers refine the range of the response, a conversation of steel and fire across the desert.

You educate your sons in the science of destruction and call it necessity, while dismissing the education of your daughters in the art of peace as a sentimental luxury.

It is a remarkable age where we congratulate ourselves for possessing the genius to create wonders and the concomitant genius to blow them out of the sky.