Sparks: Israel and Hezbollah trade fire, as US-Iran talks begin in Switzerland
The matter is this: you are asked to believe that peace is being pursued by the very same hands currently feeding the fires of war, as if a man could extinguish a blaze with his right hand while pouring oil with his left.
Diplomacy in a distant mountain retreat is a phantom of legitimacy when the actual sovereignty of the region is being decided by the trajectory of missiles over broken borders that no treaty has ever truly secured.
When men speak of peace in high halls while their subordinates exchange fire in the fields, the names of 'statesman' and 'soldier' have lost their meaning, and no lasting order can grow from such hollow rituals.
The kinetic energy of the missile now moves with a velocity that the nineteenth-century mind of the diplomat cannot calculate, leaving the machinery of international law to stall like a wooden gear caught in a high-voltage dynamo.
Men in polished boots sit in quiet rooms discussing the closure of a sea route, while other men, who have no interest in the Strait, are commanded to pull levers that send fire into the homes of strangers.
These proxy fires are the wretched children of distant creators who, having breathed life into violent movements, now recoil in feigned horror from the very destruction their own calculated neglect has unleashed upon the world.
Across the long road from the markets of the Levant to the courts of the Persians, I see that the safety of the caravan now matters less to the rulers than the pride of the garrison.
We are told these borders were drawn by design, yet we observe only the violent struggle for a niche where the most aggressive variation of the state survives by consuming the resources of its smaller, less armed neighbors.
Things that are unconvincing: a peace envoy who arrives in a private jet while the horizon behind him is black with the smoke of a hundred newly lit fires.
It is a marvelous testament to human reason that we have arranged for the diplomats to dine on fine chocolate in the Alps at the precise moment the artillerymen are providing a spectacular fireworks display for the peasants below.
While the masters of the world trade words in a warm room, the raw reality of the blockade is felt only in the empty stomachs of the workers and the searing heat of the shrapnel that tears through common flesh.