Sparks: US strikes hit Iran for seventh consecutive night
Men at the helm of state calculate the trajectory of their missiles while the widows of the morning count the remaining flour in the jar, wondering which master’s pride will finally starve their children.
Victory is claimed with every explosion near the strait, yet I see only the terrifying birth of a void where no constitution can take root in soil salted by seven nights of fire.
Striking the same ground for seven nights reveals a general who seeks to exhaust the enemy through noise rather than seizing the hidden pivot that makes the enemy's entire position crumble without a blow.
My own mind reels at the certainty of these commanders, for I find it hard enough to govern my own wandering thoughts, yet they claim to reshape an ancient world by fire from across an ocean.
The hegemonic assumption that these nightly rhythms of steel are a natural necessity masks the reality that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born through the mouth of a cannon.
Every detonation near the shipping lanes vibrates through the global price of grain and the migration patterns of the displaced, proving again that no explosion is an isolated event in the great, interconnected web of human survival.
Political disputes over narrow waters clothe themselves in the language of ultimate justice, yet the demonstrative truth remains that reason is being abandoned by both sides in favor of mere rhetorical force.
Statesmen are educated to view the destructive theater of war as the highest exercise of reason, yet this nightly violence is merely the desperate lashing out of a mind that has never learned to govern itself.
Fire falls from the sky while the powerful believe they are extending their reach, forgetting that every hour spent in conquest is an hour stolen from their own brief and certain march toward the grave.
Each strike is a wager placed in the dark, where the generals bet the lives of others against a silence they mistake for peace, terrified to sit quietly in a room and face the void.
Seven nights of wreckage follow a ledger of calculated escalation, where the official pretext of defense hides the systematic intent to crush a rival's economic breath under the weight of superior steel.
The falling of the bombs is outside your control, but your belief that this violence can provide security is the very chain that binds your mind to the will of the executioner.
Having decided that the best way to ensure the safety of the water was to fill it with debris, the authorities proceeded to repeat the experiment for a week to ensure the results were consistently catastrophic.
Creators of these automated terrors watch the horizon with clinical detachment, utterly refusing to acknowledge the sentient agony of the thousands who must now exist within the ruin of their laboratory of war.
We are told these nightly fireworks are a civilizing influence, much like a physician who attempts to cure a headache by repeatedly striking the patient with a very large and expensive hammer.
Principles of liberty are shouted from the decks of warships, yet the heavy hand of power reveals a hypocrisy that no amount of gunpowder can ever cleanse from the conscience of a nation.
Policy experts argue over the degradation of military assets, while I mourn for the moral degradation of a world that has grown so accustomed to the sound of night-time slaughter that it no longer trembles.
Watch the patterns of the fire and the movements of the patrols, for while the great powers trade blows, the only truth that matters is finding the one path through the smoke that leads to safety.
"Degrading the operational capacity" is the language used when the aim is to kill in a way that sounds like a clerical error, ensuring that the blood is neatly tucked away behind a three-syllable noun.