Sparks: Middle East live: US launches strikes to 'punish' Iran after troops killed

If the shedding of blood is to be stayed by the shedding of more blood, then we must conclude that the accounts of justice are being audited by a clerk who intends to keep the ledger perpetually open.

That an executive should exercise the power of the sword to 'punish' a foreign power without a formal declaration from the people's representatives is a departure from the constitutional architecture that alone secures a republic against perpetual war.

Anger is a brief madness, and when an empire seeks to cure its grief by inflicting it upon another, it merely ensures that the cycle of the arena shall never lack for fresh gladiators.

The exchange of missiles is conducted with the precise, practiced choreography of a bridge tournament, though with the regrettable difference that the losers are expected to provide their own funeral arrangements.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a conviction of just retribution, yet they forget that the wager of war always risks an infinity of sorrow for a finite vengeance.

You strike back because your pride demands a sacrifice, but in the secret corners of your soul, you know that each blow only binds you more tightly to the very enemy you claim to despise.

The retaliatory strike has been authorized by the appropriate department to address the previous unauthorized strike, ensuring that the ledger remains balanced while the actual objective of the proceedings is indefinitely postponed.

We are told this strategy is a deterrent, but in the struggle for survival, such periodic culling merely selects for the most resilient and aggressive variations of hostility in the regional population.

There is a fence of diplomacy surrounding these ancient borders, and the modern statesman thinks he is being very clever by knocking it down to chase a shadow, without ever wondering why the fence was put there.

Following the successful exchange of explosions, both parties expressed their profound commitment to regional stability, a term which here means making sure the next set of explosions happens at a more convenient time.

Underneath the diplomatic talk and the high-altitude precision, the same raw law of the club and the fang remains, where the strong tear at the weak until the cold takes them both.

Observe how the percussion of a single explosion creates ripples of force that travel through the social body just as a stone disturbs the equilibrium of a pond, eventually returning to shake the hand that threw it.

My journals record a landscape of ancient hospitality and complex customs, yet from the window of a bomber, all these intricate human realities are reduced to a series of coordinates to be eliminated.