“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation—how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”

Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from The New York Times—from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on the brink of... uh, World War III.

It’s the forgettable quotes, especially in regard to ongoing war, that may be the most dangerous, because all they do is solidify a collective sense of normal. My term for it is “accepted insanity.” We have the technological and psychological capacity to kill not simply thousands or even millions of people but the whole human race, but let’s talk about it in terms of strategy, tactics, and public relations! Let’s talk about it as though we’re covering a bunch of 10-yer-old boys throwing stones. Which one’s going to win?

That’s the key issue here: winning.

Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

When two cowboys face off in an armed confrontation, the one who draws and fires fastest, hitting the other guy in the stomach or wherever, wins. He gets to walk away with a self-satisfied smirk.

I’m not singling out the Times story quoted above as uniquely problematic in its coverage of the latest turn of events in the Middle East, but rather that it’s representative of the accepted insanity of endless war—the reduction of war to an abstraction, virtually always involving clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and describing murder (including mass murder) as retaliation, self-defense, “show of force,” etc., etc. “National interests” are the prize at stake. Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

The Times story, for instance, steps beyond its abstraction of the Israel-Iran confrontation at one point. Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing several Iranian officers, the story informed us. Iran retaliated two weeks later, firing 300 drones and missiles at Israel, almost all of which were shot down and very little damage was caused. The Times noted: “The only serious casualty was a seven-year-old girl, Amina al-Hasoni, who was badly wounded.”

War affects children! Yes, yes, yes it does. My heart goes out to Amina al-Hasoni. But my God—some 13,000 children have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, and thousands more injured, not to mention orphaned. And some are simply missing, lying under the rubble. What are their names?

What if war were covered the way street crime is covered—not as an abstraction, but with awareness that........

© Common Dreams