The great game of whack-a-militant continues along Israel's northern frontier, where the tally of dead soldiers has risen to four, and the Lebanese body count has swelled to a grotesque 18. One shudders to think what the final score will be by the time the UN gets around to drafting a strongly worded letter.
Let us pause, dear reader, to consider the grim arithmetic of modern warfare. Hezbollah, that doughty little engine of chaos, has been taking a right pasting. Their rocket stocks are dwindling, their commanders are finding out what the inside of a Mossad interrogation room looks like, and their morale is presumably lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut. Yet, like a particularly stubborn stain on a white shirt, they refuse to be washed out.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Defence Forces have announced the deaths of four soldiers. Four men who will never again sip coffee in a Tel Aviv cafe, four families who will receive the knock on the door that every mother dreads. The official communique is terse, respectful, and utterly devoid of the gin-soamed sorrow that your correspondent feels upon reading it. But that is the way of such things: the human cost is always sanitised, turned into statistics, made palatable for public consumption.
And what of Lebanon? The toll of 18 souls is a convenient number, neat and divisible, but each digit represents a life snuffed out, a family shattered, a future stolen. The hospitals in Beirut are overflowing, the morgues are full to bursting, and the politicians are, as ever, arguing about who gets to claim the moral high ground while the bodies pile up in the middle.
This is the theatre of the absurd, performed on a stage soaked in blood. The actors are all in costume: the stern-faced generals, the black-clad fighters, the solemn diplomats. They recite their lines with the practised gravitas of a Shakespearean tragedy, but the script was written by a committee of madmen. The audience — that is you and I — sits in the dark, munching popcorn and wondering when the interval will come, when the lights will go up and we can all go home and pretend it never happened.
But there is no interval. The show must go on. The rockets continue to fly, the bombs continue to fall, and the death toll continues to rise. We are trapped in this theatre of war, forced to watch the same old play with the same old ending. The only variation is the number of acts, the body count, the price of gin at the bar.
Your correspondent, ever the optimist, suggests a radical alternative: let us all down tools and refuse to play our parts. Let the soldiers go home, the politicians shut up, and the pundits find honest work. Let us replace the script with a blank page and write something new, something that doesn't end in tears and rubble. But that would require a collective act of sanity, and as we all know, sanity is the first casualty of war.
So we continue to watch, to read, to mourn. The bodies are buried, the speeches are made, and the cycle begins anew. And somewhere, in a bunker or a palace, a man in a suit smiles at the thought of escalation. Because war, my friends, is the greatest show on earth. And the tickets are paid in blood.
