Day 1476

Weapons out, bellies in

He stood before his warriors at the golf club by the sea — his golf club, naturally, because a man of his particular invincibility requires that even the war be announced from somewhere with a good short game — and he told them it was a little excursion. Weapon out and belly in. A short-term thing. Already won, in many ways, though not yet enough, which is the kind of winning that requires going further. How good is our military, right? Short term. Short term. Amazing. Short term.

On the first day of the excursion, a Tomahawk found a girls’ school in Tehran. One hundred and seventy schoolgirls, who had perhaps been studying grammar, or the names of birds, discovered that a Tomahawk is, in the words of the warrior-king, very generic. He had not seen the video. Iran, he noted helpfully, does not have Tomahawks, but then, a Tomahawk is sold to other countries. If the investigation finds what it finds, he added, I’m willing to live with that report. The schoolgirls, of course, are not¹.

Mea…