Another day, another dispatch from the front lines of the new century’s perpetual war. They strike at bridges and steel plants, pharmaceutical facilities - the very sinews of modern life. One recalls the old lessons on warfare: armies, navies, fortifications. But now the target is infrastructure itself, the circulatory system of a state. The dynamo, not the soldier, is the object of attack.

It is all so perfectly modern, so perfectly futile. We have accelerated the means of destruction to such a pitch that the political imagination cannot keep pace. The institutions that might restrain or direct such force - diplomacy, international law, even the concept of declared war - belong to another age, like Latin in a stock exchange. They govern nothing.

We educate our statesmen in the arts of the 19th century and send them to manage conflicts that move at the speed of light. The result is this: precision strikes against the machinery of existence, delivered with technical perfection and moral confusion. The Virgin of medieval faith could at least offer a reason to die. The dynamo of modern force offers only more efficient ways to dismantle the world.