When did preemptive become a word we no longer felt the need to define? On Friday, Israel struck targets across Iran. By Saturday the State Department had a statement. By Sunday, three cable hosts had decided it was complicated, and a former ambassador on a podcast nobody pays for had decided it was overdue.
By the time the op-ed pages went to bed on Sunday, the choreography was complete. The hawks had been vindicated. The doves had been chastened. The moderates had discovered, as they always do, that the truth lies somewhere between bombing and not bombing, and that the somewhere has a zip code and a think-tank fellowship attached.
I had people over Saturday night. Lamb, again — Eliza brought it; she has a guy. The bipartisan lobbyist arrived first, as he always does, and stood at the counter pretending to read the label on a bottle of wine he had brought himself.
“Well,” he said, when I asked what he made of it. “It was going to happen.” That was the analysis. That was the entire analysis. He examined his cufflink and accepted a glass of something cold and asked who else was coming.
Eliza, who works in the building you are thinking of, said the line she always says when I press her on these things: “Margaret, please.” Not Margaret, you’re wrong. Not Margaret, here’s the context I am authorized to share. Just please. As though I had asked her to pass the salt twice.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent eleven years at the National Archives and has a professional relationship with the word preserved, noted that the 2003 authorization for the use of military force is still on the books. She said this the way other people say the dishwasher is making a noise again.
Nobody at the table used the word war. Several people used the word operation. One person — I won’t say which — used the word housekeeping, and three other people nodded as though that were a category of foreign policy, and not something you do before company arrives.
Somewhere between the second bottle and the cheese plate, the bipartisan lobbyist mentioned that his firm had been “tracking the region” for clients, which is the polite Washington way of saying somebody made money on Friday. Nobody asked which clients. Nobody ever does. The cufflink got another look.
I will tell you what struck me, sitting there, watching grown people who have read the cables and been in the rooms decide, in real time, that the appropriate posture toward a new bombing campaign was light surprise. It was not the bombing. It was the speed. It was always going to be the speed.
We had dessert. Eliza had brought a tart. Judy asked for the recipe. The bipartisan lobbyist checked his phone twice and said he had to be at a thing in the morning. The thing, presumably, is also bipartisan.
On the way out, somebody — I think it was Eliza — said it had been a lovely evening, and meant it, and was right. We called it the lamb course. We asked for the recipe. And nobody, all night, asked who started it.