When did ‘manageable’ become a description of a smoking hole in the Zagros Mountains? I ask because I heard it four times before dessert.
By eight o’clock Wednesday night, everyone at the table knew what had happened. A two-seat F-15E Strike Eagle, one of ours, went down somewhere north of Isfahan. The Pentagon called it a ‘dynamic situation.’ The White House press office called it ‘an incident under review.’ A retired three-star on cable called it ‘not the escalation people think it is,’ which is what men in blazers say when the escalation is exactly the escalation people think it is.
Eliza had, as usual, done the seating. On my left was a bipartisan lobbyist — and I am being generous with both halves of that word — who does something with defense appropriations he cannot describe over salad. On my right was a young woman from a think tank whose name I have already forgotten but whose lanyard I have not. Across from me sat a former ambassador to a country he cannot name in mixed company because it is on the list.
“It’s recoverable,” the lobbyist said, of the aircrew. Then, catching himself: “The situation. The situation is recoverable.” He examined his cufflink for a long moment. The cufflink was fine.
My sister-in-law Judy called me from the National Archives that afternoon, which she does when she is bored and when the country is bored with itself. She said the reading room had been quiet all morning, and then, around eleven, three men she did not recognize came in and asked for material on the 1988 downing of Iran Air 655. They did not check anything out. They just looked. “Margaret,” she said, “nobody looks at that shelf unless something is about to rhyme.”
The word at dinner was ‘signal.’ The Iranians had sent a signal. We would now send a signal in response. The signal would be calibrated. The signal would be proportional. The signal would be delivered through channels that everyone at the table apparently had, because they kept referring to them in the possessive. Our channels. Their channels. The back channel, which is somehow also our channel, but quieter.
Nobody said the pilot’s name. Nobody said the weapon systems officer’s name. Nobody, in fact, said the word ‘pilot,’ because the correct term in that room is ‘airframe,’ and airframes do not have wives in Goldsboro, North Carolina, waiting on a phone call from a chaplain. Airframes are recoverable, or they are not. The distinction is technical.
Eliza, who has hosted this table for twenty-two years and buried two husbands with more decorum than the Senate can muster on a Tuesday, brought out the lamb. The lamb was excellent. The lamb was, as it happens, the only subject on which unanimous consent was achieved between the salad and the coffee, which included, in no particular order: the aircrew, the border, the runoff in a country I will not name, and a nominee whose hearings begin Monday.
I asked, at one point, what we thought would happen next. The ambassador said it depended on the Iranians. The lobbyist said it depended on the Saudis. The young woman said it depended on ‘the information environment,’ which is what people under thirty-five now call the country. Eliza said, “Margaret, please,” because I had put my fork down, and Eliza believes that putting your fork down is how wars start at her table.
I picked the fork back up. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.