What do you call six weeks of airstrikes, three carrier groups, a downed fighter, a foreign capital under blackout, and a Situation Room that has ordered so much Panera the receipts are being FOIA’d? At Eliza’s on Saturday, we called it hostilities. We extended the ceasefire on Monday. We did not extend the vocabulary.
The dinner was small on purpose. Eliza does not do large in a news cycle. There were eight of us at the table — a former ambassador, two Hill staffers of opposing parties who had clearly ridden over together, a defense reporter’s husband, my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has stopped pretending she is not tired, and a lobbyist I will only describe as bipartisan, because he is, and because the description embarrasses him in precisely the way I intend.
The ceasefire came up between the first and second courses, which is where things come up at Eliza’s. The bipartisan lobbyist said the extension was, and I am quoting, ‘a durable off-ramp.’ One of the Hill staffers said it was ‘fragile but holding.’ The other said ‘fragile but holding.’ The former ambassador said ‘fragile.’ It went around the table like grace.
I asked, because someone has to, what we would be calling the last six weeks if the other side had done it to us. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink. Eliza said, ‘Margaret, please.’ The defense reporter’s husband said the word was ‘kinetic engagement,’ and then, when nobody laughed, said he had heard it from a briefer and thought it was funny at the time.
Judy, who does not offer opinions in mixed company because she has read the memos twenty years from now and knows how they end, said only that the Archives had already been asked, informally, what the retention schedule was for ‘operational correspondence adjacent to a non-declared action.’ She said this the way she asks whether anyone wants more bread. Nobody wanted more bread.
Here is what I keep turning over. A ceasefire is a thing you extend between wars. If we are extending one, we had one. If we had one, someone should be permitted to say so out loud, in a chamber, on a record, under the coat of arms that pretends to require it. Instead we have six weeks of press briefings in which the word ‘hostilities’ has been doing the work of a word we are afraid of, and a Senate that has treated the whole business the way my building treats a broken elevator — with a printed sign and a shrug.
The Hill staffer of the party currently in the majority told me, quietly, near the sideboard, that a war-powers vote had been drafted four times and pulled four times, and that the fourth time it was pulled by a member who is on television twice a week describing himself as a hawk. I asked whether the member would say so on the record. The staffer looked at me as though I had asked whether the lamb had been sourced ethically.
The lamb, incidentally, had been sourced ethically. Eliza mentioned it twice. It was the only item at the table that enjoyed unanimous consent. The bipartisan lobbyist said the ceasefire would probably hold through the summer, which was the first thing anyone said all evening that sounded like a prediction and not a prayer. Judy asked for the recipe.
We are going to extend this again in six weeks. Someone at the podium will say fragile. Someone in the chamber will say durable. Someone on cable will say kinetic. Judy will file whatever we let her file, in whatever box we let her file it in, and in thirty years a graduate student will open the box and learn that the country fought a war between April and — well, that is the part we haven’t decided yet, because we haven’t decided we fought one.
The lamb was excellent. We asked for the recipe. We called it the lamb course, because that was a thing we were willing to name.