Most of my friends grew up to understand how their emotions work, particularly when it came to matters of the heart. They came to understand the mania that accompanies an early crush or love affair. It’s an emotional rocket fuel that powers people to open themselves up to new experiences, even to new self-conceptions. They start getting their lives in order and planning for a blissful long term. But the downside is that this same emotional fuel powers self-delusion. As my friends aged into their twenties and thirties, they tended to understand how to ride these emotional ups and downs, to be at least a little wary of swells of passion, and to recognize that long-term domestic bliss is built by steady acts of the will, and that violent passions serve as guard of the home only at its outer edges, and in dangerous circumstances.
I wish I could say the same of my peers in the intellectual courts of power when it comes to matters of war, that they came to understand their passions and recognize when they are in fits of mania. Alas, the last few days are just like the days three years ago when Ukraine was driving Russia back from its march on Kyiv, or when the bombs began to fall on Libya. Suddenly, normally sensible people who pay their mortgages, and stay faithful to their vows, are talking about vanquishing evil forever, about a single attack that will not only solve all the geopolitical problems of the Middle East, but also finally and irrevocably prove the naysayers (the “isolationists”) wrong to everyone. And it will be popular too!
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