“Americans should know that there are adults at home,” wrote Miles Taylor, a senior official in the US Department of Homeland Security, in 2018, referring to the officials who, secretly from Donald Trump, were in charge of protecting the country. of the potentially reckless decisions that the president himself could make in the exercise of his office. The notice, published in the form of an article in The New York Times, irritated the Republican politician, but somehow sent a message of calm to all the inhabitants of the planet: there were people of order who prevented the despotic tenant of the White House from manipulating the nuclear briefcase in privacy.
The relevance of these shadowy characters who minimize the effects of crises – not always with the knowledge of their political bosses – has grown hand in hand with fiction. Deep down, all of us who have seen series like Homeland or movies like Zero Dark Thirty want to believe that in the darkness of a parking lot or in the anonymity of a roadside cafe, meetings are held where spies from countries in conflict agree on a roadmap. reasonable, avoiding major disasters. It doesn’t matter that we suspect that they do it only out of corporatism since, although they belong to different cultures, in reality they share contempt for politicians who will never know how to value their work on the ground. The important thing – we need to believe – is that there are adults at home.
The response that Iran gave last morning to the Israeli attack on its consulate in Damascus seems calculated down to the last detail to avoid, as we said, further damage. It was an announced and slow-motion offensive – drones and missiles crossing the plains of Jordan with advance warning – that in the end led to a night of fireworks over the sky of Israel, thanks to the protective shield that this country has. It is a pity that the seven-year-old girl Amina Alhasoni, an Israeli Bedouin, suffered serious shrapnel wounds to her head due to the collateral effects of this highly theatrical attack. This is what happens when it is staged with real fire. The reasonable doubt is to what extent we can trust that there are adults in every house where decisions as crazy as bombing an enemy country are made, even in response to another attack.
