In gilded towers, men in ties
Debated body counts over bread.
They waved off intel, polished up the lies,
And blessed the bombs that made the nameless dead.

They lit the sky and called the burning good,
Gave Fury a name, proclaimed Epic their fire.
The generals clinked their crystal where they stood
While in ancient lands, the pyres climbed higher.

The pundits spoke of surgical precision,
Of targets neutralized with sterile care,
While mothers learned the dark definition
Of “collateral”—the children playing there.

A mother in Tehran braids her daughter’s hair,
Hums softly, knows nothing of what they’ve spun,
The “axis of evil,” the headlines that blare—
She only knows the sirens have begun.

Behold the math of democratic war:
We bomb them into freedom, death by death.
The senators applaud and vote for more
While a child in Rafah draws their final breath.

An infant’s shoe beside a shattered gate,
A doctor weeping in a corridor,
Become statistics in the logs of state,
Acceptable to those who keep the score.

They say the Persians harbored wicked schemes,
That preemption is the wisest form of peace,
That rubble is the architecture of dreams
And death, correctly managed, brings release.

But pull the curtain back—behold the crude,
The black blood pulsing through the Hormuz Strait.
For oil we dress the slaughter up as shrewd,
For tanker lanes we fabricate the hate.

They’ll tell us it was “necessary,” “just,”
That history will vindicate the choice.
But history is written in the dust
Of every throat that never found its voice.

And when the last drone footage fades to black,
When talking heads debate what went awry,
The dead won’t care who signed off on the attack,
Nor parse the manufactured reasons why.

So raise the flag and sound the triumph’s horn,
Let history record another win.
The foolish and the wise alike will mourn
The wars we end by letting them begin.