Dhaka, June 20 -- Israel's pre-emptive military strike on Iran is the latest episode in a Middle Eastern conflict that began once upon a vanished time and that appears to have no end in a tangible future. What could be more existential? However, the latest instalment of that conflict raises temporal questions about the motivations, objectives and capabilities of countries, particularly those that are arrayed against each other so implacably as to consider war to be the normal, default and ultimate currency of human exchange. Peace is but the uneasy interregnum between two endless wars. Such is the case in the Middle East today.

Iran's declared hostility to the very existence of Israel is reason enough (according to the Jewish state) for ...