The Steady Hand

The best way to win a war is to make it unnecessary. A bomb that is defused kills no one, leaves no ruin, and gives no orphan a grievance to carry for thirty years. Defusing asks for a steady hand, which neither hatred nor fear can supply.

The Long Walk

The men who dismantle bombs for a living have a name for the last hundred yards. They call it the long walk.

Everyone else has been moved back. The street is empty and very quiet. The officer goes forward alone, in a suit of armor that will not save him if he is wrong, toward an object that someone built with the intention of killing whoever touched it.

He brings certain habits with him. He does not hate the building he is trying to save, and he wastes no thought on the man who planted the device, who is no longer there. He does not tell himself that the thing is probably harmless. He does not kick it. He kneels beside it and looks, for as long as it takes, until he understands how it was put together: where the power comes from, what completes the circuit, what the maker was afraid of and guarded against. Only then does he reach for his tools. And he cuts only what must be cut.

For a generation the world has dealt with religious violence in every way but this one.

It has fought at the point of the explosion. It has hunted the bombers, bombed their camps, tightened its borders, and searched its travelers. Some of that was necessary. None of it touched the charge. Kill one generation of fighters and the next grows up reading the same pages under the same rulings, with the same hunger to matter.

It has raged. It has blamed a quarter of mankind for what a fraction of a fraction has done, and by doing so confirmed to every Muslim what the recruiters most need him to believe: that the world outside despises him.

And it has looked away. It has insisted that there is no device at all, that each new atrocity is an aberration with no roots in anything, and that to say otherwise is hatred. Those who took this view meant well. They left the reformers alone on the field, and they insulted Muslims by supposing them unable to read their own book.

Soldiers, haters, and flatterers have all failed, because none of them was willing to kneel beside the device and look at it.