For many people with souls of iron or rot, last night’s U.S. military strike against Syrian forces—which Donald Trump authorized in retaliation for the recent, deadly chemical weapons attack that killed more than 70 civilians—was a stilling moment, shaking even the most fervent sabre-rattler with its portent of new war, arriving swift and seemingly without forethought. For these simple-minded creatures, it was just a terrifying reminder of the fraying thread that civilization balances on, now more than ever.
But Brian Williams—a man who sees things no one else sees, particularly in the fog of war—stared deeply into that sudden hail of missiles launched at Syrian airfields by U.S battleships, whistling their way toward destruction and certain death for everyone they encountered. And in them, he saw the beauty. As those 60 Tomahawks rained down upon the Levant, Williams’ own soul welled up with poetry, and—with the awed and lyrical grace of W.B Yeats—he shared that poetry with MSNBC viewers, soothing them with his gentle pleas to look at “the beautiful pictures.”
“We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” Williams mused over footage of these magnificent missiles heading off to kill someone. Then, realizing that even his own tongue had failed to capture the true grandeur of a bombing that more prosaic minds had clumsily dubbed an “aggression against a sovereign state in violation of international law” and “dangerous,” and which resulted in the deaths of six servicemen and nine civilians—including, Syria claims, four children—Williams turned to the words of the late Leonard Cohen: “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’”