And isn't there a paradox, if not a problem, in the very idea of winning a war on terror through what is in essence terror bombing?
This sort of commercial selling out, he says, goes against the very essence of illegal bombing, which operates outside the constraints of conventional society.
"In essence, we should not bomb Iran because the worst of its leaders positively want to be bombed and are doing their level best to bring that about," he writes.
In essence, 24 dramatised the ticking-bomb defence of torture which maintains that, when an attack is imminent, it's no time to curl up with a text book on human-rights law.
William Kristol, as ever, manages to distill the rot down to its ludicrous essence: "What's the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?
The task was to identify the bomb, and time was of the essence.
In essence, such a vaccine would act like a smart bomb, homing in on a signal transmitted from within each H.I.V.-infected cell.
The controversial demographer Paul Ehrlich distilled the essence of his somewhat apocalyptic 1968 book, The population bomb, into a simple equation: impact (I) = population (P) x affluence (A) x technology (T).
At the moment a bomb explodes, nothing else matters but the very essence of life and death, he says.
It's also the way violence, bombs, paranoia, blood, gore, and conspiracy theories (the essence of terrorism) have become a staple of popular entertainment.
