"Turn it off if you want."
"It isn't bothering me. I'm used to AFKN by now."
"Well, sometimes AFKN has movies about American history but I guess not with the war. I needed a break from CNN. An hour ago CNN reported that we—I mean the Americans— bombed a residence where they think Saddam Hussein was staying at. Four two-thousand pound bombs. They thought that killing the innocent people of that block was nothing next to the chance of him being there— he and his sadistic sons. Who knows how many innocent people were collateral damage."
"Do Americans think it was right?"
"I don't know."
"Was it right?"
"I don't know." It was a cold calculation, a moral choice that was not meant to be that of humans; and yet someone behind a desk had made this one to have a chance of reducing the length of the war and its casualties. He had never been good at modern math so his studies were centered innocuously in musicology. "What do I know about this?" he asked himself. "What do I know about anything?"
"Will they do that to the North Koreans?"
"I don't know. Don't know—hope not. What are you reading?"
"Nothing."