This week in the saga

Tuesday afternoon the strait is ordered cleared of mines that he says there is no report of, immediately. Thursday, at one in the morning, an old photograph: at military academy with his parents. Three hours later the ledger of a war — the navy gone, the air force gone, the leaders wiped from the face of the earth, and forty-seven years answered by the forty-seventh president. Friday night the heaviest raid of the campaign obliterates every military target on the island the country's oil runs through, and he notes that for reasons of decency he has chosen not to destroy the oil itself. An hour later, two sentences: those plans are now dead. And Monday, the chief of staff who has run the building since the first day is diagnosed with cancer, and will keep working from the house.