Marathe & Steeply: the attaché incident as geopolitics — civilian-as-warning

The samizdat's first mass casualty read as a diplomatic incident: the attaché has "no political value" except as the pretext for a Saudi "shrill stink," and O.U.S.'s real question to Marathe is whether the A.F.R. would "make of him the example" — terror as message, a civilian killed to warn O.N.A.N. Marathe's denial ("Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our desire") is itself a statement of doctrine: the A.F.R. does target O.N.A.N. by demonstration, just not this way, not yet. (The Entertainment-as-object and its lethality are entertainment-self's; landed here as the geopolitics of the samizdat and the terror-message question.)