Nepal, April 5 -- Smoke, mirrors, and the cost of performing power in the West Asia war There is a term from psychology that has been quietly making its way into conversations among academics, policy thinkers, and ordinary citizens trying to make sense of what they are watching unfold: moral injury.

It is not the fear of being harmed. It is the damage done when human beings are forced to witness, or feel implicated in, events that violate their deepest convictions about right and wrong, about the rules by which civilisation is supposed to operate. It is what happens when everything you were taught to believe the world was built upon begins to dissolve in front of you in real time.

That dissolution is now a daily experience for millions...