A worker can lose his job for a serious mistake. A driver can lose his license. A surgeon can lose the right to operate. But in Washington’s war machine, the people who sell catastrophe as strategy almost never lose standing. They remain “experts.” They keep the studio seat, the column, the donor network, the institutional title, the polished tone. That is not meritocracy. It is immunity.

David Horovitz has now said in public what should have shattered the performance much earlier: after 39 days of war, despite tactical gains, none of the central goals publicly attached to the US-Israeli campaign against Iran had actually been achieved. In his own formulation, what Trump was celebrating was “only a tactical victory,” while the war’s central objectives remained unmet at the ceasefire. 

That matters for one reason above all: it exposes not merely failure, but fraud in the language that prepared it. These wars do not run on firepower alone. They depend on a prior labor of legitimation. Somebody has to make maximalist fantasy sound like sober policy. Somebody has to turn obsession into analysis, escalation into restraint, and delusion into “serious debate.” That labor was done. It was done publicly. It was done repeatedly. And it was done by people who will now try to present themselves as unfortunate witnesses to events they helped script.

These were not anonymous experts. They had names, institutions, television bookings, and a clear line of argument. Jonathan Schanzer published “Regime Change Without Nation Building” under the banner of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Senator Lindsey Graham publicly pushed the line that the United States was close to “strategic victory.” This was not detached observation. It was active plausibility production for the highest levels of decision-making. 

That last formula deserves special contempt: regime change without........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)