When the Cheerleaders of War Begin Threatening the Witnesses

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 nation building. It is the kind of sentence that should permanently disqualify its author from being treated as a serious guide to reality. It promises history without aftermath, destruction without decomposition, collapse without fragmentation, intervention without inheritance. It tells power exactly what power most wants to hear: that it can break a state at the top and somehow avoid paying the political, social, and regional price below. That is not analysis. It is fantasy written in policy prose. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is not incidental to this structure. He is one of its operators. Washington’s war intellectuals supply legitimacy. Trump supplies theatrical force. Netanyahu supplies the political form in which non-closure becomes useful. After the ceasefire, he said Israel had its “finger on the trigger” and could return to war at any time. Reuters reported that Israel backed the pause on Iran while excluding Lebanon from it. In other words, the war’s unresolved character was not a bug. It remained politically available as a governing instrument. 

And here is where the pattern becomes uglier still. When this machinery begins to fail, it reveals something worse than strategic incompetence: degeneration. A power confident in its own legitimacy does not need to menace independent moral authority. It does not need to “set straight” the Vatican in the language of hierarchy and force. Yet the current controversy exists because Mediaite, citing earlier reporting, described allegations that Pentagon officials confronted the Holy See’s ambassador in terms strong enough that JD Vance was pressed on them publicly, while the Pentagon answered that the characterization was exaggerated and distorted. The details remain disputed. But even as a disputed episode, it matters. It is intelligible because it fits the form. 

This is not strength. It is weakness in a militarized costume. It is what power looks like when it can no longer persuade, only pressure; no longer govern, only threaten; no longer command respect, only demand submission. When an order begins to lose control over reality, it often tries to seize control over the witnesses. That is why the Vatican episode belongs inside the same diagnosis as the war’s failed promises. It is not a side story. It is a symptom.

And here is the real obscenity: when reality refuses obedience, the same apparatus does not disappear. It begins semantic salvage. Victory becomes “tactical.” Failure becomes “buying time.” Non-closure becomes “sending a message.” The war that was sold as decisive is repackaged as useful pressure. The people who inflated expectations become the people who manage disappointment. First they sell the fantasy. Then they manage the disaster. Then they ask to survive the wreckage as neutral analysts. Horovitz’s article matters precisely because it punctures that maneuver and says openly that the central goals remained unachieved. 

No. That luxury should be denied to them.

A worker is thrown out for less. A man on a factory floor can pay with his livelihood for one costly error. But the architect of a public fantasy that helps normalize war, widen its aims, and immunize its advocates from accountability is supposed to keep his title because he merely misread “a dynamic environment”? Spare me. If ordinary people are punished for mistakes that damage a shift, a machine, or a ledger, then those who help manufacture strategic hallucinations with regional and potentially global consequences should not be rewarded with another panel discussion, another op-ed, or another respectful invitation to brief power.

The point is not that these people were simply wrong. Being wrong is human. The point is that they helped construct the very grammar in which unreality circulated as judgment. They were not standing outside the machinery, describing it. They were oiling it. They were furnishing it with vocabulary, prestige, institutional cover, and intellectual respectability. They made absurd goals sound measured, historical, achievable, even mature. And now, because the goals remain unmet and the script has torn, they will retreat into the oldest professional alibi in Washington: complexity.

Complexity is real. But it is also where cowards hide after overpromising force and underdelivering results.

The deeper scandal here is not merely that the war did not deliver what was advertised. It is that the public sphere is structurally built to protect the vendors of overreach. First, maximal aims are floated by political leaders. Then they are laundered through think tanks, columns, cable hits, and “serious” strategic language. Then, when the promised result fails to materialize, the same ecosystem explains why nobody could have known better. But we did know who was saying what. We do know who packaged ambition as reason. We do know who kept insisting that fantasy was strategy right up to the moment reality tore up the script. 

If there is to be any intellectual decency left after this episode, the issue cannot be reduced to whether the campaign was tactically impressive but strategically incomplete. That formula is too polite. Too procedural. Too kind to the cheerleaders. The real question is simpler and harsher: who helped make an impossible architecture of goals sound like realism, and why should those people continue to be treated as trustworthy interpreters of power after the public collapse of their script?

A worker loses a job for a serious failure.

These people sell war wrapped in certainty, miss the result, and then ask to keep the microphone, the title, and the immunity.

That is not expertise.

That is a protected caste of licensed irresponsibility.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig