Peloni: This is a very important article.
October 7, 2023, Was Not a Failure of Intelligence. It Was a Failure of Imagination
Gregg Roman | MEF | July 24, 2025
Flag of Israel in the Western Wall. (Photo by Hynek Moravec – Self-photographed, CC BY 2.5, Wikipedia)
The wire was cut. The sirens were silent. Then the world broke.
October 7, 2023, was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of imagination. It was the final, bloody refutation of a doctrine that had governed Israel for fifty years. The doctrine of the strong fence and the quiet life. The doctrine of deterrence. The doctrine of “mowing the grass.” It was a doctrine that assumed a rational enemy. It was a doctrine that believed one could contain a firestorm with a garden hose.
In 1928, writing from Paris, Ernest Hemingway observed that “the first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war.” The Middle East has tried both. Neither worked. Now comes a third option: Pax Israeliana. An Israeli Peace. Not a request but a statement of fact, forged in the fires of Gaza, proven in the skies over Iran, and now being written into the soil of a shattered Syria.
The Arithmetic of Failure
Consider the arithmetic of containment. Fifteen years. Five major operations in Gaza. Thousands of rockets. Billions in defense spending. Zero strategic progress. This was not a strategy; it was lawn maintenance with F-16s. Israel called it “mowing the grass,” as if Hamas were dandelions rather than an ideological cancer metastasizing on its border. The metaphor itself revealed the poverty of ambition. Gardens require more than mowing. They require uprooting.
As Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum have long argued through the Israel Victory Project, the fundamental error lay in seeking to manage rather than win. For decades, Israel was the defender. It absorbed the first blow. It managed the conflict. It sought ceasefires. It accepted a level of violence that no other Western nation would tolerate for a single afternoon. That Israel is gone.
The concepts presented here by Gregg Roman are well-founded applications of the expression, ” Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan!”
As long as Israel ultimately wins a decisive victory over the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist proxies, the opportunities for an enduring peace and increasing prosperity among nations in the Middle East increase exponentially!
Macron the Clown
https://open.substack.com/pub/lel817/p/macron-the-clown?r=1q2uiq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
This is an excellent article, much longer than usual but well worth the read.
It sheds plenty of light on the second class decisions of past years and reminds us that we will not gain peace by appeasement.