The power of utterly delusional thinking

It remains remarkable how entirely unserious the objectives of the war on Iran are, to the extent that they can be made out at all:

As the United States and Israel prepared to go to war with Iran, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, went to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a plan.

Within days of the war’s beginning, said David Barnea, the Mossad chief, his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government. Mr. Barnea also presented the proposal to senior Trump administration officials during a visit to Washington in mid-January.

Mr. Netanyahu adopted the plan. Despite doubts about its viability among senior American officials and some officials in other Israeli intelligence agencies, both he and President Trump seemed to embrace an optimistic outlook. Killing Iran’s leaders at the outset of the conflict, followed by a series of intelligence operations intended to encourage regime change, they thought, could lead to a mass uprising that might bring about a swift end to the war.

I know it’s a very fine line between “deranged” and “dishonest,” but my guess is that Trump and Netanyahu really believed that a bombing campaign by the United States and Israel would not only politically strengthen regime opponents, but do so decisively enough that their total lack of a planned endgame would take care of itself. That to state the premise is to refute it is not a great sign for how this is going to go.