I’ve often observed that government officials no longer seem able to grasp the concept of wars or winning them. But here’s a State Department official being quoted by CNN to whom the whole thing is an entirely alien concept.

The US believes Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah in strikes over the last week but is still working feverishly behind the scenes to try to convince it not to escalate further and launch a ground incursion into Lebanon over concerns the intensified fighting could spark a broader conflict engulfing the wider Middle East, officials told CNN.

“I can’t recall, at least in recent memory, a period in which an escalation or intensification led to a fundamental de-escalation and led to profound stabilization of the situation,” the State Department official told reporters Monday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

No one at the State Department can also recall the last time we won a war.

Winning a war deescalates a conflict. We don’t do that anymore and so we have endless generational wars instead.

Rather than understanding wars, officials talk in terms of ‘escalation’ or ‘deescalation’ which is the same lunatic philosophy that led to Oct 7 on the theory that some state of low-level conflict could forever be sustained as long as both sides were being monitored and persuaded to deescalate the conflict as if the thing at issue here were a simmering rivalry between 5th graders and not a zero-sum conflict with Islamic terrorists.

Rather than deescalating a war so that the terrorists can attack again, Israel is trying to win a war.

Some of our officials might want to consider cracking open a history book to learn more about the concept.