I don’t get why a cease fire for hostages exchange can’t happen but I am just a simple minded semi professional comedian and not an expert in international diplomacy.
Getting at some of that isn't so much being an expert in international diplomacy as it is taking a willful trip into some very dark, awful places. And those places are the heads and hearts of leaders who lack some basic humanity. Often, we can only know some of these details by looking at the past. For example, Lyndon Johnson's reasons for escalating the Vietnam War...dumb horrorshow bullshit like "if ah could just get Ho Chi Minh in the room and talk turkey with him." For all his personal empathy, depth of experience, etc, he was missing and/or blind to some basic things that led to a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. And, yes, CWM was right, we did carpet bomb southeast Asia and, no, it never does any good to pretend something like that is happening when/where it's not out of a desire to be right (or, frankly, any reason at all). Like a getaway car, nothing good starts with that.
Understanding why leaders don't take some obvious and good steps means trying to understand the inner workings of sick, or at least deeply lacking, people. And the more time I spend trying to think about these things, the more time I end up spending hunched over the toilet.
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