Why don’t the leaders of the people act rationally?

Here we were informed that “with regard to the policy of responding to future rocket launches from Gaza towards Israeli territory, the Chief of Staff is striving to change the equation. Kochavi presented to the General Staff generals an approach according to which it is unequivocally forbidden to respond as in the past, and the achievements of the operation must be utilized to begin changing the response. In his view, for every rocket launch, a structure in the Gaza Strip with a terrorist infrastructure must be evacuated and destroyed – even at the cost of dragging the IDF and the region into battle.”
Why on earth do you have to go through five rounds in Gaza and twenty years of rockets to understand what any child can say with the power of their own logic?!
Of course, one can say that the leaders are stupid (that may be true for Regev and Ohana), but that is certainly not true for all the defense ministers and the prime minister.
Maybe the rabbi has a learned explanation for this phenomenon? Maybe they don’t give enough faith in simple conclusions that arise from logic?! And so they prefer short-term silence. This is really a mystery to me.