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Jewish World Review August 4, 2006 / 10 Menachem-Av, 5766 Amateur hour is over By Caroline B. Glick
Israel's national leadership has so far managed to take every political and strategic advantage that Israel has, and turn it into an impediment
The bad news is that Israel's national leadership has so far managed to take every
political and strategic advantage that Israel has, and turn it into an impediment.
Today, assuming Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will let us win, what three weeks ago
could have been a rapid victory will now be costly and slow.
Regionally and internationally, the threats that Israel faces mount by the day.
While all eyes are focused on Lebanon, Syria and Iran have both upped the ante.
Diplomatically, Israel is a guppy swimming with the sharks. And as the dangers
mount, far from learning from their mistakes, Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz,
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen Dan Halutz have
gone from acting like rookies to acting like amateurs.
And so, as the IDF marches on to an uncertain but still forward marching trumpet, it
is becoming increasingly clear that Israel's chief impediment to victory is its
government.
The week began well enough. In his speech before the Mayor's Conference, Olmert made
a go of speaking in Winston Churchill's voice. His message of stubborn commitment to
victory was so well delivered that even his political rivals admitted he had
inspired them. It is true that doubt lurked in the shadows. US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's support for a rapid ceasefire showed that the wall of American
support was beginning to crack. But Olmert seemed impervious to pressure.
Then came that bizarre State Department announcement in the middle of the night
informing the IDF that it would be ceasing aerial bombardment for 48 hours. This,
together with Rice's announcement Monday morning that working with her colleagues at
Turtle Bay she would be forcing Israel to end its operations altogether by Wednesday
or Thursday was the first clear indicator that Israel's leaders had failed to
maintain meaningful US support.
By Tuesday, Olmert had replaced his Churchillian face with a one more reminiscent of
Bill Clinton. To the amazement of the media and indeed of the entire country, Olmert
announced that we had won the war. Addressing the IDF War College Olmert declared,
"If the military campaign were to end today, already today it could be said with
certainty that the face of the Middle East has changed….Now [Hizbullah] can never
threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it - because this nation is
contending with these missiles and beating them."
Huh? Olmert went on to say that neither he, nor Peretz nor the members of the
General Staff had ever promised us that when the war ends we won't still face the
threat of missiles from Lebanon. Even the normally supportive media admitted that
was a bold faced lie.
Yet the contempt which greeted Olmert's fabrications and empty declarations of
victory did not deter him. In fact, it seemed to embolden him. By Wednesday morning
he removed his Clinton mask and went back to being plain old Olmert - the hack
politician who was barely elected to Knesset in 2003.
Speaking to news services Wednesday morning, Olmert built on his fantasies of
victory. By then not only had Israel changed the balance of power and restored its
deterrence, it had actually destroyed all of Hizbullah's infrastructures in southern
Lebanon.
Before Olmert's remarks hit the wires, Hizbullah opened its largest missile attack
at Israel to date. In all 231 missiles, including two long-range missiles, rained
down on Israel that day.
Of course that wasn't all Olmert said. He also told the Associated Press that
Israel's "victory" against Hizbullah would pave the way for the implementation of
his plan to transfer control of Judea and Samaria to Hizbullah's most ardent
supporters - the Hamas and Fatah-led Palestinians.
Olmert's empty declarations of victory and his continued obsession with his plan to
expel up to 100,000 Israeli citizens from their homes in Judea and Samaria and
transfer the areas to the Palestinian Authority are not simply preposterous. They
are dangerous.
On the domestic level, anyone who takes a look at both the IDF casualties and the
IDF troops and officers themselves will see that talk of withdrawing from Judea and
Samaria is a recipe for demoralization. Maj. Ro'i Klein, the deputy battalion
commander from the Golani brigade who was killed in Bint Jbail last week, died
heroically, when after calling out "Shema Yisrael" he jumped on a hand grenade to
save the lives of his soldiers. Klein lived with his wife and two young children in
the community of Eli that Olmert has slated for destruction.
So too, Lt. Amichai Merhavia who was also killed in the battle, lived in Eli. In
photographs making their way through the Internet, Merhavia is seen being beaten by
police as he passively resisted the destruction of the Gilad Farm in Samaria in
2002. Last summer prior to the expulsion of Israeli civilians from Gaza and the
withdrawal of IDF forces, Merhavia sent a private letter to Halutz. In it he
explained why he believed the operation was wrong. Halutz reportedly ordered him
thrown out of the army. His commanders intervened and Merhavia was placed on a three
week leave.
Between 30-50 percent of the IDF combat troops and officers in the regular army and
the reserves are religious. A large percentage of them live in Judea and Samaria. By
claiming that a victory in Lebanon will pave the way for them to be thrown out of
their homes, Olmert signaled clearly that he either doesn't understand the role of a
national leader in wartime, and worse, he doesn't understand why victory is
essential.
Indeed, his declarations of victory themselves indicate that he does not understand
the nature of the war Israel is facing or the challenges it must contend with both
regionally and internationally. By claiming that Israel has already won when it is
absolutely clear it has not, Olmert sends terrible messages to both Israel's ally
the US, and to Israel's enemies.
He tells the US that it doesn't have to take us seriously as a client. Since we're
willing to pretend that we've already won, we tell America that we will accede to
any settlement the State Department carves out with the French and the Russians --
even if it involves a total Israeli capitulation replete with land giveaways to
Hizbullah and the surrender of Israel's right to defend itself to some UN mandated
multinational force made up of French dhimmis and Indonesian jihadists.
Olmert tells our enemies that they do not have to be concerned that Israel will
defeat them because the Prime Minister of Israel is not planning on doing anything
that would involve their actual defeat. This of course emboldens them to widen their
attacks.
And our enemies are in fact emboldened. Over the weekend, for the first time, Syrian
forces detonated a bomb along the border at Kuneitra in the northern Golan Heights.
On Monday, Syrian President Bashar Assad ordered his army to ready itself for war.
For the first time, this week Assad allowed Druze leaders in Damascus to openly call
for a reconquest of the Golan Heights. And of course, Syria is actively assisting
Hizbullah by resupplying its forces and providing logistics bases for them.
Rather than explaining to the world that Syria is in fact a participant in the war
and should be treated as an aggressor, intent on pretending that the conflict is
limited and so can be wished away, Olmert and his government have all but given
Damascus a clean bill of health. Not only did the government announce that it would
not attack Syrian targets, it reportedly asked the anti-Israeli, anti-American
government of Spain to engage the Syrians. And so, on Thursday Spanish Foreign
Minister Miguel Moratinos went to Damascus, ending Syria's diplomatic isolation
initiated after it masterminded the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister
Rafik Hariri in February 2005. While there, Moratinos praised Assad's leadership and
said that Syria "will play a positive role," in any ceasefire talks. Far from
insisting that Syria be shunned for its aggression, Israeli incompetence is paving
the way for Syria to be rewarded for it.
Then there is Iran, the mastermind of this war. As each day passes, Iran's threats
and its actions become more and more extreme. Wednesday, the German newspaper Die
Welt reported that Iran sent Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad, who has been living in
Iran since November 2001, to the Syrian-Lebanese border to mobilize Palestinian
forces in Syria to fight against Israel.
On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made veiled nuclear threats
against Britain, the US and Israel when he said, "Today, the Iranian people is the
owner of nuclear technology. Those who want to talk with our people should know what
people they are talking to. If some believe they can keep talking to the Iranian
people in the language of threats and aggressiveness, they should know that they are
making a bitter mistake. If they have not realized this by now, they soon will, but
then it will be too late."
This statement was followed Thursday by his address to the Organization of the
Islamic Conference in Malaysia where he again called for Israel to be annihilated.
The undeniable fact is that the nature of the war that Israel is now fighting in
Lebanon is not local. It is not about territory. It is about jihad. Hizbullah is not
simply a terrorist organization. It is the Iranian army. According to press reports,
over the past six years, some three thousand Hizbullah fighters underwent military
training in Iran. Iran and Syria are not simply Hizbullah's patrons. They are active
participants in this war against the West in which Israel is a frontline state.
Yet due to Olmert's weak and incompetent leadership and Rice's opportunistic
laziness, both the US and Israel are pretending it is possible to see the war as a
simple, isolated event. As a result, they are advancing purported solutions, like
ceasefires, multinational forces and empty declarations of victory that only
increase the dangers.
To date, in the interest of maintaining national unity, Israel's political
opposition, led by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu has been unwilling to publicly
criticize Olmert for his mishandling of the war. This approach has much to recommend
it. But what the government needs right now is some very tough love from leaders
like Netanyahu, his fellow opposition members Natan Sharansky, Effie Eitam, Yuval
Steinitz and Aryeh Eldad as well as from military leaders like former Chief of
General Staff Moshe Yaalon. These men and others, who understand the nature of the
war and the dangers Israel faces need to force Olmert and his colleagues to listen
to reason and change course immediately. Amateur hour must end. A difficult victory
awaits us.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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