August 26, 2006

The Futility of an Olmert Quasi-Putsch

Yoel Marcus:

What happened is that our best and brightest suddenly lost it. They had an attack of reckless, sloppy, half-baked thinking. It would never have happened to some of the people who held their jobs before them. Yitzhak Rabin, for example, was the anxious type. At the very suggestion of some military operation, his face would turn grim and you could guess right away what he was going through his head his breakdown on the eve of the Six Day War, his defeat at the polls in 1977, the experience of the first intifada. Yitzhak Shamir could not be dragged into any kind of military escapade. He would not let his defense minister, Moshe Arens, or his chief of staff, Ehud Barak, bomb Iraq when the Scuds were falling here during the Gulf War.

The defense troika in power today had a Pavlovian urge to respond as soon as the soldiers were kidnapped. They could have said: "We'll hit back when we're good and ready." But what guided them was the fear that Israel would lose its legitimacy in the global arena if it did not act right away. Legitimacy to do what? Lose the war and disappoint George Bush and the Arab countries, who were counting on us to stop the fundamentalist Islamic terror that endangers them, too?

The cabinet acted hastily when it approved the "Give Us 10 Days And We'll Call It Quits" plan. We did call it quits, but we did not get the job done. We did not free the kidnapped soldiers or finish off Hezbollah. The decision was made too quickly. The reserve soldiers were not sufficiently trained. A mind-boggling shortage of ammunition required an emergency airlift from America. Shouldn't someone have thought about this sort of thing ahead of time?

On second thought, despite all the public fury and the clamor to kick out the "Big Three," ousting the government and appointing a commission of inquiry could turn out to be a serious mistake. We have no better players sitting on the bench today. We have no time for a commission that will start investigating everything that has happened since May 2000 and reach its conclusions in another year from now, when there are so many challenges staring us in the face.

Better to let the current administration, which is barely four months old, learn from its mistakes and make some quick all-around improvements. By chopping off heads, we will not rebuild ourselves. [emphasis added]

The bolded section is probably about right. On the right, Avigdor Liberman or Bibi Netanyahu aren't going to magestically ride in and save the day, I'm afraid. And, on the Israeli left, it's slim pickings indeed. The dearth of quality political leadership appears a growing problem in quite a few countries, doesn't it?

Posted by Gregory at August 26, 2006 01:29 AM