In defense of Ehud Olmert | Jerusalem Post

While my views on this subject have been around for weeks, I thought it appropriate to give the other point of view -- that Olmert didn't do such a bad job in the recent war after all.

I can't speak to the apparent failure in Israeli military planning, intelligence and imagination to deal with a Hizbullah foe that it clearly knew was there, dug in, supported and trained at every level by Iran and Syria,and armed with over 10,000 rockets aimed at Israel. Hopefully that truth comes out and Israel and we learn from it, but it is clear that the failure happened on Ariel Sharon's watch. I suspect that a major cause of this failure will ultimately point to Ariel Sharon's politicization of the IDF's upper ranks with soldiers supporting his unilateral disengagement, coupled with his own politically tramatic experience in Lebanon and longer focus on Iran's nuclear capability (i.e., I have other things to worry about... I can't think about Lebanon).

As for the enclosed article's contention that Olmert perhaps didn't prosecute this war beligerrently enough from the beginning because he feared that the US would pull the plug of political support for it, if this indeed were true it represented both a failure by Israeli policymakers to:

1. read American public opinion going into our Fall elections (i.e., it served Bush's interests to have Israel facing Iran and Syria as part of a proxy war to remind Americans that Judeo-Christianity is in a war against evil -- and would you rather have the Democrats running things in such a war?), and

2. understand that initiating a strong groundbased strike would send a more effective deterrent message to an Arab world that has begun to believe that Israel has lost its political will to go "all out". Israeli casualties from such an action were going to happen no matter what, in order to achieve any semblance of the military objectives that were supposedly sought (but perhaps not really sought -- and have not been achieved). The political support for such action in Israel was there -- Israelis know in their DNA how to deal with their enemy and the importance of maintaining their "mad dog", unmeasured deterrent posture in the Arab world. And finally, if Olmert had striked hard on the ground decisively and subsequently lost American political support on the world stage for too robust a reaction (as the author suggests), Israel would be where it is right now, except perhaps it would have acheved some additional deterrence points and been more effective in destroying its enemy.

Bottom line, Olmert screwed up, and deserves to go.

In defense of Ehud Olmert | Jerusalem Post