Olmert

Everybody has something to say about the commission report that excoriated Ehud Olmert and his government for badly botching the war against Hezbollah last summer. Olmert and his advisors obviously deserve the criticism, as Israel’s offensive was politically disastrous even if you believe it was justified. The most interesting aspect of the report is the contrast between Israel and the United States, a contrast that Haninah Levine depicts quite starkly:

What I want to emphasize right now, though, is how vastly different this report is from anything that’s been seen in the U.S. Less than a year has passed since the events described, the same people who were running the country then are still in power (only the Chief of Staff got the axe) – and yet already a harsh, detailed, scathingly public review of the government’s actions has been produced.

This report is expected to serve not only as a collective report card for Israel’s military leadership, but as a highly personalized one: personnel decisions in the General Staff have been effectively frozen pending the results of the Commission. The Baker boys, by contrast, famously felt that even their statement that “our political leaders must build a bipartisan approach to bring a responsible conclusion to what is now a lengthy and costly war” was inflammatory enough to warrant holding off publication till after Election Day.

In other words, countries that believe they face genuine security threats don’t piddle around with nonsense about how “criticism hurts the morale of the troops”, and “What’s important is the situation now, not how we got into this mess”. As should be obvious, the decisions that lead to a disaster like Iraq reflect very poorly on the capabilities of leaders in power. No one dumb enough to think this war was a good idea should have been trusted with its execution.

This reminds me of another point that I talked about a while ago, and that I was recently debating with John Noonan of Op-For (we’re thinking of cross-posting elements of the debate). Believing that the Surge is a good idea, and the key to victory in Iraq, is in and of itself a denunciation of the manner in which the war has been executed over the last four years. For almost four years the President and his Secretary of Defense steadfastly refused to deploy more troops to Iraq, or to use the troops there in a particularly vigorous fashion. In other words, even on the narrow grounds that wingnuts evaluate such things, the President has demonstrated himself to be a miserable failure. Given that, why would you trust he, his allies, or his appointees with any job more complicated that pouring a scotch-on-the-rocks ever again?

Kingdaddy makes this point a bit more succinctly:

Why do we keep returning to the events of 2002 and 2003?

• Because no one has paid. That’s important because…
• Until someone pays, there’s no reason to think something equally bad won’t happen again.