Olmert's Ouster Just a Matter of Time

That's the only fitting title I could think of after reading these three articles. Here's a portion of Caroline Glick's column, which is essentially a stinging itemized indictment of the Olmert government:

Every aspect of the government's handling of the war has been a failure. Take relief efforts as an example. For five weeks the government ignored the humanitarian disaster in the North where over one million Israelis are under missile assault. The government developed no comprehensive plan for organizing relief efforts to feed citizens in bomb shelters or for evacuating them.

And then there is the military failure. The IDF suffers from acute leadership failures, brought to Israel courtesy of Ariel Sharon who hacked away at the General Staff, undermined its sense of mission and treated our generals like office boys just as he decimated the Likud by undermining its political vision and promoting its weakest members.

It was the government's responsibility to critique and question the IDF's operational model of aerial warfare and to cut its losses when after two or three days it was clear that the model was wrong. At that point the government should have called up the reserves and launched a combined ground and air offensive.

But the government didn't feel like it. It wanted to win the war on the cheap. And when the air campaign did not succeed, it abandoned its war goals, declared victory and sued for a cease-fire.

All the while, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni did her best to demoralize the IDF and the public by publicly proclaiming that there is no military solution to what is clearly a military conflict.

Olmert is simply the wrong man for this situation: a clueless moderate. In times of war, which is what they were faced with following Hezbollah's attack, hardliners must step to the fore. They couldn't because this is a government purged of hardliners. It sounds like Sharon purged the generals who'd fight like the military of the sixties and seventies.

Foreign Minister Livni sounds like she was another nobody getting on-the-job training. Her ouster is also mandated. She clearly doesn't have a clue.

The bottom line for me is that I'm hard pressed to find any justification for the Olmert government to exist past this week. How is it that he didn't act with ferocity when President Bush green-lighted him and Arab 'neighbors' didn't jump to Hezbollah's defense? It's one of the great mysteries of this situation. Rather than investigate the why's, it's better to just purge that clueless government and start with a competent government.

Here's a sample of Yossi Klein Halevi's column:

With an unprecedented green light from Washington to do whatever necessary to uproot Iranian front line against Israel, and with a level of national unity and willingness sacrifice unseen here since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, our leaders squandered weeks restraining the army and fighting a pretend war.

...As one outraged TV anchor put it, Israeli towns were exposed to the worst attacks since the nation's founding, a million residents of the Galilee fled or sat in shelters for a month, more than 150 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed along with nearly a thousand Lebanese, all in order to ensure the return of U.N. peacekeepers to southern Lebanon.

This is just more proof that Olmert is justifiably called the Jewish Jimmy Carter. I've seen no proof that he isn't a pacifist. Sayonara.

Technorati: Olmert, IDF, Hezbollah, Jimmy Carter, Likud, Kadima

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Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 11:17 AM

July 2006 Posts

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