Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Olmert: His Own Shlemiel, or Bush’s?

Olmert: His Own Shlemiel, or Bush’s?
While Israel’s Winograd Commission has certainly pulled no punches in
excoriating the Israeli military and political leadership for their
botched war in Lebanon last summer, there appears to be a massive lacuna
in its conclusions. (I’m not even going to get into the question of
cluster bombs and other military actions by Israel in that conflict that
contravene international law.) Israel clearly went to war in haste without
a considered plan, without weighing alternatives, without establishing
clear objectives and without an exit strategy. That much Winograd was
prepared to say bluntly. But what he doesn’t explain is why things played
out in this way.
And here, I think, he’s avoiding the elephant in the room: the very clear
sense, throughout the Lebanon misadventure, that Israel was coordinating
its actions with Washington to an extent that the Bush Administration’s
own decisions had a decisive impact on how Israel waged its campaign. Once
Israel had launche its initial air raids, the U.S. quickly moved to define
the objectives of the war in terms far more expansive than Israel had ever
intended, using its diplomatic veto to block a ceasefire that the Israeli
leadership had, in fact, been counting on when they began. I had
previously written about how in order to truly understand the brutal
botchup of Lebanon, the commission would have to probe the U.S. role in
Israel’s decision making — the war was one in which I believe Israeli
leaders ceded an unprecedented level of control over Israeli decisions to
the United States. 
It was clear, at the time, that the neophyte Olmert was outsourcing his
decision-making to Condi Rice. I wrote at the time of the sense that
Israel was waging a proxy war for the Bush Administration — a sense
confirmed at the time by the hawkish dean of Israeli military
correspondents, Ze’ev Schiff, who wrote at the height of the conflict: 
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the figure leading the
strategy of changing the situation in Lebanon, not Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert or Defense Minister Amir Peretz. She has so far managed to
withstand international pressure in favor of a cease-fire, even though
this will allow Hezbollah to retain its status as a militia armed by Iran
and Syria.
As such, she needs military cards, and unfortunately Israel has not
succeeded to date in providing her with any. Besides bringing Hezbollah
and Lebanon under fire, all of Israel’s military cards at this stage are
in the form of two Lebanese villages near the border that have been
captured by the IDF.
If the military cards Israel is holding do not improve with the
continuation of the fighting, it will result in a diplomatic solution that
will leave the Hezbollah rocket arsenal in southern Lebanon in its place.
The diplomatic solution will necessarily be a reflection of the military
realities on the ground. 
The rhetoric of the Bush Administration about this war being the dawning
of a “new Middle East” confirmed a sense that it had been appropriated for
the deranged purposes of Rice and Bush’s giddy fantasies about
transforming the region through “shock and awe.” The extent of U.S.
influence was also made clear by Israeli media reports at the time of
Olmert rushing out of critical security cabinet meetings to coordinate his
strategy on the phone with Rice — hard to picture Ariel Sharon doing that,
actually. But Schiff also makes clear that, plainly, the Israelis had no
idea what they’d signed up for, which is why, as Winograd concluded, they
waded into battle without a plan. (But Winograd doesn’t appear to want to
ask why — presumably U.S.-Israeli relationship is a third-rail of Israeli
politics that dare not be touched…) They had assumed they were launching
retaliatory strikes to punish Hizballah for seizing two of its soldiers;
then, suddenly, they were exected — by Washington — to militarily
eliminate Hizballah. 
And the neocons in and around the Administration spelled this out during
the conflict, with some of Israel’s most aggressive supporters in
Washington making clear what was expected of it in service to the American
grand design. John Bolton’s comments, recently, about the pointlessness of
Israel’s final ground offensive underscore this sense. 
My friend Daniel Levy wrote a thoughtful analysis of Rice’s role in that
conflict last month: 
“Senior Israeli ministers are on record testifying to an investigating
committee that when they voted in the cabinet to authorize the initial
military strike they did not consider this to be the start of a prolonged
war. Their working assumption was that diplomatic pressure would end the
military conflict after 48 to 96 hours.
That did not happen - America prevented it, thereby making Israel a
prisoner to accomplishing a mission that was never realistic. The delay in
diplomacy did not change the substance of the deal eventually reached, it
did, however, cause more death, destruction and loss of American
prestige.” 
A year ago, I wrote an op ed in Haaretz questioning whether it was in
Israel’s best interests to hitch it’s wagon to a dangerously misguided
Bush Administration’s wild and obviously doomed revolutionary schemes,
because “it’s a safe bet that Assad, Nasrallah, Ali Khamenei and Hamas
will be there long after Bush, Rice and their fantasy are wheeled off the
stage.” In the piece, I wrote this of the Lebanon war:
When Olmert stumbled into Lebanon last summer, he may have been expecting
Washington to play the role of the big brother who would drag him, still
swinging, off Hassan Nasrallah, having demonstrated his “deterrent” power
without getting himself into too much trouble. Instead, he found
Washington impatiently egging him on, demanding that he destroy Nasrallah
to prove a point to the Shiite leader’s own big brother, and holding back
anyone else who tried to break up the fight. As neocon cheerleaders like
Charles Krauthammer made plain, the administration was disappointed at
Olmert’s wimpish performance. 
The Winograd report, as far as I can tell from the reporting I’ve seen,
has avoided asking these questions. And that’s unfortunate, not only
because it fails to establish a complete picture of what shaped Olmert’s
decision making — was he just a shlemiel, or was he Bush’s Shlemiel? — but
because it avoids forcing Israelis to confront the consequences of the
disastrous policies the Bush Administration has purused, often on its
behalf, over the past eight years. 
http://tonykaron.com/2008/01/31/olmert-his-own-shlemiel-or-bushs/
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 Olmert: His Own Shlemiel, or Bush's?
ah, sicchè non è un complimento? Qualcuno mi dovrà delle scuse...