Calamitous incompetence rewarded

Working at my computer, I’ve had C-SPAN on in the background, with Shimon Peres speaking to a Washington, D.C. audience. Somehow I hadn’t taken this in before, but Peres is the deputy prime minister of Israel. Think about what this means. Peres, the current deputy prime minister, was, in his role as Yitzak Rabin’s foreign minister in the early 1990s, the father of “Peace Process I,” the catastrophic Oslo process that unleashed Palestinian suicide bombings and ultimately the terror intifida. Moreover, Peres, in his monotone, robotic, depressing voice, is still talking about the peace process as if it might have worked if only the Arabs had said “yes”—and he can’t understand why they said no. So he’s learned nothing—he’s still fully committed to the hideous mistakes of the past. Ehud Olmert, the current prime minister, was Ariel Sharon’s lieutenant and then the leader of “Peace Process II,” unilateral withdrawal, which has led directly to the present war. Moreover, Olmert has not abandoned the plan to evacuate the West Bank, despite the fact that the withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon served only to empower Israel’s enemies. So the two living and functioning men in Israel who were the most involved in, and are still committed to, the liberal idiocies that landed Israel in its current mess are still leading Israel at this moment. Israeli politics would appear to be devoid of any principle of accountability, or else there is such a lack of leadership talent in that country that there’s no one else half-decent to turn to.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 01, 2006 10:08 PM | Send