Summing up Olmert

I don’t often approvingly quote John Podhoretz, but this comment by him at The Corner really gets at the criminal fecklessness of the Israeli leadership:

This morning’s postings describe the desperate efforts by Secretary Rice and Israeli politicians to claim the U.N. ceasefire is a victory for the good guys represents nothing more than a beautifying effort—they’re putting lipstick on a pig. There’s one reason only to cut Condi some slack here. I think it’s pretty clear that we could have given Ehud Olmert and his government six months to do the job in South Lebanon and they wouldn’t have done it. They didn’t want to do it. It took them 30 days to get boots on the ground there. They kept hitting the Hezbollah neighborhood in Beirut in what seems like a hapless effort to decapitate the terror group’s leadership, and they would have continued to do that until even Jackie Mason would have declared they had gone too far. The Bush administration didn’t impede Israel. The Israeli government impeded Israel.

This also underscores a key point about the conflict in Lebanon. If, as many charged, there was harm to Lebanese civilians and infrastructure beyond what was needed for legitimate military purposes, it was because Olmert wasn’t willing to take decisive action on the ground, relying on the panacea of air power instead. Sounds like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. As James Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West (one of the books that made me a conservative), liberal national leaders cannot fight war effectively because they dislike the use of force and therefore have never developed any intellectual framework for its effective and moral employment. So, when a situation arises requiring military action, they will typically hesitate to use any force, then, when the situation gets really bad, suddenly reverse themselves and use excessive force.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 16, 2006 11:36 AM | Send