Tag Archives: Egypt

Obama’s Arabian dreams

US President Barack Obama claims to be a big fan of telling the truth. In media interviews ahead of his trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and during his big speech in Cairo on Thursday, he claimed that the centerpiece of his Middle East policy is his willingness to tell people hard truths.

Indeed, Obama made three references to the need to tell the truth in his so-called address to the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, for a speech billed as an exercise in truth telling, Obama’s address fell short. Far from reflecting hard truths, Obama’s speech reflected political convenience.

Obama’s so-called hard truths for the Islamic world included statements about the need to fight so-called extremists; give equal rights to women; provide freedom of religion; and foster democracy. Unfortunately, all of his statements on these issues were nothing more than abstract, theoretical declarations devoid of policy prescriptions.

He spoke of the need to fight Islamic terrorists without mentioning that their intellectual, political and monetary foundations and support come from the very mosques, politicians and regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt that Obama extols as moderate and responsible.

He spoke of the need to grant equality to women without making mention of common Islamic practices like so-called honor killings, and female genital mutilation. He ignored the fact that throughout the lands of Islam women are denied basic legal and human rights. And then he qualified his statement by mendaciously claiming that women in the US similarly suffer from an equality deficit. In so discussing this issue, Obama sent the message that he couldn’t care less about the plight of women in the Islamic world.

So, too, Obama spoke about the need for religious freedom but ignored Saudi Arabian religious apartheid. He talked about the blessings of democracy but ignored the problems of tyranny.

In short, Obama’s "straight talk" to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to "justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings," was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.

In a like manner, Obama’s tough "truths" about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.

On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America’s ties to Israel are "unbreakable."

Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign – and therefore unjustifiable – intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.

The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.

This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the "reconstitution" – not the creation – of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.

But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history."

He then explicitly tied Israel’s establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.

Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel’s rebirth, was Obama’s characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners’ treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, "resistance."

BUT AS disappointing and frankly obscene as Obama’s rhetoric was, the policies he outlined were much worse. While prattling about how Islam and America are two sides of the same coin, Obama managed to spell out two clear policies. First, he announced that he will compel Israel to completely end all building for Jews in Judea, Samaria, and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. Second, he said that he will strive to convince Iran to substitute its nuclear weapons program with a nuclear energy program.

Obama argued that the first policy will facilitate peace and the second policy will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that neither of his policies can possibly achieve his stated aims. Indeed, their inability to accomplish the ends he claims he has adopted them to advance is so obvious, that it is worth considering what his actual rationale for adopting them may be.

The administration’s policy toward Jewish building in Israel’s heartland and capital city expose a massive level of hostility toward Israel. Not only does it fly in the face of explicit US commitments to Israel undertaken by the Bush administration, it contradicts a longstanding agreement between successive Israeli and American governments not to embarrass each other.

Moreover, the fact that the administration cannot stop attacking Israel about Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, but has nothing to say about Hizbullah’s projected democratic takeover of Lebanon next week, Hamas’s genocidal political platform, Fatah’s involvement in terrorism, or North Korean ties to Iran and Syria, has egregious consequences for the prospects for peace in the region.

As Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas made clear in his interview last week with The Washington Post, in light of the administration’s hostility toward Israel, the Palestinian Authority no longer feels it is necessary to make any concessions whatsoever to Israel. It needn’t accept Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. It needn’t minimize in any way its demand that Israel commit demographic suicide by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as full citizens. And it needn’t curtail its territorial demand that Israel contract to within indefensible borders.

In short, by attacking Israel and claiming that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace, the administration is encouraging the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole to continue to reject Israel and to refuse to make peace with the Jewish state.

The Netanyahu government reportedly fears that Obama and his advisers have made such an issue of settlements because they seek to overthrow Israel’s government and replace it with the more pliable Kadima party. Government sources note that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel played a central role in destabilizing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first government in 1999, when he served as an adviser to then president Bill Clinton. They also note that Emmanuel is currently working with leftist Israelis and American Jews associated with Kadima and the Democratic Party to discredit the government.

While there is little reason to doubt that the Obama administration would prefer a leftist government in Jerusalem, it is unlikely that the White House is attacking Israel primarily to advance this aim. This is first of all the case because today there is little danger that Netanyahu’s coalition partners will abandon him.

Moreover, the Americans have no reason to believe that prospects for a peace deal would improve with a leftist government at the helm in Jerusalem. After all, despite its best efforts, the Kadima government was unable to make peace with the Palestinians, as was the Labor government before it. What the Palestinians have shown consistently since the failed 2000 Camp David summit is that there is no deal that Israel can offer them that they are willing to accept.

So if the aim of the administration in attacking Israel is neither to foster peace nor to bring down the Netanyahu government, what can explain its behavior?

The only reasonable explanation is that the administration is baiting Israel because it wishes to abandon the Jewish state as an ally in favor of warmer ties with the Arabs. It has chosen to attack Israel on the issue of Jewish construction because it believes that by concentrating on this issue, it will minimize the political price it will be forced to pay at home for jettisoning America’s alliance with Israel. By claiming that he is only pressuring Israel to enable a peaceful "two-state solution," Obama assumes that he will be able to maintain his support base among American Jews who will overlook the underlying hostility his "pro-peace" stance papers over.

OBAMA’S POLICY toward Iran is a logical complement of his policy toward Israel. Just as there is no chance that he will bring Middle East peace closer by attacking Israel, so he will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons by offering the mullahs nuclear energy. The deal Obama is now proposing has been on the table since 2003, when Iran’s nuclear program was first exposed. Over the past six years, the Iranians have repeatedly rejected it. Indeed, just last week they again announced that they reject it.

Here, too, to understand the president’s actual goal it is necessary to search for the answers closer to home. Since Obama’s policy has no chance of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it is apparent that he has come to terms with the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran. In light of this, the most rational explanation for his policy of engagement is that he wishes to avoid being blamed when Iran emerges as a nuclear power in the coming months.

In reckoning with the Obama administration, it is imperative that the Netanyahu government and the public alike understand the true goals of its current policies. Happily, consistent polling data show that the overwhelming majority of Israelis realize that the White House is deeply hostile toward Israel. The data also show that the public approves of Netanyahu’s handling of our relations with Washington.

Moving forward, the government must sustain this public awareness and support. By his words as well as by his deeds, not only has Obama shown that he is not a friend of Israel. He has shown that there is nothing that Israel can do to make him change his mind.

Iran’s global reach

US President Barack Obama underestimates the threat Iran poses to global security. Were this not the case, he would not have sent CIA Director Leon Panetta to Israel ahead of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House.

Panetta was reportedly dispatched here to read the government the riot act. Israel, he reportedly told his interlocutors, must not attack Iran without first receiving permission from Washington. Moreover, Israel should keep its mouth shut about attacking Iran. As far as Washington is concerned, Iran’s latest threats to destroy Israel were nothing more than payback for statements by Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials regarding Israel’s refusal to countenance a nuclear armed Iran.

Over the past several weeks, we have learned that the administration has made its peace with Iran’s nuclear aspirations. Senior administration officials acknowledge as much in off-record briefings. It is true, they say, that Iran may exploit its future talks with the US to run down the clock before they test a nuclear weapon. But, they add, if that happens, the US will simply have to live with a nuclear-armed mullocracy.

The administration’s nonchalance about the threat of a nuclear armed Iran explains why the White House is so up in arms about the prospect of Israel acting independently to prevent Iran from building a nuclear arsenal. As far as the administration is concerned, the only reason Iran would threaten US interests is if Israel provokes it. As far as the administration is concerned, if Israel could just leave Iran’s nuclear installations alone, Iran would behave itself. But if Israel preemptively takes out Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and Iran in turn attacks Israeli and US targets in the region, the Obama administration will hold Israel – not Iran – responsible for whatever losses the US incurs. That was apparently the message Panetta wanted to transmit to Jerusalem during his recent visit.

WHILE LARGELY supported by the US media, the administration’s view of the Iranian threat is not without its domestic critics. Opponents of the administration’s policy of engagement and appeasement have pointed out that a nuclear armed Iran will surely destabilize the Middle East and as a consequence, will harm US national security interests. And this is true enough.

Whether by spurring a regional nuclear arms race; destabilizing with the intent of overthrowing Western-aligned regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Morocco; enabling its terror proxies in Hizbullah and Hamas to operate under its nuclear umbrella; or attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, it is clear that the emergence of Iran as a nuclear power will cause tragedy, grief, chronic war and instability throughout the region. And – as the administration’s critics make clear – such a state of affairs would be antithetical to US national interests.

While correct, these warnings miss the mark. Yes, it is true that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Middle East. But the Obama White House doesn’t seem to care about that. What interests the White House apparently, is minimizing Teheran’s animosity towards Washington. If it can convince the mullocracy that Washington is not a threat, then – the thinking goes – perhaps, the buck will stop at the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.

This bit of wishful thinking is wrong both theoretically and practically. It fails to take into account Iran’s stated intentions and the consequences of its likely behavior for the Middle East, and it ignores the fact that Iran’s intentions and actions for the past two decades have not been limited to the Middle East.

For upwards of 20 years, and at a break-neck pace since 1999, Iran has built up a long strategic arm in America’s backyard from which it is fully capable of attacking the US directly with the able and enthusiastic assistance of a network of proxies and allies.

IRAN POSES a direct threat to US national security through its alliances and military, intelligence and terrorist presence in South and Central America. Today Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s Hizbullah terror cells, and other Iranian agencies operate in open collaboration with anti-US governments throughout the Western Hemisphere. The South American lynchpin of this new and growing Iranian-centered alliance system is Hugo Chavez’s regime in Venezuela.

Through Chavez’s good offices, Iran has developed a strategic presence in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia and warm ties with Cuba. It is exerting growing influence in El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and among FARC terrorists in Colombia. And it has highly developed and already proven human smuggling routes to the US in Mexico. It is through this alliance structure with anti-American regimes in Latin America and with sub-national Islamic and narco-terrorist networks in failing states that Iran already constitutes a grave threat to US national security. And it is through this rapidly expanding alliance system that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an acute danger to US national security.

So far, the Obama administration has dealt with the threat posed by Iran’s strategic alliance with Venezuela and Chavez’s string of allied regimes in the same fashion as it has contended with Iran itself: It has blamed the situation on the Bush administration. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it last week, the Bush administration’s policy of "isolating leaders who have led the opposition to US policies in Central and Latin America has failed and marginalized Washington’s interests."

CLINTON’S STATEMENT makes clear the basic and disturbing consistency of the administration’s failure to understand that there are regimes that are inherently hostile to the US and will remain irreconcilably hostile to the US regardless of what it does or who sits in the White House. Just as the administration cannot get its arms around the fact that the Iranian regime can only justify its existence by maintaining its hostility towards America, so it cannot countenance the fact that Chavez is only able to justify his existence through his hatred for Uncle Sam. It has no way of explaining for instance the fact that Iran and Venezuela responded to Obama’s attempts last month to extend an open hand to both countries by signing a memorandum upgrading their military alliance.

Were the administration able to understand the basic fact that some countries simply cannot abide by America, it would realize that the Iranian-Venezuelan military alliance itself is cause for a systematic reassessment of the rationale behind the US’s Western Hemispheric strategy. As Italy’s La Stampa reported last December, every week a Venezuelan airliner takes off from Teheran. It travels on to Syria’s Damascus airport before continuing on to Caracas. These flights have no commercial value, and the passenger manifest is kept secret. But as La Stampa reported and as both US officials and Venezuelan dissidents have testified, these flights are used to transfer prohibited military equipment, including missile parts from Teheran to Syria. Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese-Hizbullah and Palestinian terror personnel then board the plane to its final destination in Caracas. Iranian Revolutionary Guards are sent to Venezuela to among other things train Venezuela’s security services in methods for repressing internal dissent.

Venezuela’s military alliance with Iran places Iranian military personnel and Hizbullah operatives at every level of Venezuela’s military, intelligence and law enforcement establishment. For example, as the Washington-based Center for Security Policy’s Western Hemispheric Security Project documented in a recent report, Hizbullah agents control Venezuela’s passport agency.

In 2003, Chavez appointed Tarek el-Aissami, a known Hizbullah member to head the country’s passport agency. Last year Aissami was promoted to serve as Minister of Interior and Justice. Then too, last June, the US Department of Treasury designated Ghazi Nasr al Din, a Venezuelan diplomat who served as the deputy ambassador in Damascus and Beirut as a Hizbullah agent.

Hizbullah has a large and active presence in Venezuela. It operates openly throughout the country through both Lebanese cells and through native Venezuelan operatives who have converted to Islam. In 2006, a Hizbullah cell comprised of local converts staged an attempted bombing against the US embassy in Caracas.

Hizbullah has developed a formidable economic presence in Latin America. Although it has run a web of businesses in the region for decades, since 2005 the economic importance of these businesses has been eclipsed by the terror group’s involvement in worldwide cocaine distribution facilitated through its close ties with Chavez and FARC. According to the US military’s Southern Command, Hizbullah in Latin America earns between $300-500 million per year. This dwarfs the $200 million a year it receives from Iran.

Through Mexico, Hizbullah members and other terror operatives are able to enter the US relatively easily. In 2002 for instance the US arrested a Hizbullah operative in Mexico who admitted that he had facilitated the infiltration of several hundred Hizbullah operatives into the US.

THEN THERE is Nicaragua under the leadership of Chavez’s buddy Sandinista chief Daniel Ortega. Since he assumed Nicaragua’s presidency in 2007, Ortega has facilitated a massive expansion of Iran’s presence in Central America. With more than a hundred accredited diplomats, Iran’s embassy in Managua – a massive compound surrounded by four-meter-high concrete walls lined with razor wire – is one of the largest diplomatic compounds in the world.

Even more disturbing than Iran’s enormous diplomatic presence in Nicaragua are its massive maritime activities and plans. In 2007 Iran and Venezuela announced that they were investing $350 million to build a deep water port at Nicaragua’s Monkey Point along the Caribbean Sea. Iran also announced its plans to upgrade Nicaragua’s Pacific Port of Corinto. Finally, Teheran announced it would build a dry canal connecting the two ports. Such a building scheme would enable Iran to evade the Panama Canal; to build its own military infrastructure within the ports themselves; and to freely camouflage missile ships as civilian maritime traffic and use them to launch short and medium-range missiles against the US. Moreover, with its massive army of Hizbullah operatives on standby, Iran could launch attacks through its proxies – as it did in its 1992 and 1994 attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires – and so deny it had anything to do with the attacks.

None of this should suggest that anyone expects the US to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. The administration’s policies clearly rule out any such contingency. As for Israel, regardless of what the US does, it should be clear that Jerusalem will not stand by idly and allow existential threats to emerge and grow.

What people – and particularly Americans – could have expected is that the administration would take seriously the threat that Iran poses to the US in the Western Hemisphere. Depressingly however, the administration’s apparent decision to abdicate America’s position and responsibilities as the sole global superpower has led it to also abdicate its position and responsibilities as the most powerful nation in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, what the administration’s refusal to acknowledge the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran – rich with proxies and allies at America’s doorstep – poses to America demonstrates is that in its haste to blame its predecessor for the fact that the US has real enemies, the administration is abdicating its responsibility to defend America itself.

Washington has abandoned its obligations

Last Sunday, the head of Israel’s military intelligence reported that Iran has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and can rapidly move from low-grade uranium enrichment to weapons-grade uranium enrichment. He also said that the next 18 months will be "critical" for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

There is a national consensus in Israel that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the most important and urgent national-security challenge facing the country. Even if Iran refrains from using the weapons directly against Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran will accelerate its efforts to destabilize and destroy the Jewish state by using its proxies in the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to wage constant, unrelenting terror, guerrilla and conventional warfare.

A nuclear arsenal will likewise help Iran to expand its sphere of influence by empowering it to escalate its efforts to overthrow the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes, and accelerate Hamas’ takeover of the Palestinian Authority, scuttling peace negotiations and peace treaties with Israel. Other Arab states – including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, and Kuwait – will also see their regimes threatened or overthrown by radical forces operating under Iran’s nuclear umbrella.

And this is the best-case scenario.

It is no wonder, then, that Israelis of all political stripes are deeply disturbed by the Obama administration’s Middle East policies. Since taking office, President Obama has made it clear that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not a major concern for him. Rather, he strives to open diplomatic relations with Iran in the inexplicable hope that Iran can be appeased out of a nuclear program that has already brought it to the cusp of regional hegemony.

Over the last several weeks, as part of the buildup to tomorrow’s meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the administration has ratcheted up its rhetoric against Israel. Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, national security adviser James Jones, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are among those who have stated that Israel cannot expect the United States to support its aim of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons unless Israel first makes concessions to the Palestinians. That is, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Israel will be to blame.

Israelis are mystified by this position. With Iran’s proxy Hamas in charge of Gaza, and ascendant in the West Bank, it is clear that any Palestinian state that is established in the near future will be an Iranian-aligned terror state at war with Israel. That is, while administration officials claim "the only solution is a two-state solution," Israelis recognize that the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state will only cause more war, terror, and regional instability.

Moreover, statements by Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing the administration’s opposition to an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations, together with Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller’s recent call for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, have led many Israelis to perceive a strategic and moral blindness informing the administration’s views about Israel and Iran. Apparently, for the administration, there is no difference between Israel, a stalwart U.S. ally and fellow democracy, and Iran – a terror-supporting, human-rights-violating, self-declared enemy of the United States that has been attacking U.S. citizens, interests, and allies since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and has repeatedly called for Israel to be eradicated.

A poll taken earlier this month by Bar Ilan University showed that only 38 percent of Israelis view Obama as friendly toward Israel. Moreover, 66 percent of Israelis support a military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, and only 15 percent say they believe Israel should cancel an attack on Iran if the United States opposes the operation.

These data are important for understanding how Israelis are responding to the Obama administration’s apparent hostility toward Israel and its perceived preference for a nuclear-armed Iran over any concerted action by the United States or Israel to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. What the administration is signaling Israelis – and their government – is that Washington is no longer Israel’s trusted ally. Indeed, it is becoming clear to the Israeli public that, for the administration, it doesn’t matter what Israel does or what its enemies do. As far as Obama and his advisers are concerned, Israel’s refusal to make further concessions to the Palestinians will be the cause for whatever transpires.

In this state of affairs, on the eve of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, more and more Israelis have come to the conclusion that there is little point in taking Washington’s views into consideration. If Washington is going to blame Israel anyway, we are better off being blamed for preemptively removing the threat of a new Holocaust than for allowing that threat to become a fact of life.

Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Opportunity is knocking on Israel’s door

Like nature, Israel’s strategic relations abhor a vacuum. In the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to drastically curtail the US’s strategic alliance with Israel in the interest of American rapprochement with Iran and Syria, the Netanyahu government has been moving swiftly to fill the void.

On Monday, with Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival and with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm e-Sheikh, two potential strategic alliances came into view.

Building effective alliances with the Vatican and Egypt is a delicate process. Each side wants more from the other than the other can reasonably provide. But each side also has much to gain even if it doesn’t achieve everything it wants. The art of alliance building is making the new ally both happy with what it gets and comfortable with not getting everything it wants. This is the task that presents itself today, as Netanyahu and his colleagues engage with both the pope and with Mubarak.

The strategic goal that Israel wishes to advance through an alliance with the Vatican is the strengthening of its international position as the sole sovereign in Jerusalem. The strategic goal it wishes to advance with Egypt is the prevention of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

UNDER POPE BENEDICT XVI, the possibility of winning the support of the Catholic Church for Israel’s position that Jerusalem will never again be partitioned and will remain under perpetual Israeli sovereignty is greater than it was under his predecessors. Unlike his predecessors, Benedict has been outspoken in his concern for the plight of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. During his visit to Amman he made a point of speaking out for the protection of Iraqi Christians who are under attack from all quarters. Since he replaced Pope John Paul II, Benedict has made repeated calls for religious tolerance and freedom in Islamic countries – most notably in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword.

After his words sparked murderous violence throughout the Islamic world, Benedict expressed his regret for the hurt his statement caused. But he never retracted it. Moreover, during his visit to the King Hussein Mosque in Amman on Saturday, Benedict indirectly reasserted his 2006 message. When he said, "It is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society," Benedict was reinforcing – if cryptically – his basic criticism of Islam.

The pope’s obvious recognition of the danger jihadist Islam constitutes for Christians puts the Vatican, under his leadership, in a position where it could be more interested than it was in the past in working with Israel to secure the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem by supporting Israeli control of the city.

The pope made this possibility even more apparent in his homily at Mount Nevo. Standing on the mountain where Moses gazed at the Land of Israel, Benedict spoke of "the inseparable bond between the Church and the Jewish people." As he put it, "From the beginning, the Church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two Testaments. May our encounter today inspire in us a renewed love for the canon of sacred Scripture and a desire to overcome all obstacles to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews in mutual respect and cooperation in the service of that peace to which the word of God calls us!"

In saying this, the pope made clear that he views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage. The Islamic Wakf, which would control the city’s holy sites in the event of its partition, has already gone to great lengths to systematically destroy the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Jewish and Christian heritage of the holy basin through archeological theft, illegal building and digging.

ISRAEL’S ABILITY to embrace the Vatican as an ally and so advance an alliance with the Church regarding Jerusalem is constrained from its perspective by the legacy of the Church’s behavior during the Holocaust. Politically, this constraint is manifested in the Vatican’s stated desire to canonize Pope Pius XII.

Quite simply, no government in Jerusalem has the moral right to ignore weighty allegations that Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. It is because of this moral imperative to remain vigilant in seeking justice for our murdered brethren that successive governments have strained relations with the Vatican by objecting to Pius XII’s canonization.

What the government can do is encourage Holocaust historians and Yad Vashem to engage their Catholic counterparts in a joint study – through conferences and research – of the allegations against Pius XII. Such discussions have taken place between Vatican scholars and Yad Vashem over the years, most recently in March. Israel should offer to institutionalize them.

Specifically worthy of a joint study are the revelations made in January 2007 by Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian KGB, that the allegations against Pius XII were the brainchild of the KGB. In an article published in National Review, Pacepa, who when he defected to the US in 1978 became the highest ranking Soviet-bloc defector, claimed that in the late 1950s the KGB began perceiving the Catholic Church as the primary threat to its control over Eastern Bloc countries. Consequently, in 1960 the KGB decided to wage a campaign to destroy its moral authority. Since Pius had died two years earlier, the decision was made to castigate him as a Nazi collaborator. Already dead, he was in no position to defend himself.

Pacepa alleged that the 1964 play The Deputy, which opened the floodgates of criticism against Pius, was written by the KGB and that its presumed author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a communist fellow traveler. He claimed that the basis for the play was documents that Romanian KGB agents disguised as Catholic priests had purloined from the Vatican archives. Those documents, he alleged, were then doctored at KGB headquarters in Moscow.

Former CIA director James Woolsey has vouched for Pacepa’s personal credibility. Pacepa’s memoir Red Horizons formed the basis for the indictment and conviction of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989.

At the same time, it is impossible to fully accept Pacepa’s assertions in light of the Vatican’s refusal to open its wartime archives.

If Israeli scholars are willing to engage Catholic counterparts in an open exchange of information on Pius XII’s wartime record that allows for new verifiable information to be fairly assessed, whatever the eventual results of the research, Israel would be able to clear some of the acrid air that makes it difficult to gain Vatican cooperation on pressing concerns like strengthening its diplomatic standing on the issue of Jerusalem. And again, this is in the Church’s own strategic interest since it wishes to preserve and ensure free access to Christian and Jewish holy sites there.

THEN THERE IS EGYPT. In his videotaped address to the AIPAC conference last week Netanyahu made the case for a strategic alliance with Egypt when he said, "For the first time in my lifetime… Arabs and Jews see a common danger… There is a great challenge afoot. But that challenge also presents great opportunities. The common danger is echoed by Arab leaders throughout the Middle East; it is echoed by Israel repeatedly… And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it is this: Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons."

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2006, Egypt has demonstrated repeatedly that it supports Israel in its fight against Iran and its proxies. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported Israel in the war against Iran’s Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon in 2006. They supported it in its war against Iran’s Hamas proxy in Gaza in Operation Cast Lead this past December and January.

Egypt helped Israel by keeping its border with Gaza closed and by allowing the IAF to overfly Egyptian airspace en route to attacking Iranian weapons convoys in Sudan destined for Gaza. Moreover, with Egypt’s rejection last week of the Obama administration’s attempt to link action against Iran’s nuclear weapons installations to Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, Mubarak and his associates in Cairo have made clear that they will support Israeli military action against Iran’s nuclear installations.

On the other hand, as the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world, Egypt is a main sponsor of the Palestinian war against Israel and a leader in the campaign to delegitimize Israel internationally. The Mubarak regime may risk its own domestic stability it if is perceived as supporting Israel since the overwhelming majority of Egyptians are hateful toward Israel and Jews. Furthermore, today Egypt has Jordan to consider.

The Obama administration has clearly enlisted King Abdullah II to act as its proxy in the Arab world for coercing Egypt and the Gulf states to deny support for Israel on Iran for as long as it maintains its refusal to give more of its land to the Palestinians. Given Jordan’s new role, Egypt and the Gulf states have been put in an even more awkward situation vis-à-vis Israel and Iran.

To contend with this situation, the Netanyahu government would do well to hew very closely to the line that Netanyahu set out in his address to AIPAC. There he made clear that there will be no chance of peace with the Palestinians as long as Iran and its proxies remain ascendant.

Netanyahu would also do well to recall that the reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia ended up accepting Hizbullah control over Lebanon and Hamas control over Gaza is because under the Olmert government, Israel failed to defeat them. Had Israel routed Hizbullah in 2006 and Hamas this past December and January, Egypt may have adopted a different position relating to the Palestinians.

So too, like Israel, today Egypt views preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and weakening its Hizbullah and Hamas proxies as a paramount national interest. If, with Egyptian assistance Israel is able to successfully prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the regional dynamic relating to the Palestinians – who support Iran – as well as the political standing of the Obama administration – which is enabling Iran to acquire nuclear weapons – may change. So Israel’s best practice regarding Egypt is to buy time on the Palestinian issue while successfully preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Building alliances is difficult business. And recognizing their limitations as well as their potential requires courage and patience. But today the opportunity to build new relationships is clear. Israel’s great challenge going forward then is to seize the moment.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama’s green light to attack Iran

Arctic winds are blowing into Jerusalem from Washington these days. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s May 18 visit to Washington fast approaches, the Obama administration is ratcheting up its anti-Israel rhetoric and working feverishly to force Israel into a corner.

Using the annual AIPAC conference as a backdrop, this week the Obama administration launched its harshest onslaught against Israel to date. It began with media reports that National Security Adviser James Jones told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

According to Haaretz, Jones was quoted in a classified foreign ministry cable as having told his European interlocutor, "The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush."

He then explained that the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states must determine together what "a satisfactory endgame solution," will be.

As far as Jones is concerned, Israel should be left out of those discussions and simply presented with a fait accompli that it will be compelled to accept.

Events this week showed that Jones’s statement was an accurate depiction of the administration’s policy. First, quartet mediator Tony Blair announced that within six weeks the US, EU, UN and Russia will unveil a new framework for establishing a Palestinian state. Speaking with Palestinian reporters on Wednesday, Blair said that this new framework will be a serious initiative because it "is being worked on at the highest level in the American administration."

Moreover, this week we learned that the administration is trying to get the Arabs themselves to write the Quartet’s new plan. The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi pan-Arab newspaper reported Tuesday that acting on behalf of Obama, Jordanian King Abdullah urged the Arab League to update the so-called Arab peace plan from 2002. That plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights and accept millions of foreign Arabs as citizens as part of the so-called "right of return" in exchange for "natural" relations with the Arab world, has been rejected by successive Israeli governments as a diplomatic subterfuge whose goal is Israel’s destruction.

By accepting millions of so-called "Palestinian refugees," Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state. By shrinking into the 1949 armistice lines, Israel would be unable to defend itself against foreign invasion. And since "natural relations" is a meaningless term both in international legal discourse and in diplomatic discourse, Israel would have committed national suicide for nothing.

To make the plan less objectionable to Israel, Abdullah reportedly called on his Arab brethren to strike references to the so-called "Arab refugees" from the plan and to agree to "normal" rather than "natural" relations with the Jewish state. According to the report, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was expected to present Obama with the changes to the plan during their meeting in Washington later this month. The revised plan was supposed to form the basis for the new Quartet plan that Blair referred to.

But the Arabs would have none of it. On Wednesday, both Arab League General Secretary Amr Moussa and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that they oppose the initiative. On Thursday, Syria rejected making any changes in the document.

The administration couldn’t care less. The Palestinians and Arabs are no more than bit players in its Middle East policy. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace.

To make certain that Israel understands this central point, Vice President Joseph Biden used his appearance at the AIPAC conference to drive it home. As Biden made clear, the US doesn’t respect or support Israel’s right as a sovereign state to determine its own policies for securing its national interests. In Biden’s words, "Israel has to work toward a two-state solution. You’re not going to like my saying this, but not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement."

FOR ISRAEL, the main event of the week was supposed to be President Shimon Peres’s meeting with Obama on Tuesday. Peres was tasked with calming the waters ahead of Netanyahu’s visit. It was hoped that he could introduce a more collegial tone to US-Israel relations.

What Israel didn’t count on was the humiliating reception Peres received from Obama. By barring all media from covering the event, Obama transformed what was supposed to be a friendly visit with a respected and friendly head of state into a back-door encounter with an unwanted guest, who was shooed in and shooed out of the White House without a sound.

The Obama White House’s bald attempt to force Israel to take full blame for the Arab world’s hostility toward it is not the only way that it is casting Israel as the scapegoat for the region’s ills. In their bid to open direct diplomatic ties with Iran, Obama and his advisers are also blaming Israel for Iran’s nuclear program. They are doing this both indirectly and directly.

As Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel made clear in his closed-door briefing to senior AIPAC officials this week, the administration is holding Israel indirectly responsible for Iran’s nuclear program. It does this by claiming that Israel’s refusal to cede its land to the Palestinians is making it impossible for the Arab world to support preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Somewhat inconveniently for the administration, the Arabs themselves are rejecting this premise. This week US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Persian Gulf and Egypt to soothe Arab fears that the administration’s desperate attempts to appease the mullahs will harm their security interests. He also sought to gain their support for the administration’s plan to unveil a new peace plan aimed at isolating and pressuring Israel.

After meeting with Gates, Amr Moussa – who has distinguished himself as one of Israel’s most trenchant critics – said categorically, "The question of Iran should be separate from the Arab-Israel conflict."

Just as the administration is unmoved by objective facts that expose as folly its single-minded devotion to the notion that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East, so the Arab rejection of its view that Israel is to blame for Iran’s nuclear program has simply driven it to escalate its attacks on Israel. This week it opened a new campaign of blaming Israel directly – through its purported nuclear arsenal – for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Speaking at a UN forum, US Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said, "Universal adherence to the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea… remains a fundamental objective of the United States."

As Eli Lake from The Washington Times demonstrated convincingly, by speaking as she did, Gottemoeller effectively abrogated a 40-year-old US-Israeli understanding that the US would remain silent about Israel’s nuclear program because it understood that it was defensive, not offensive in nature. In so doing, Gottemoeller legitimized Iran’s claim that it cannot be expected to suspend its quest to acquire nuclear weapons as long as Israel possesses them. She also erased any distinction between nuclear weapons in the hands of US allies and democratic states and nuclear weapons in the hands of US enemies and terror states.

The Israeli media are largely framing the story of the US’s growing and already unprecedented antagonism toward Israel as a diplomatic challenge for Netanyahu. To meet this challenge, it is argued that Netanyahu must come to Washington in 10 days’ time with an attractive peace plan that will win over the White House. But this is a false interpretation of what is happening.

Even Ethan Bronner of the The New York Times pointed out this week that Obama’s Middle East policy is not based on facts. If it were, the so-called "two state solution," which has failed repeatedly since 1993, would not be its centerpiece. Obama’s Middle East policy is based on ideology, not reality. Consequently, it is immune to rational argument.

The fact that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, all chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab world will disappear, is of no interest to Obama and his advisers. They do not care that the day after Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashaal told The New York Times that Hamas was suspending its attacks against Israel from Gaza, the Iranian-controlled terror regime took credit for several volleys of rockets shot against Israeli civilian targets from Gaza. The administration stills intends to give Gaza $900 million in US taxpayer funds, and it still demands that Israel give its land to a joint Fatah-Hamas government.

REGARDLESS OF the weight of Netanyahu’s arguments, and irrespective of the reasonableness of whatever diplomatic initiative he presents to Obama, he can expect no sympathy or support from the White House.

As a consequence, the operational significance of the administration’s anti-Israel positions is that Israel will not be well served by adopting a more accommodating posture toward the Palestinians and Iran. Indeed, perversely, what the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel should be making clear to the Netanyahu government is that Israel should no longer take Washington’s views into account as it makes its decisions about how to advance Israel’s national security interests. This is particularly true with regard to Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Rationally speaking, the only way the Obama administration could reasonably expect to deter Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear installations would be if it could make the cost for Israel of attacking higher than the cost for Israel of not attacking. But what the behavior of the Obama administration is demonstrating is that there is no significant difference in the costs of the two options.

By blaming Israel for the absence of peace in the Middle East while ignoring the Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist; by seeking to build an international coalition with Europe and the Arabs against Israel while glossing over the fact that at least the Arabs share Israel’s concerns about Iran; by exposing Israel’s nuclear arsenal and pressuring Israel to disarm while in the meantime courting the ayatollahs like an overeager bridegroom, the Obama administration is telling Israel that regardless of what it does, and what objective reality is, as far as the White House is concerned, Israel is to blame.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that Netanyahu shouldn’t make his case to Obama when they meet and to the American people during his US visit. What it does mean is that Netanyahu should have no expectation that Israeli goodwill can divert Obama from the course he has chosen. And again, this tells us two things: Israel’s relations with the US during Obama’s tenure in office will be unpleasant and difficult, and the damage that Israel will cause to that relationship by preventing Iran from acquiring the means to destroy it will be negligible.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

One civilization clashing

On June 7 Hizbullah will likely take over Lebanon and formally bring the oldest Arab democracy into the Iranian axis.

Iran’s stalking horse will not become the ruler of the largely pro-Western, non-Shi’ite majority country through a violent revolution. Lebanon will become yet another Iranian vassal state through ballots, not bullets. On June 7, Hizbullah and its allied parties are set to win a smashing popular victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections.

Hizbullah’s projected victory in these elections is of course not an isolated event. It is part of an Islamist electoral sweep in democratic elections throughout the region. Indeed, Islamists have won every free or partially free election in the region for the past six years.

Beginning with Turkey’s Islamist AKP party’s first electoral victory in 2003 – followed by its even more decisive reelection in last year’s race; moving to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in the relatively free, (although not open), presidential elections in his country in 2005, to the Muslim Brotherhood candidates’ sweep of nearly all electoral races they were permitted to contest in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections, to Hamas’s electoral victory in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative elections in 2006, the Islamist candidates and parties have been victorious in state after state.

The only outlier in this pattern is Iraq. But then, Iraq is the only country in the region where the West overthrew an enemy regime and retained an empowered military force in the country in the years that followed. What will happen in Iraq once US forces are withdrawn is an open question.

Generally speaking, Western analysts have attributed the Islamists’ victories to their well-run welfare programs for the poor, and to the fact that unlike their secular opponents, Islamist parties and politicians are perceived as honest.

No doubt, economic interests have played a role in their election. But the fact is that people who voted for the likes of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmadinejad, and those who are poised to vote for Hizbullah are not blind and they are not disengaged from the ideological currents of their societies. They know full-well what these parties and their leaders represent and seek.

Turkish voters, for instance, know that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan wishes for Turkey to be an Islamic state and a leader in the Islamic world. Palestinian voters did not vote for Hamas just because it runs the best soup kitchens. They supported Hamas because they support its goal of destroying Israel.

Iranian voters chose Ahmadinejad over former president Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani not merely because Rafsanjani was corrupt, but because of Ahmadinejad’s outspoken extremism. Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Egypt know that the jihadist movement calls for the overthrow of the government and its replacement with a caliphate and that the group spawned both al-Qaida and Hamas. And in Lebanon, voters know that a vote for Hizbullah is a vote for war against Israel and the West and a vote for placing Lebanon under effective Iranian control.

They know all this, and still they vote for these parties and leaders. And once in office, these leaders do not disappoint them. In addition to expanding welfare benefits for their supporters, they have worked steadily and aggressively to Islamify their societies internally and to strengthen their alliances with likeminded governments against the West in foreign affairs. At home, through patronage, repression of political opponents, introduction of Islamic laws, and incitement against the West, these democratically elected regimes have been moving their people further and further away from secularism.

AS FOR the burgeoning alliances between and among these likeminded jihadist states, events of the past week alone make clear that backed by popular support at home, these governments are steadily expanding their military and commercial ties in a naked bid to challenge and defeat the West.

Buffeted by US President Barack Obama’s warm embrace of Turkey earlier in the month, Erdogan has moved swiftly to consolidate his place as a central pillar in the new regional jihadist axis spearheaded by Iran, which includes Syria, Lebanon and the PA. Over the past week, his government signed a military pact with Lebanon committing Turkey to providing arms and training for the Lebanese army – a force which is already largely subservient to Hizbullah and will likely come under its complete control on June 7.

It signed a defense agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Defense, and even more provocatively conducted a three-day joint land forces exercise with the Syrian military. This was the first joint exercise between Syria and a NATO member.

As for Iran, Turkey signed a trade agreement with the mullocracy that is slated to double bilateral trade between the two countries within five years. Even more significantly, Ankara gave a green light to Iranian gas exports to Europe through the Nabucco gas pipeline which runs from Turkey to Austria. The Nabucco pipeline was supposed to bypass both Iran and Russia and increase instead gas exports from the former Soviet republics to Europe. Iran’s access to the pipeline will earn it billions of dollars annually and increase its political power as Europe increases it dependence on Iranian gas.

BOTH THE popularity of Islamist parties and their behavior after being popularly elected have confounded conventional Western reasoning – particularly in the US. Quite simply, successive administrations in Washington have been unable to provide an accurate explanation of what drives the populations of these countries, and increasingly of the Islamic world in general to support Islamist parties and movements.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration came to the conclusion that it isn’t that these parties and movements are popular. It is just that people are intimidated into supporting them. Were the people given the freedom to choose, they would choose to be led by liberal political forces interested in living at peace with the West. For former president George W. Bush and his advisers, the root of Islamic extremism was authoritarianism and the solution was Westernization through open elections.

When time after time the citizens of these countries or societies voluntarily elected jihadists, the Bush administration was confounded. Rather than seek an alternative explanation to understand what was happening, the administration alternatively denied reality – as in the case of Turkey where it pretended that the AKP was a moderate, pro-Western Islamist party in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Or they claimed that the people were simply voting against corruption and showered them with money – as has been the case with the Hamas-supporting Palestinians. Or, as in the case of Egypt and Iran, they have simply ignored the fact that elections took place.

The same of course occurred after Hizbullah’s violent coup last May. Rather than cut off ties with the Saniora government – which had been compelled to accept Hizbullah control over its affairs – the Bush administration continued to support Saniora and increased US military assistance to the Lebanese army – hoping that it could pretend away the problem.

SINCE HIS first moments in office, President Barack Obama has embarked on a policy course which rejects Bush’s belief that the quest for freedom is universal as so much American chauvinism. For Obama, Islamic hostility towards the West is caused by American arrogance, not the absence of freedom. And because American arrogance is the root of the problem, the solution must be American contrition. It is this view that propels Obama from one international apology tour to the next and causes him to air the CIA’s laundry in public. As far as he is concerned, the more apologetic he is, the more contrition he expresses for the actions of his predecessors, the greater the payoff will be.

And yet, as we see from the behavior of Lebanon, Turkey, Syria and Iran over the past week alone, Obama’s apologetics are not winning them over, but emboldening them to take more aggressive positions against the West. How can this be explained?

There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of the peoples of the Islamic world that actually can explain events, and has successfully forecast them. It has even engendered policy recommendations that might have mitigated both the popularity of Islamist parties and deterred these parties, once elected, from taking provocative steps against Western states and interests. Unfortunately, every time this explanation is raised, Western policy-makers head for the hills.

This explanation is really nothing more than an observation. It observes that the populations of Islamic countries and societies support Islamist parties like the AKP and Hizbullah and Hamas because they support what they stand for. This explanation notes that tens and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Turks, Egyptians and others voluntarily congregate in public venues and swoon when Islamist leaders tell them that Islam will defeat the West and promise the death of America and the death of Israel.

The jihadist message resonates with them. Their hearts and minds have already been won over. Contrary to what Western leaders as distinct as Bush and Obama believe, the hearts and minds of the Islamic world are not presently in play. From Beirut to the Taliban-controlled Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan, jihadists enjoy public support because the public supports their aim of defeating the West with bullets, with bombs, and with ballots.

It is too early to know how Obama will react when he like Bush is no longer able to deny that his strategy for winning over the hearts and minds of the Islamic world has failed. We don’t know if like Bush before him, he will simply ignore reality and pretend that nothing has happened; if he will blame his political opponents or Israel for not joining him in his contrition; or if he will cast about for another central organizing principle that will explain hostile Islamic behavior.

What is clear is that in the absence of Western – and specifically American – willingness to consider the possibility that what is happening in the Islamic world has next to nothing to do with either what the West embodies or what it has done, and everything to do with the resonance of the Islamist message within the Islamic world, events like the expected loss of Lebanon in June will continue to be met with incoherent prattling and confusion.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Caroline Glick disusses tactical communications at Ft. Leavenworth

Caroline Glick, a columnist and deputy managing editor for The Jerusalem Post, spoke about tactical and strategic communications March 30 at the Combined Arms Center’s Grant Auditorium.

"We (communicators) have to understand the atmosphere in which we operate and we fight, and we also have to think about what our specific goals are, what (message) are we trying to get across," she said.

Glick gave examples of tactical communications methods the Israel Defense Forces used against Hamas in the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. She said mass leaflet drops and direct phone calls to specific homes warned Gazans about impending IDF operations.

"What tactical communications allows you to do is minimize, to the extent possible, the amount of collateral damage that is going to be incurred in your area of operations," Glick said.

She said another effective means of tactical communications was the interaction of IDF troops with Palestinian civilians in homes they took over during the fighting, and the manner in which the troops treated the civilians. Glick said these interactions, while generally positive, were ultimately limited in scope and not enough to overcome lies told by the enemy on a persistent basis.

"The long term impact of an immediate experience with an Israeli is limited by the strategic communications of the enemy," she said.

Glick said Al Jazeera, Hamas TV and other media may spread false accusations and outright lies, but it is a losing strategy to respond to the enemy. She said the best way to project a strategic communications narrative is to make the story about the nature of the enemy.

"In Israel, and to an increasing degree in the United States, we have forgotten how to tell our story. In order to explain why we do things, we have to stop talking about ourselves, we have to talk about our enemy," Glick said.

 

The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is not an American story, she said, but a Saudi, Afghan, Egyptian, Pakistani and Arab story. Glick said the Holocaust is not a Jewish story, but a German story and a European story.

"When we are victims, we are not actors," she said. "We’re not the story, they are."

Glick provided some best practices for projecting strategic communications messages based on her personal experiences and lessons learned from recent IDF operations.

Glick was an embedded reporter with the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She said the IDF was criticized for not embedding reporters during Operation Cast Lead, but did this for good reason.

Glick explained embedding a reporter is very expensive for a media organization, and there always exists a potential for conflict between the story the host unit wants to tell versus what the reporter wants to tell, versus what the editor wants to tell. Additionally, she said embedding gives first-person credibility to potentially hostile news outlets to tell inaccurate or unbalanced stories.

"We (Israel) are dealing with an issue of massive hostility toward our fight, not only in the Arab media and in Arab society, but also particularly in the European media and increasingly in the U.S. media, toward what we’re doing," Glick said.

As an alternative to embedding, Glick said the IDF filmed operations and distributed them through their own YouTube channel, making the IDF a competitor in news.

For example, Glick said, Israel has claimed for years that terrorists use human shields, which Hamas and others have denied. She said during Operation Cast Lead the IDF filmed a Hamas gunman in Gaza using a child as a human shield in order to safely cross a street. Glick said the images were uploaded to the IDF’s YouTube channel and viewed by several million people.

Glick said another way to put strategic communications on the offensive is to use existing national and international laws to go after terrorists, and those who finance and support them, by trying them "Nuremburg style" in war crimes tribunals.

"If you simply follow the law and enforce it, then the discussion becomes about them. That’s the kind of thing that strategic communications should be doing," she said.

 

Originally published in the Fort Leavenworth Lamp

Israel’s Arab cheerleaders

It is a strange situation when Egypt and Jordan feel it necessary to defend Israel against American criticism. But this is the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Last Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee that Arab support for Israel’s bid to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is contingent on its agreeing to support the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state. In her words, "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it’s looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts." As far as Clinton is concerned, the two, "go hand-in-hand."

But just around the time that Clinton was making this statement, Jordan’s King Abdullah II was telling The Washington Post that he is satisfied with the Netanyahu government’s position on the Palestinians. In his words, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has "sent a message that he’s committed to peace with the Arabs. All the words I heard were the right words."

As for Egypt, in spite of the Israeli media’s hysterical reports that Egypt won’t deal with the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration’s warning that Israel can only expect Egypt to support its position that Iran must be denied nuclear weapons if it gives Jerusalem to the PLO, last week’s visit by Egypt’s intelligence chief Omar Suleiman clearly demonstrated that Egypt wishes to work with the government on a whole host of issues. Coming as it did on the heels of Egypt’s revelation that Iranian-controlled Hizbullah agents were arrested for planning strategic attacks against it, Suleiman’s visit was a clear sign that Egypt is as keen as Israel to neutralize Iranian power in the region by preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

And Egypt and Jordan are not alone in supporting Israel’s commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. American and other Western sources who have visited the Persian Gulf in recent months report that leaders of the Gulf states from Bahrain – which Iran refers to as its 14th province – to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and, of course, to Iraq – are praying for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and only complain that it has waited so long to attack them.

As one American who recently met with Persian Gulf leaders explained last week, "As far as the Gulf leaders are concerned, Israel cannot attack Iran fast enough. They understand what the stakes are."

UNFORTUNATELY, THE nature of those stakes has clearly eluded the Obama administration. As the Arabs line up behind Israel, the Obama administration is operating under the delusion that the Iranians will be convinced to give up their nuclear program if Israel destroys its communities in Judea and Samaria.

According to reports published last week in Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz, President Barack Obama’s in-house post-Zionist, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, told an American Jewish leader that for Israel to receive the administration’s support for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it must not only say that it supports establishing a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza, it must begin expelling its citizens from their homes and communities in Judea and Samaria to prove its good faith.

With just months separating Iran from either joining the nuclear club or from being barred entry to the clubhouse, the Obama administration’s apparent obsession with Judea and Samaria tells us that unlike Israel and the Arab world, its Middle East policies are based on a willful denial of reality.

The cold hard facts are that the Middle East will be a very different place if Iran becomes a nuclear power. Today American policy-makers and other opponents of using military force to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons compare the current situation to what the region could look like in the aftermath of an Israeli campaign against Iran’s nuclear installations. They warn that Hizbullah and Hamas may launch massive retaliatory missile attacks against Israel, Egypt, Jordan and other states, and that US military personnel and installations in the region will likely be similarly attacked by Iranian and Syrian proxies.

Indeed, proponents and opponents of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations alike warn that Iran’s deployment of terror proxies from Beirut to Bolivia, from Managua to Marseilles, and from Gaza to Giza means that things could get very ugly worldwide in the aftermath of an Israeli attack.

But all of that ugliness, all of that instability and death will look like a walk in the park compared to how the region – and indeed how the world – will look if Iran becomes a nuclear power. This is something that the Arabs understand. And this is why they support and pray for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.

IF IRAN acquires nuclear weapons, the Obama administration can throw its hopes for Middle East peace out the window. Today, even without nuclear weapons, Iran is the major force behind the continued Palestinian war against Israel. Iran exerts complete control over Hamas and Islamic Jihad and partial control over Fatah.

In and of itself, Iran’s current control over Palestinian terror groups suffices to expose the Obama administration’s plan to force Israel to destroy its communities in Judea and Samaria as misguided in the extreme. With Iran calling the shots for the Palestinians, it is clear that any land Israel vacates will fall under Iranian control. That is, every concession the US forces Israel to make will redound directly to Iran’s benefit. This is why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s claim that it will be impossible to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians without first neutralizing Iran rings so true.

If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the situation will become even more destructive. A nuclear-armed Iran means that any chance of marginalizing these Iranian-controlled forces in Palestinian society will disappear. For Israel, the best case scenario in the age of a nuclear-armed mullocracy would involve continuous war with Iranian proxies – sort of expanded versions of the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead – in which it has little option for victory because the terror armies would fight under Iran’s nuclear umbrella.

Regionally, a nuclear-armed Iran would in short order compel both Egypt and Jordan to abrogate their peace treaties with Israel. The exposure of the Iranian sabotage ring in Egypt last week makes clear that Iran seeks to either overthrow or dominate the Arab world with its nuclear arsenal. If Iran becomes a nuclear power, roundups of Iranian agents like the one in Egypt will be inconceivable. Iranian agents will be given free reign both regionally and worldwide.

For Israel, the abrogation of its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan would raise the danger of regional war to an all-time high. Goaded by Iran, and operating with Iran’s US- and Turkish-armed Lebanese proxy and Teheran’s Syrian slave, Egypt and Jordan may well be made to decide that the time has come to invade Israel again.

These scenarios, of course, are likely because they compare favorably to the worst case scenarios in which a nuclear-armed Iran decides to simply detonate its nuclear bombs over Israel, either in the form of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack or in the form of a direct nuclear strike. An EMP attack would not immediately kill anyone, but would destroy the country’s electricity grid and permanently paralyze its military and civilian infrastructures, rendering the population defenseless not merely from its neighbors, but from disease and starvation. If successful, a direct nuclear strike would likely kill between 50,000 and several million Israelis, depending on how many warheads reached their targets.

GLOBALLY OF COURSE, a nuclear-armed Iran would be well positioned to take over the world’s oil markets. With Saudi Arabia’s main oil installations located in the predominantly Shi’ite eastern provinces, it would be able to credibly threaten to destroy Saudi oil installations and so assert control over them. With Iran’s strategic alliance with Venezuela, once it controls Saudi oil fields, it hard to see how it would not become the undisputed ruler of the oil economy.

Certainly Europe would put up no resistance. Today, with much of Europe already within range of Iran’s ballistic missiles, with Iranian-controlled terror cells fanned out throughout the continent and with Europe dependent on Persian Gulf oil, there is little doubt of the direction its foreign policy would take in the event that Iran becomes a nuclear power. Obviously any thought of economic sanctions would disappear as European energy giants lined up to develop Iranian gas fields, and European banks clamored to finance the projects.

Finally, there is America. With Israel either barely surviving or destroyed, with the Arab world and Europe bowing before the mullahs, with much of Central and South America fully integrated into the Iranian axis, America would arguably find itself at greater risk of economic destruction and catastrophic attack than at any time in its history since the War of 1812. An EMP attack that could potentially send the US back to the pre-industrial age would become a real possibility. An Iranian controlled oil economy, financed by euros, would threaten to displace the dollar and the US economy as the backbone of the global economy. The US’s military options – particularly given Obama’s stated intention to all but end US missile defense programs and scrap much of its already aging nuclear arsenal – would be more apparent than real.

Yet what Clinton’s statements before Congress, Emmanuel’s statements to that American Jewish leader and Obama’s unremitting pandering to Teheran and its Syrian and Turkish allies all make clear is that none of these reasonable scenarios has made a dent in the administration’s thinking. As far as the Obama White House is concerned, Iran will be talked out of its plans for regional and global domination the minute that Israel agrees to give its land to the Palestinians. The fact that no evidence exists that could possibly support this assertion is irrelevant.

On Sunday, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland claimed that Obama will not publish his administration’s policy on Iran until after he meets with Netanyahu at the White House on May 18. It will be during that meeting, Hoagland wrote, that Obama will seek to convince Netanyahu that there is no reason to attack Iran.

The fact that Obama could even raise such an argument, when by Israel’s calculations Iran will either become a nuclear power or be denied nuclear weapons within the next 180 days, shows that his arguments are based on a denial of the danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel and to global security as a whole.

It is true that you can’t help but get a funny feeling when you see the Arabs defending Israel from American criticism. But with the Obama administration’s Middle East policy firmly grounded in La La Land, what choice do they have? They understand that today all that stands between them and enslavement to the mullahs is the Israel Air Force and Binyamin Netanyahu’s courage.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Iran’s Western enablers

Egypt’s recent actions against Hizbullah operatives are a watershed event for understanding the nature of the threat that Iran constitutes for both regional and global security. For many Israelis, Egypt’s actions came as a surprise. For years this country has been appealing to Egypt to take action against Hizbullah operatives in its territory. With minor exceptions, it has refused. Believing that its operatives threatened only us, the Mubarak regime preferred to turn a blind eye.

Then too, now seems a strange time for Egypt to be proving Israel correct. Senior ministers in the new Netanyahu government have for years been outspoken critics of Egypt for its refusal to act against Hizbullah and for its support for the Hizbullah/Iran-sponsored Hamas terror group. By going after Hizbullah now, Egypt is legitimizing both their criticism and the Netanyahu government itself. This in turn seems to go against Egypt’s basic interest of weakening Israel politically in general, and weakening rightist Israeli governments in particular.

But none of this seemed to interest Egyptian officials last week when they announced the arrest of 49 Hizbullah operatives and pointed a finger at Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah and his bosses in Teheran, openly accusing them of seeking to undermine Egypt’s national security.

The question is what caused Egypt to suddenly act? It appears that two things are motivating the Mubarak regime. First, there is the nature of the Hizbullah network it uncovered. According to the Egyptian Justice Ministry’s statements, the arrested operatives were not confining their operations to weapons smuggling to Gaza. They were also targeting Egypt.

The Egyptian state prosecution alleges that while operating as Iranian agents, they were scouting targets along the Suez Canal. That is, they were planning strategic strikes against Egypt’s economic lifeline.

The second aspect of the network that clearly concerned Egyptian authorities was what it showed about the breadth of cooperation between the regime’s primary opponent – the Muslim Brotherhood – and the Iranian regime. Forty-one of the suspects arrested are Egyptian citizens, apparently aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. This alignment is signaled by two things. First, many of them have hired Muslim Brotherhood activist Muntaser al-Zayat as their defense attorney. And second, Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen have decried the arrests.

For instance, in an interview with Gulf News last Thursday, Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Issam el-Erian defended Hizbullah (and Iran) against his own government, claiming that Nasrallah and the Iranian ayatollahs are right to accuse President Hosni Mubarak of being little more than an Israeli stooge.

In his words, "The Egyptian government must redraw its national security policies to include Israeli threats against Arab counties like Syria and Lebanon and to consider threats against Palestinians by Israelis as a threat against its national security."

In a nutshell then, both the Hizbullah network’s targets and its relationship to Egypt’s Sunni Islamist opposition expose clearly the danger the Iranian regime constitutes to Egypt. Iran seeks to undermine and defeat opponents throughout the world through both direct military/terrorist/sabotage operations and through ideological subversion. It is the confluence of both of these aspects of Iran’s revolutionary ambitions that forced Egypt to act now, regardless of the impact of its actions on the political fortunes of the Netanyahu government. And it is not a bit surprising that Egypt was forced to act at such a politically inopportune time.

THROUGHOUT the region and indeed throughout much of the world, Iran’s star is on the rise. Its burgeoning nuclear program acts as a second arm of a pincer-like campaign against its opponents. The asymmetric and ideological warfare it wages through its terror and state proxies are the campaign’s first arm. Together, these two strategic arms are raising the stakes of Iran’s challenge to its neighbors and to the West to unprecedented and unacceptable heights. Morocco is so concerned about Iranian subversion of its Sunni population that last month it cut off diplomatic ties with Teheran.

Iran’s great leap forward has been exposed by recent events. Last month’s Arab League summit in Doha exemplified how Iran has successfully split the Arab world between its proxies and its opponents. For the past three years, and particularly since the 2006 war between Israel and Iran’s Hizbullah in Lebanon, Arab League states have been increasingly polarized around the issue of Iran. The country has used its satellite states of Syria, Sudan and Qatar, as well as its burgeoning alliances with Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere, to legitimize its rapidly escalating assaults on Sunni regimes throughout the region.

Although Egypt and Saudi Arabia successfully blocked Qatar from inviting Iran and Hamas to the summit, by using the good offices of Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Thani and Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Iranians were able to get their anti-Saudi/Egyptian platform passed. As the Middle East Media Research Institute chronicled in a report on the proceedings, Assad successfully abrogated the so-called Saudi peace plan that the Arab League adopted in 2002. According to a new Syrian-backed resolution, any Arab rapprochement with Israel would be contingent on Israel first destroying itself by withdrawing into indefensible borders and being overwhelmed by millions of hostile foreign Arab immigrants.

Sensing what awaited him at the summit, Mubarak chose to stay home and send a junior emissary in his place. Saudi King Abdullah said nothing throughout the two-day Arab love-fest with Iran. Both leaders emerged weakened and humiliated.

In recent years, Iran has expanded its sphere of influence to strategic points around the region. Two recent additions to Iran’s axis are Eritrea and Somalia. Iran and Eritrea signed a strategic alliance last year that grants Iranian Revolutionary Guard units basing rights in the strategically vital Bab al-Mandab strait that controls the chokepoint connecting the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea. As for Somalia – whose position along the Gulf of Aden provides it a similarly critical maritime posture – Iran has been exploiting its condition as a failed state for several years.

In 2006, the UN reported that some 720 Somali jihadists aligned with al-Qaida fought with Hizbullah in Lebanon during its war against Israel. According to an analysis of Iran’s coopting of Somali jihadists published in November 2006 by the on-line Long War Journal, in exchange for the Somali operatives’ assistance, Iran and Syria provided advanced military training to the Somalis who had just established the al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic Courts Union regime in the country. Teheran equipped the ICU with anti-aircraft missiles, grenade launchers, machine guns, ammunition, medicine, uniforms and other supplies both before and after it took control of Somalia.

The UN report also linked the ICU to Iran’s nuclear program. Its alleged that Iranian agents were operating in ICU chief Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys’s hometown of Dusa Mareb, where they sought to buy uranium.

Beyond the Horn of Africa, of course, Iran has been consistently expanding its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both countries the mullahs simultaneously sponsor the insurgencies and offer themselves as the US’s indispensible partner for stabilizing the countries they are destabilizing.

What is perhaps most jarring about Iran’s ever-expanding influence is the disparate responses it elicits from Israel and Sunni regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the one hand, and the West on the other. Whereas Israel and the Sunni Arab states warn about Iran daily, far from acknowledging or confronting this ever-expanding Iranian menace, the US and the Europeans have been alternatively ignoring it and appeasing it. If the US were taking the Iranian threat seriously, the Obama administration would not be begging Iran to negotiate with it after Teheran demonstrated that it has complete control over the nuclear fuel cycle.

If the US were interested in contending with the danger Iran constitutes to global security, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not be absurdly arguing that the US cannot verify whether Iran’s announcement that it is now operating 7,000 centrifuges and its opening of another nuclear site signify an increase in its nuclear capacity.

Were the US taking Iran seriously, it would not be asking Iran to help out in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would not be treating Somali piracy as a strategically insignificant nuisance. It would not be ignoring Eritrea’s newfound subservience to Iran. It would not be maintaining the Central Command’s headquarters in Qatar. And, of course, it would not be permitting Iran to move forward with its nuclear weapons program.

THEN there is Britain. Last week Michael Ledeen from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported that Britain’s decision to recognize Hizbullah is part of a deal it struck with Iran and Hizbullah in exchange for five Britons who have been held hostage in Iraq by Hizbullah/Iran-affiliated terrorists for two years. According to the deal, in exchange for the British hostages, London agreed to recognize Hizbullah and the US agreed to release a number of Shi’ite terrorists its forces in Iraq have captured.

As Tariq Alhomayed, the editor of Asharq al-Awsat, noted in response to the news, the deal puts paid Nasrallah’s contention that Hizbullah does not operate outside Lebanon except to wage war against Israel. But it also points to a severe problem with the West.

If Britain was willing to acknowledge and contend with the grave threat Iran constitutes for global security, it would not accept the authority of Hizbullah or Iran to negotiate the release of British hostages in Iraq. Instead it would place responsibility for achieving the release of the British hostages on the sovereign Iraqi government and use all the means at its disposal to strengthen that government against agents of Iranian influence in the country.

So, too, rather than participate in the deal, the US would seek to destroy the Iranian-controlled operatives holding the hostages and discredit and defeat the Iraqi political forces operating under Iranian control. Certainly if the US were taking the Iranian threat seriously, it would announce that any withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq will be linked to the complete defeat of agents of Iranian influence in Iraq.

The West’s refusal to contend with the burgeoning Iranian menace no doubt has something to do with the West’s physical distance from Iran. Whereas Middle Eastern countries have no choice but to deal with Iran, the US and its European allies apparently believe that they can still pretend away the danger. But of course they cannot.

From the Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden to Hizbullah cells from Iraq to Canada; from Iranian agents in British universities to Hizbullah and Iranian military advisers in South and Central America, the West, like the Middle East, is being infiltrated and surrounded.

Egypt’s open assault on Hizbullah is yet another warning that concerted action must be taken against the mullocracy. Unfortunately, the absence of Western resolve signals that this warning, too, will go unheeded.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Remembering Olmert’s true record

Last week’s reports that during Operation Cast Lead Israel bombed truck convoys in Sudan transporting medium-ranged Fajr-3 missiles to Gaza from Iran couldn’t have come at a better time for outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Even as defense officials were following standard practice of neither confirming nor denying the reports, Olmert was bragging like a teenage boy.

In an address at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya last Thursday Olmert crowed, "We are operating in every area in which terrorist infrastructures can be struck. We are operating in locations near and far and attack in a way that strengthens and increases deterrence. It is true in the north and in the south. There is no point in elaborating. Everyone can use their imagination. Whoever needs to know, knows."

Unfortunately, Olmert’s bravado doesn’t stand up to even the flimsiest scrutiny. What about the weapons smugglers along the Philadelphi corridor? More than Sudan, Philadelphi – Gaza’s international border with Egypt – is the choke point of weapons transfers from Iran to Gaza. And along that border, during his three years and two months in office, Olmert has failed to even temporarily cut off the flow of Iranian arms entering Gaza. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, Israel never once launched a sustained operation aimed at blocking Hamas, Fatah and their sister organizations in Gaza from transporting ever more lethal weapons systems into the area through its border with Egypt.

THIS WEEK EHUD OLMERT will finally leave office. Ironically, the cause for his early departure from power – the multiple criminal probes being conducted against him – has nothing to do with his actual performance as prime minister. That is, the failures that brought him down were not his failures in office, but his private failings which predated his rise to power.

Israel’s political memory is notoriously short. In the space of a few short years, politicians’ past failures in office are frequently forgotten by their parties and the public. Consequently, Olmert can easily assume that if he is able to fend off the multiple felony indictments awaiting him on his return to private life, he many one day soon return to lead us.

It is due first and foremost to the prospect of Olmert one day returning to politics that it is critical to consider his actual record of service as prime minister. Only by understanding what he has done over the past three years and two months can we ensure that he will be properly remembered for what he is: the worst prime minister Israel has experienced to date. Only by recognizing his tenure in office as an unmitigated disaster for the country will we be able to avert the danger that he may one day return to office.

Olmert’s failure to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza at the Philadelphi corridor and his attempt to obfuscate this failure by exaggerating the strategic significance of the reported IAF strikes in Sudan are his stock in trade. Olmert, as the only prime minister to have led the country in two wars in one term of office, does not hesitate to use force to project an image of fearless manliness to the public. And as the only prime minister to have led Israel to defeat in war – and indeed, in his case, in two wars – Olmert is the only prime minister to have wielded the sword with utter strategic incompetence.

OLMERT ENTERED office in January 2006 pledged to unilaterally surrender Judea, Samaria and large areas of Jerusalem to the Fatah terrorist organization. Olmert was both politically and ideologically committed to the Left’s belief that wars are unwinnable and consequently enemies need to be appeased rather than defeated.

In light of his political predisposition, both Lebanese and Palestinian aggression presented Olmert with a difficult political challenge. In both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel had previously adopted his strategy of preemptive appeasement by unilaterally surrendering territory to its enemies. Hizbullah’s and Fatah/Hamas’s post-surrender aggression exposed Olmert’s political platform as both wrongheaded and dangerous.

Beyond the political embarrassment Olmert suffered in the wake of both Hizbullah’s 2006 aggression and Gaza’s post-withdrawal transformation into an Iranian-controlled jihadist hub, he had to contend with the public outcry against their unprovoked and unrelenting attacks. In both July 2006 and in December 2008, the public demanded that Olmert defend the country by using force to defeat our enemies. Yet even in the face of the public outcry, Olmert remained ideologically committed to the belief that war is inherently futile.

Olmert’s ideologically driven political and strategic mind-sets caused him to prosecute both wars as little more than mindless, violent engagements with enemy forces. In Lebanon, IDF units were sent into tactical battles that lacked any operational objectives.

The strategic aims that Olmert announced at various stages of the war in Lebanon – first to defeat Hizbullah and, later on, to "send Hizbullah a message" – were strategically illogical since they lacked any connection to the manner in which IDF forces were deployed. Absent an order to conquer southern Lebanon and defeat Hizbullah as a fighting force, the IDF could not hope to defeat Hizbullah.

Given Hizbullah’s commitment to Israel’s destruction and its complete subservience to Iran, there is no way for Israel to deter the group. As a result, the only "message" Israel conveyed was one of military incompetence and ideological weakness.

Although the public responded to Olmert’s performance in outrage, for Olmert the outcome of the war in Lebanon was the best of all possible worlds. By failing to accomplish any strategic objectives through fighting, Olmert was able to continue to argue for preemptive appeasement in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as well as on the Golan Heights.

Olmert brushed aside the public’s demand for his resignation by emptily, arrogantly and repeatedly pledging to correct his own mistakes. But of course, given his political and ideological blinders, he was incapable and unwilling to do so.

The IDF’s improved tactical performance in Gaza two years later showed that to the extent it was able, it did learn from its mistakes in Lebanon. In contrast, Olmert’s strategic leadership of Operation Cast Lead demonstrated that he remained committed to the same wrongheaded and dangerous strategic outlook with which he had led the country to ignominious defeat in Lebanon.

DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES UNDER Olmert were motivated by the same ideological dictates as its military engagements. Consequently, their results were equally disastrous.

By any objective measure, Israel’s greatest diplomatic challenge for the past three years and two months has been to build an international consensus around the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And yet, contending with Iran was nowhere near the top of our diplomatic agenda under Olmert. Indeed, Olmert and his deputy and successor as leader of the Kadima party outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni never developed any coherent position on Iran at all.

Instead of concentrating diplomatic efforts on convincing the nations of the world to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy the Jewish state and to dominate the region and the oil economy, Olmert concentrated his diplomatic efforts on strengthening the Fatah terrorist organization against the Hamas terrorist organization.

This goal – which is the central component of Olmert’s appeasement-based mind-set – required him to lead his colleagues and subordinates in ignoring certain basic facts about Fatah. Israel needed to ignore the fact that Fatah rejects its right to exist and openly calls for its destruction. Israel needed to ignore Fatah’s continued direct involvement in terror attacks against it and its complicity with and support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks. Israel had to ignore Fatah’s cozy ties with Hizbullah, Syria and Iran and the leadership role Fatah occupies in the international diplomatic offensive and political war against the Jewish state.

Due to Olmert’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Fatah’s belligerence, the effect of his diplomatic efforts has been the legitimization not only of Fatah but of all of Fatah’s allies and supporters. That is, the effect has been to legitimize all of our enemies and encourage them to maintain and expand their campaigns on every front.

In the case of Fatah for instance, by refusing for three years and two months to confront it on its involvement in terror, Olmert paved the way for its current campaign to prosecute IDF soldiers as war criminals in international tribunals. Moreover, due to Olmert’s refusal to acknowledge Fatah’s lead role in terrorism, he paved the way for the current state of affairs where Fatah forces are now being trained and armed by the US military.

BY DESTROYING the IDF’s international reputation as a world-class fighting force by twice committing it to war and twice refusing to allow it to fight to victory, and by transforming the Foreign Ministry into a mouthpiece for Fatah and the PLO while ordering it to ignore Iran, Olmert wrecked Israel’s reputation as a steady and reliable strategic ally in Washington. Moreover, he weakened its supporters both in the US capital and throughout the world by effectively accepting the lie that Israel itself is responsible for the radicalization of the Arab and Islamic worlds and that only by cutting it down to size will the West be able to moderate the behavior of jihadists from Teheran to Karachi to Baghdad to London.

Olmert’s massive incompetence has had another victim: the country’s social fabric. Not only has his studied inability to defend the country attenuated many Israelis’ faith in the state’s ability to defend them, Olmert’s refusal to countenance the public’s demand that he resign after the war in Lebanon and his insistent postwar attempts to give away Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah while wrecking the strategic alliance with the US have sown confusion and discord. This discord has led to a deepening of social and political fissures at a time when – due to the rising Iranian threat which he studiously ignored, and the steady delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist that he engendered – we need to be united as never before.

To sum up then, Olmert’s ideological and political commitment to appeasement, his personal arrogance and his contempt for his countrymen have made his tenure an unrelenting and unmitigated disaster for the country. Today, rather than acknowledge his failure, Olmert is using the disclosure of IAF attacks in Sudan as yet a new way to obfuscate the fact that for three years and two months he has failed to adequately protect the state.

It is in light of this that it is imperative that the public understand his record. For in the final analysis, it is not simply our ability to ensure that Olmert never returns to lead us that stands in the balance. Our wherewithal to survive with the strategic wreckage he has laid before us depends on our capacity to understand and remember the dimensions of Olmert’s incompetence.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.