Column One: Olmert’s Ill-Timed Washington Visit, by Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post)
“If Olmert were a strong leader, in light of the Republican defeat and Bush’s response to that defeat, he could use the meeting as an opportunity to tell Bush that Israel accepts responsibility for attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. But Olmert, who spent his last visit in the US capital trying to convince the Americans to support his plan to surrender Judea and Samaria to Hamas, is not a strong leader. He is a weak leader. The new wind blowing out of Washington will easily cast him asunder.
Too bad he can’t cancel his visit to Washington. Israel would be better off if Olmert called in sick on Monday morning.”
Excerpts;
Many downplay the significance of the US congressional elections. But the truth is nonetheless glaring. It would seem that on Tuesday, the George W. Bush era came to a close.
The consequences of this turn of events on Israel will be dramatic. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that anyone has explained them to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ahead of his scheduled visit to the White House next week.
In the wake of the Democratic victory in Tuesday’s elections, President Bush transferred control over American foreign policy to his father’s anti-war advisers.
The president’s announcement of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “resignation” Wednesday signaled the transfer of control from Bush’s team to Bush pere’s team. Robert Gates, Bush’s nominee to replace Rumsfeld, served as his father’s deputy national security adviser and CIA director. Gates… is closely associated with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker. He is a member in good standing of the Arabist wing of the Republican Party which dominated the president’s father’s administration.
In recent years, Gates made one notable foray into the world of international affairs. In 2004 he collaborated with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser in the Carter administration. Like former president Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski is one of Israel’s greatest adversaries in US policymaking circles.
In recent months, Gates has been serving as a member of the Iraq Study Group chaired by Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton. The congressionally mandated committee is scheduled to recommend new strategies for managing the war in Iraq to Bush later in the month.
In a series of recent press interviews, Baker and Hamilton have indicated that they will recommend that Bush enter into negotiations with Iran and Syria. The proposed talks they say, will serve to motivate Iran and Syria to stabilize the situation in Iraq in a manner that will pave the way for a retreat of US forces from the country.
Since it is Iranian and Syrian sponsorship of the insurgency that is causing the war to continue, it is fairly clear that Baker is egging for a temporary cease-fire that will last long enough to enable a pullout of US forces. The fact that the price of the temporary cease-fire will be a US defeat in Iraq and the surrender of Iraq to the tender mercies of Iran and Syria is apparently okay by Baker.
Moreover, as Michael Ledeen from the American Enterprise Institute, who served with Gates in the Reagan administration argues, when Bush made the decision in April 2003 not to widen the campaign in Iraq to the sources of the then-nascent insurgency in Syria and Iran, the president effectively decided not to win the war in Iraq. This is the case because Iraq is merely one front in a regional war. The US cannot win the regional war while limiting its operations to playing defense on one front.
When seen from this perspective, far from signaling a strategic shift in US policy, Gates’s nomination merely serves to restate an existing policy.
Yet Bush’s policies to date have been far from consistent. Indeed, for the past several years Bush has been simultaneously advancing two contradictory policies. On the one hand, as his critics on the Right have repeatedly stated, through his engagement of Teheran and support for Palestinian statehood, he has been carrying out a policy of appeasement towards the Iranians and the Arabs. At the same time, however, Bush supported Israel in the war this summer. He isolated the Palestinian Authority after Hamas took power, and at the beginning of his tenure, he refused to meet with Yasser Arafat in spite of the significant domestic and international pressure exerted on him to do so.
Practically speaking, Bush supported Israel’s right to take action to defend itself. (What Israel did with his support is a completely separate issue.) As to Iran, Bush distinguished himself from his predecessors by announcing his support for the overthrow of the regime in Teheran. In recent months, Bush and at least some of the members of his administration pointed fingers at Damascus and Teheran for their sponsorship of the insurgents in Iraq, for Hizbullah in Lebanon and for Palestinian terror groups in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.
So when the full breadth of Bush’s policies are taken into consideration, his decision to appoint Gates does signal a strategic shift in direction. Rumsfeld was completely identified with Bush’s pro-Israel policies and with his hawkish stances towards Islamic radicalism. Rumsfeld’s ouster and replacement by a follower of Baker, Bush pere and Scowcroft signals a clean break with the policies Rumsfeld embodied. Furthermore, by sacking Rumsfeld the day after the elections, Bush sent a signal to the Democrats that he is willing to forgo victory in exchange for political breathing space.
This is the Washington that will greet Olmert during his visit on Monday.
The Republicans lost the elections. Politicians and defense secretaries who would have willingly listened to such messages from an Israeli prime minister have been booted out of office, thrown into the back benches of Congress, and fired by Bush.
Today Israel stands alone against the Palestinians. More disturbingly, the responsibility for preventing Iran from achieving nuclear capabilities has moved conclusively from Washington to Jerusalem.
If Olmert were a strong leader, in light of the Republican defeat and Bush’s response to that defeat, he could use the meeting as an opportunity to tell Bush that Israel accepts responsibility for attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. But Olmert, who spent his last visit in the US capital trying to convince the Americans to support his plan to surrender Judea and Samaria to Hamas, is not a strong leader. He is a weak leader. The new wind blowing out of Washington will easily cast him asunder.
Too bad he can’t cancel his visit to Washington. Israel would be better off if Olmert called in sick on Monday morning.
Commentary;
Journalist Caroline Glick, as good as she is on many issues, has not risen above political correctness and the perception that Israel owes her entire identity and existence to both a superpower’s policy whims and it’s [the superpower’s] electoral politics.
Neither she, nor any Israeli journalist for that matter, have risen to the level of recognition and understanding that an Israel which does the right thing, in which all Jews are united as brethren and with unbridled love for this special, holy land is zocha to backing which no other power, no matter how great, is capable of supplying.
And so, the fumbling, bumbling, inept prime minister Olmert goes, with hat in hand as a beggar, a schnorrer, to Washington. And surely, he’ll be back with plenty of favorable media spin regarding the humiliation and Chilul Hashem suffered on a trip that, as Caroline Glick writes, is better left unmade. MB
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