The amazing Atlas posts the transcript of an AIPAC briefing given this week by Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, who was the IDF chief of staff from 2002-2005, until he started to stray off the disengagement script. He is currently a distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The transcript includes this exchange:
Question: Do you think the acceptance by the Israelis of the cease-fire accord which otherwise seems so illogical was significantly a result of American pressure upon
Israel? . . .
Ya’alon: As far as I know, there was no American pressure, and this is my answer.
Ya’alon’s answer is consistent with the analysis that John Podhoretz posted yesterday at The Corner:
I think it’s pretty clear that we could have given Ehud Olmert and his government six months to do the job in
South Lebanon and they wouldn’t have done it. They didn’t want to do it. It took them 30 days to get boots on the ground there. They kept hitting the Hezbollah neighborhood in Beirut in what seems like a hapless effort to decapitate the terror group’s leadership, and they would have continued to do that until even Jackie Mason would have declared they had gone too far. The Bush administration didn’t impede Israel. The Israeli government impeded Israel.
Olmert squandered an almost unprecedented national unity — a widespread public consensus that the war should be ended by the IDF, not the UN. He was given extraordinary American diplomatic backing — which precluded a UN cease-fire resolution week after week — until the
Pressured by neither his public nor his ally — on the contrary, given complete backing by both — Olmert waged a tentative, inconsistent, half-hearted war in which he (1) first insisted he would not stop without the return of the abducted Israeli soldiers, then (2) declared victory in the middle (and suggested he was anxious to get back to “convergence”), and then (3) effectively gave up.
He held six-hour cabinet meetings followed by public announcements of what he might do in several days (and never did), and was even less hawkish than the unqualified Defense Minister he had selected to manage the IDF.
David Warren’s harsh assessment today, following Ari Shavit’s seminal article in Haaretz and Caroline Glick’s definitive analysis in The Jerusalem Post, is unfortunately accurate. He has been a catastrophe.
Israel needs someone at the helm with experience and vision, who understands the stakes, who has made mistakes but learned from them, who can effectively state Israel’s case in the international media (now an important war front in its own right), and who can restore the American president’s confidence in his ally.
There is only one person in