Today's Situation

General politics Wednesday, September 06, 2006

According to the press this morning, the generals were merciless in their criticism of the IDF’s top commander, and expressed concern about an erosion of the IDF’s values for the officers’ corps. Relying on both published reports and their own sources in the army, they complained about senior officers who didn’t deign to go to the battlefields. There was much criticism of the IDF’s emphasis on air power and a concomitant reduction of resources for infantry and armor. The meeting lasted five hours, with Halutz speaking for the first hour. Although last week several ex-generals called for Halutz to resign, no such direct call was issued at the meeting last night. Halutz called upon the reserve generals to take part in the many internal IDF inquiries he has already set in motion to ‘learn the lessons’ of the war.

This morning, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrasse met with the Knesset State Comptroller’s Committee to deliver a very preliminary report on what he is doing to investigate government mismanagement during the war. He said that of the many issues he would investigate, two main focal points of his probes would be the defense establishment and local authorities, meaning the small and not so small towns of the north that seemed to stop functioning when the war broke out, leaving the work of taking care of the poor left in unprepared bomb shelters to charities and volunteer groups.

He promised that his office, which has hundreds of investigators, would leave no stone unturned and when asked by MKs if he would question the prime minister, he said that anyone who had anything to do with the failures his office uncovers will be questioned. ‘We will go where the inquiry leads,’ said Lindenstrasse, a former district court judge.

He has already recommended that the attorney general order a criminal investigation into Ehud Olmert’s use of his position as Industry Minister in Ariel Sharon’s government for blatantly political appointments to jobs in a branch of the ministry. Olmert and Lindenstrasse have been at odds for months, ever since the comptroller began an inquiry -- still underway -- into the financial dealings that lay behind the Olmert’s sale of a property and the acquisition of another for more than a million dollars.

The attorney general meanwhile had to inform the prime minister that two former generals he had named to the ‘governmental examination committee’ headed by former Mossad chief Nahum Admoni, have conflict of interests and must be replaced. Yedidya Yaari, the former IDF navy admiral and is currently head of Rafael, the state’s arms development agency, and David Ivry, the former air force commander, defense ministry director general, ambassador to the U.S. and chairman of the National Security Council, is now Boeing’s representative in Israel and therefore also has a conflict of interest.

The hasty appointments obviously were not vetted in a thorough process, and in many ways seemed to be a microcosm of what went wrong with the war against Hizbollah: a hasty decision meant to solve a political problem, with the goals and measures to achieve those goals changing on the fly as events dictate instead of any clearcut plan. Thus, Olmert, who had planned on an easy majority in his government today (though at least some Labor ministers, including party leader Peretz, would vote nay) for his committees, was forced to backtrack and cancel the vote.

No wonder Binyamin Netanyahu and U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney think yesterday was a good time for them to meet, or so was reported by state-owned Israel Radio this morning. Netanyahu has a plan. He’s expecting Olmert’s party, Kadima, to collapse, with many of its MKs returning to the Likud, from whence they came. That could give Netanyahu the chance to cobble together a Rightist-Religious coalition from the opposition parties.

Trouble is, he’d have to reconcile his differences with Yisrael Beitenu’s Avigdor Lieberman, who regards Netanyahu with disdain, and while public opinion polls show Netanyahu has risen since the days when he was the highly unpopular finance minister under Sharon, he still hits a glass ceiling at 30-35 percent popularity -- and that, only because he has essentially remained silent and out of the public eye since the war began. As many a commentator in Israel has pointed out, Netanyahu’s popularity right now is precisely because he is silent.

Meanwhile, the police have apparently collected testimony from other women with complaints about President Moshe Katsav’s sexual proclivities and his alleged abuse of power to satisfy them. He was in another round of questioning this morning by police investigating the allegations by Katsav’s former secretary about the president using physical force as well as his power as her boss, to make her have sex with him. Katsav is meanwhile denying everything, but he has hired one of the most prominent criminal lawyers in the country as part of a battery of well-connected lawyers who keep appearing in the press besmirching the accusing woman more than defending the president.

And in Ankara, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was meeting with Turkey’s leadership to discuss how and where Turkish troops would be posted to the new UNIFIL. Slowly but surely, the new UNIFIL is taking shape and Israeli troops are leaving south Lebanon. Current estimates say that all IDF troops will be out of Lebanon before the Jewish New Year holidays begin on September 22. At least, so Olmert and Peretz must be hoping.

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation