Column One: Tzipi and the drug lords
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Nov. 27, 2008
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Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has finally found a mission she can sink her
teeth into. This week Israel's would-be prime minister declared that she
will leave no stone unturned in her quest to commute the sentences of two
Israeli drug dealers just condemned to death by a court in Thailand.

Yigal Mahluf and Vladimir Agronik were arrested in Bangkok last December
while in possession of some 23,000 Ecstasy pills. Livni has promised that
she will take their case all the way to the King of Thailand if she needs
to.

Livni's decision to champion degenerates appears to be just another example
of what happens when a government has no sense of priorities. Indeed, she
seems to have no idea what her job is. Rather than use diplomacy to advance
the national interest, Livni uses diplomacy to help two criminals who have
harmed Israel's reputation. More tellingly, she embraced these national
embarrassments the same week she chose to do nothing as Israel was
repeatedly condemned for its crime of existing at the UN General Assembly.

As it does every year, this week the UN marked the General Assembly's
November 29, 1947 decision to accept the partition of the British Mandate of
Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state with a full schedule of events
bemoaning that decision and decrying the existence of Israel. If Livni had
any sense of priorities, she would have used the week as a means of
delegitimizing the UN, which is today the largest and most powerful
anti-Semitic organization in the world.

She would have ordered Israel's ambassadors in places like Thailand to use
the week as a way of persuading foreign governments to stop supporting the
UN's anti-Semitic agenda. But instead, her ministry announced that it was
going to ignore the UN this week. There is no point, the Foreign Ministry
said, to defending the country when the cards are stacked against us. The
notion that Israel can win by losing never seemed to occur to Livni.

ARGUABLY MORE disturbing than Livni's failure to grasp the purpose of
diplomacy is what her embrace of drug dealers tells us about what she
values, and what the government she represents values. Livni's actions on
behalf of Mahluf and Agronik call to mind the government's decision to free
unrepentant baby killer Samir Kuntar and four other Hizbullah terrorists and
hand over the bodies of 200 Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian terrorists to
Hizbullah, in exchange for the bodies of murdered IDF reservists Eldad Regev
and Ehud Goldwasser this past July.

Livni, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and their
colleagues presented their decision as a testament to their commitment to
IDF soldiers. But in their self-praise they conveniently forgot that their
actions empowered Israel's enemies and so increased the chance of war. Far
from a testament to their dedication to IDF soldiers, their decision
increased the chance that countless soldiers and civilians will be killed in
another war.

As with the bodies-for-terrorists swap last summer, so with the
clemency-for-drug-dealers this week, Livni exhibits a consistent moral
obtuseness in her repeated habit of placing the interests of the few above
the general interest of the country. And then after abandoning the common
good, she cynically presents her devotion to the few as proof of her
patriotism and leadership skills.

While Livni's actions lend to the conclusion that the government lacks any
sense of priorities, the truth is far more disturbing. The fact of the
matter is that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government lobbies for drug dealers
and frees baby killers not because they don't know what they are doing. They
advance these absurd policies to divert public scrutiny away from their
actual priorities - which are truly dangerous.

One of the government's main priorities is to inculcate Israel's vital
national institutions with its perverse view of the national interest. Doing
so will ensure that Israel suffers from the government's legacy of
incompetence and failure long after it is gone.

Take the IDF for instance. Last week the Prime Minister's Office leaked a
classified document to Haaretz which detailed the view of senior military
brass that Israel should give the Golan Heights to Iran's best Arab friend
Syria. By placing its national security in the hands of Iran's Arab proxy,
the General Staff claims absurdly that Israel will be better off because
Assad will disavow the very ties to Iran to which he owes Israel's
willingness to give him the Golan Heights.

More than anything else, the leaked document showed that despite all the
added training that soldiers have undergone since the Second Lebanon War,
and all the talk about learning the lessons of that war, the IDF is still
led by politicized generals who are willing to sacrifice the nation's
security if it makes them popular with the leftist media.

Top commanders like Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, OC Military
Intelligence Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin and their underlings are the legacy of
this government which promoted them. Their unreasonable and frankly
dangerous willingness to trust Assad exposes an ugly truth: If Hizbullah
(which thanks to Livni, Olmert, Barak and their strategically challenged IDF
subordinates has tripled its military strength since the 2006 war) renews
its war against Israel tomorrow, there is no reason to believe that the IDF
would be any more successful in defending the country and defeating
Hizbullah than it was in 2006.

The corruption of the IDF General Staff by incompetent and opportunistic
leaders exposes clearly some of the massive challenges that will face the
next government. But those challenges pale in comparison to the strategic
disaster that Olmert, Livni and Barak are preparing for their successors.

IN ITS waning days in office, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is seeking
to tether the next government to a set of policies that when taken
separately and together empower the country's enemies, destroy Israel's
strategic importance as a US ally and make it impossible for Israel to
defend itself either diplomatically or militarily.

During his visit last week to Washington, Olmert set out his agenda for his
last months in office. First, he is ceding massive amounts of territory to
the Palestinians. And second, he is seeking to commit the next government to
ceding still more territory to the Palestinians.

Over the past few months, Olmert has been rolling back all of the IDF's
military successes from Operation Defense Shield in 2002. He is transferring
control over Judea and Samaria to Palestinian militias and restraining IDF
operations in the areas to such a degree that within a short period of time,
the Palestinians will be able to rebuild their terror infrastructures in the
areas. This week Bethlehem was the latest city surrendered to the
Palestinians and from which the IDF will be all but barred from operating.
Hebron, Jenin, and Nablus have already been handed over to Fatah.

Olmert's massive land giveaways are being carried out with absolutely no
public discussion. They are being billed as a way to "empower" weak,
lame-duck Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But the fact is
that they simply set the course for Hamas's takeover of Judea and Samaria.

As for Hamas, while Olmert was in Washington, he sent his emissary Amos
Gilad to Cairo to negotiate an extension of Israel's one-sided cease-fire
with Hamas. The cease-fire that Gilad secured this summer did four things.
It enabled Hamas to stage a massive build-up of its military capabilities in
Gaza free from any threat of Israeli attack. It surrendered the military
initiative to Hamas. It paved the way for Hamas's international
legitimization. And it committed Israel to cease its counter-terror
operations in Judea and Samaria six months later.

This last devastating aspect of the cease-fire is the least discussed. Hamas
demanded that in return for its limitation of rocket and mortar offensives
against southern Israel, Israel cease its counter-terror efforts not only in
Gaza, but in Judea and Samaria as well. Israel balked but reportedly agreed
to curtail its activities in Judea and Samaria in six months.

In the intervening six months, Israel has set the conditions to do just
that. By transferring control over Palestinian cities to Fatah, which is no
match for Hamas, Israel has not only curtailed its own operations. It has
set the conditions for a Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria in the coming
year.

But this not all Olmert is doing. Aside from actually handing over territory
to the Palestinians, Olmert is striving to commit Israel's next government
to ceding still more territory including all remaining portions of Judea and
Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians. With Livni's full support, Olmert
is attempting to conclude a US-guaranteed agreement with Abbas that will
make such Israeli concessions binding on his successors.

If the next government tries to disavow Olmert's 11th hour surrender talks,
Olmert is setting conditions that will make it all but impossible for the
country to disengage from his commitments without wrecking its relations
with Washington. During his visit to the US capital, Olmert sought to
formalize his view that Israel is a US client state rather than a US ally
and so render it all but impossible for a future Israeli government to stand
up to US pressure.

Olmert's declared goal in his meeting with President George W. Bush was to
have Bush provide a meaningless pledge that the incoming Obama
administration and the Congress will honor Bush's already proffered empty
pledge to provide Israel with financial handouts for the next decade. By
presenting his request for handouts - in the midst of the gravest financial
crisis to hit the US economy in decades - as his chief concern, Olmert cast
Israel as a strategic liability and welfare case and so tried to undermine
any residual US support for Israel as a strategic ally and asset for
Washington.

AND THIS isn't all. While Olmert surrenders Israel's military initiative to
its enemies on all fronts and wrecks Israel's most important international
alliance, he seeks to take away Israel's long-term capacity to defend itself
from future military and diplomatic assaults. With his enthusiastic embrace
of the so-called Saudi peace plan, Olmert is committing Israel to accepting
the Arab narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Saudi plan is predicated on the wholly mendacious claim that there has
never been any Arab aggression against Israel - only Israeli aggression
against Arabs and legitimate Arab resistance to Israel. With Olmert now
giving his stamp of approval to the Saudi plan, he is denying the country
its moral right to defend itself both militarily and diplomatically.

In the coming weeks, as the elections draw near, the Israeli public will be
subject to countless mini-crises of the magnitude of the plight of Livni's
drug dealers to convince the public that she is a competent leader. Some of
these crises will be aimed at obfuscating the fact that she is a full
partner in Olmert's agenda. But no matter what their proximate cause, all of
these crises will serve the wider aim of hiding the government's real
priorities and actions from the public.

caroline@carolineglick.com