William Mehlman

In an interview with the popular German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton declared the Bush Administration’s foreign policy to be “in free fall.”

Bolton’s specific reference was to the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate asserting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons production program in 2003. “I know the people who wrote that estimate,” Bolton averred during a January stop in Israel to participate in the annual conference of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center’s Institute for Policy and Strategy. “They are not from our intelligence community. They’re from our State Department. It was a highly politicized document written by people who had a very clear policy objective.” This was, of course, the same State Department whose thinly veiled distaste for Bolton’s redefinition of UN diplomacy in terms of America’s vital interests dulled President Bush’s appetite for a fight with the Pelosi-Reid Congress for the prolongation of his mission. Never one to mince words, Bolton said that in embracing the NIE report, the president was “acting against his own judgment and instincts under the influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

Had he been in Israel a week earlier, the ambassador might have witnessed even more pointed evidence of the Bush foreign policy in free fall. It was exemplified by the president’s performance at his January 9th reception at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. It’s doubtful that he ever delivered a speech so pockmarked with errors, half truths and sheer nonsense in all his seven years in office.

The mess was evident from the outset. “I reiterate my appreciation for the Arab League peace initiative,” he intoned. Granted even the most generous definition of “peace initiative,” it would require a giant leap of the imagination to construe this as anything but fiction. There is not, nor has there ever been a peace initiative directed at Israel by the Arab League. The so-called Saudi Initiative, belatedly adopted by the League, hardly meets that criterion. The Arab League’s operational charter recognizes Israel only as an illegal entity. A bit further on, the president was heard praising “both sides” for “getting down to the business of negotiating.” Nearly a month and a half after Annapolis, they haven’t even settled on a declaration of principles.

The going got progressively worse. In defining his “vision” of “two democratic states living side-by-side in peace and security,” the president called for “an end to the occupation that began in 1967.” In parroting this contemptuous reference to Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, the president put himself in league with the historical revisionist assault on the Jewish state’s solid claim to those lands under the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo and Paris Treaties, the League of Nations mandate and Israel’s own Basic Law.

Some of the components of Mr. Bush’s vision represented downright threats to Israel’s viability. Whether or not he realized it, the president’s goal of a “contiguous” Palestinian state, linking Gaza with Judea and Samaria, would mean the bifurcation of the Jewish state. And his call for a final status agreement predicated on “adjustments to the armistice lines of 1949” would effectively reverse every strategic territorial gain Israel made in 1967 and 1973. Moreover, it is totally at odds with Bush’s parallel insistence that Israel must emerge from this “peace process” with “secure and defensible borders.”

The President’s vow that evening that “no Palestinian state will be born of terror” flew in the face of reality. The gunmen of Tanzim and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades are root and branch of the Palestinian Authority the President would make sovereign in Judea and Samaria. Eliminating them would be tantamount to the PA’s self-immolation.

Mr. Bush’s closing assessment that “the establishment of a Palestinian state is long overdue” was dubious at best. His prediction that “it will enhance the stability of the region and contribute to the security of the people of Israel” would have made a tea leaf reader blush.

The impression of a policy in free fall created by the president’s January 9th speech in Jerusalem was at such variance with the strength and clarity of purpose he displayed in his June 2002 address to the graduating class at West Point that one can only wonder if it was a Bush Doppelganger who showed up at the King David Hotel.

There, at West Point, stood a George W. Bush with a “vision” worthy of the name, unflinching, undiplomatic in the best sense of the word, telling us there could be “no neutrality between the innocent and the guilty, between justice and cruelty.” He said that “we [were] in conflict between good and evil” and that America would “call evil by its name.” By confronting evil and lawless regimes, he assured us, “we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.”

It was a speech blessedly free of contrivance, moral equivalency and fiction dressed up as truth. Endless, purposeless diplomatic schmoozing, toothless economic sanctions and other excuses for inaction against tyrants were not on the president’s agenda that day. “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best,” he said. “All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price…We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world…”

A U.S. president in free fall was the last thing an Israel in free fall needed. The scene that attended Bush’s arrival had the trappings of a comic opera as it might have been directed and choreographed by Federico Fellini. Jerusalem was in a semi-locked down mode with 10,000 cops on the streets and security agents of every description tripping over each other. The entrance to the King David Hotel was reconfigured into a tunnel, accessible only to the privileged, and there within its sumptuous confines stood the drama’s three protagonists – a lame duck president, a prime minister with the credibility of an Atlantic City blackjack dealer and a secretary of state who thinks Fatah is a chapter of the NAACP.

They had all assembled with their entourages for the rhetorical spade-turning on a “homeland for the Palestinian people.” Abu Mazen, its putative president, was there only in spirit. “Health reasons” would have precluded his acceptance of an invitation even had it been proffered.

Obsequy was the flavor of the evening. One eventually lost count of the number of times Mr. Olmert thanked the president for gracing Israel with his presence. Anybody exiting the premises uninformed of his view that George Bush was the greatest gift bestowed on the Jewish people since the parting of the Red Sea must have had his hearing-aid turned off. Bush, alternately dazed and embarrassed, looked for all the world like the chosen victim for a revival of the old “This Is Your Life” TV show as he was mindlessly mugged with a super-saccharine rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Aside from a bitchy query about “illegal outposts” ( Bush: “they should go”), the only disconcerting note of the evening was sounded by Mr. Olmert—and it was pure comedy. Exhausted with paeans to the “peace process,” the prime minister veered off at one point into an ultimately fruitless attempt to mollify coalition partner Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right wing Israel Beiteinu party, by playing tough guy on the Jerusalem issue. A visibly displeased Condoleezza Rice was the only one playing it straight. Meanwhile, over at the Dan Panorama Hotel, headquarters for the press corps accompanying Bush, a group of anti-road map activists were being charged by the police with “incitement” and “sedition” for distributing a pamphlet by investigative reporter Arlene Kushner questioning the “moderate” credentials of Abu Mazen and his Fatah organization. They were finally released with a reprimand.

The President and his entourage are gone, the American flags refurled, the King David Hotel restored to its pristine dignity, the streets of Jerusalem back in normal gridlock mode. Reality has returned to Israel but not without some lingering Felliniesque overtones. Avigdor Lieberman and Israel Beiteinu have quit Ehud Olmert’s coalition, reducing its governing majority from 78 to 67 seats. Entreaties from President Bush for Lieberman to remain in harness melted in the face of the threat to his already tattered right-wing credentials posed by the prime minister’s inability to further delay discussion of “core issues” with the Palestinians. If George Bush is in free fall, Israel isn’t going to provide a parachute.

Things haven’t gotten any brighter on other fronts for Mr. Olmert. The bereaved parents of 119 soldiers who fell in the 2006 Second Lebanon War have vowed to block roads and stage protests and hunger strikes until and unless the prime minister “goes home.” At this writing the Winograd Committee’s full report on his handling of the war is still a week away from release, but Winograd’s verdict on his ordering of a ground offensive when he knew a cease-fire was just hours away is expected to be especially damning. Thirty three IDF soldiers were killed in that inexplicable operation.

Olmert is taking further military flack from a letter published by 50 young IDF company commanders demanding his resignation. An inflammatory response by an unnamed aide has turned the incident into a cause celebre. “How dare these young officers judge the functioning of the prime minister,” he replied, admonishing a group that braved more than a month of fire in defense of Israel for “not having even done anything yet in their lives.”

The direst threat—military and political—to Olmert’s continued tenancy of the prime minister’s office is coming from the IDF reserves—the veteran officers and non-coms whose services were so scandalously ill-used during Lebanon II. They are the main source of pressure on Defense Minister Ehud Barak to fulfill a pledge to take his 19 Labor seats out of the coalition if the Winograd Commission report nails Olmert to the wall. Barak is thought to be desperately looking for a way to keep the coalition alive and prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from ascending to power without destroying his own credibility with the army he once led. It won’t be easy.

Meanwhile, in south Lebanon, a place where troubles don’t melt like lemon drops, Israel has witnessed the biggest military exercise ever put on by Hezbollah—three days of intensive maneuvers involving thousands of guerillas in infantry, anti-tank and antiaircraft units. All this under the noses of UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army. IDF intelligence reports that Hezbollah is getting almost daily shipments from Syria of Katyusha rockets and anti-tank missiles. Moreover, the terror group has now completely rebuilt its pre-war underground fortifications north of the Litani River—outside UN detection, but in range of Israel.

The Olmert government’s response has been a flat rejection of the preemptive strike urged by outgoing IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Moshe Kaplinsky. Instead, the government appears to be resting its hopes on UNIFIL, the same UNIFIL that has studiously ignored Hezbollah’s rearmament since the end of Lebanon II. Almost comically, even as Israel pressures the Europeans to continue contributing troops to this self-blinded collection of “peace keepers,” General Claudio Graziano, their commander, is issuing frantic warnings that the tension in south Lebanon and the deepening Lebanese political crisis could prompt the Europeans to close down the whole UNIFIL operation.

What passes for long range strategic thinking has also taken on a Felliniesque accent in the wake of President Bush’s visit. University of Haifa Professor Arnon Sofer, who doubles as a popular lecturer at the IDF’s National Defense College, compares Israel under Olmert to the Titanic, “where up on the Tel Aviv main deck they’re having a big party – a stock market orgy.” On the one hand, he assails “the leftists and so-called human rights lawyers who only care about the well being of cats, dogs and Palestinians, but never about Jews.” On the other, he is ecstatic over the 2005 Gaza disengagement, whose purpose, he claims, was “not to put an end to terrorism or Kassam fire,” but to “stop being responsible for a million and a half Arabs who continue to multiply in conditions of poverty and madness. I am thrilled we are out of there.”

So what about those Kassams coming down over the western Negev? “The Kassams,” Sofer replies, “do not constitute a strategic threat.” Nor does he regard Iran as a strategic threat. “Much ado about nothing. Two missiles on the Iranian islands of Karaj and Seri and Iran’s entire oil revenue drops from $60 billion to zero. Iran is so weak and vulnerable, it’s unbelievable.” Sofer’s formula for Israeli survival: Complete the security fence “and then whoever tries tocross it gets a bullet in the head….If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.”

Over and above all others, the two most Felliniesque characters in this post-Bush bash scenario are Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres. In a week that saw the western Negev on the receiving end of 160 Kassams, while the organization of a modern-day “Kindertransport” of traumatized Sderot children to America was taking shape, Mr. Olmert was telling us that pain was the only antidote to our existential concerns.

The more pain we accept—the handover of Judea and Samaria, the division of Jerusalem—the greater our chances for survival. He draws the line on the Palestinians’ professed “right of return,” but rumor has it he’s prepared to admit a “token” 50,000 “refugees” if that will close the deal. Praise for George Bush remains open-ended: “He’s not doing a single thing that I don’t agree to. He doesn’t support anything that I oppose. He doesn’t say a thing that he thinks will make life harder for Israel.” On at least the first two counts, the prime minister is being completely accurate. As former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens points out, “the Annapolis Conference would never have taken place had Olmert not made it clear that he was looking forward to such a conference where he could publicly state his view that the State of Israel is finished if a Palestinian state does not come into being. The slogans ‘two states for two peoples’ and ‘the occupation must end’ were launched in Israel, not in Washington.”

Never, in Mr. Olmert’s view, has Israel been surrounded by so many loving and influential European friends— Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in England, Nicholas Sarkozy in France, Angela Merkel in Germany. But, he hastens to remind us, “the world that is friendly to Israel…the world that really supports Israel, when it speaks of the future, speaks of Israel in terms of the ’67 borders. It speaks of the division of Jerusalem.” The Prime Minister’s wonderful world of Israel supporters clearly does not include the 50 million or so Christian Zionists who oppose the division of Jerusalem and an Israeli retreat to the pre-June 1967 lines.

At the Felliniesque pinnacle stands Israel’s president and Aesopian sage Shimon Peres. The clairvoyant Mr. Peres envisions Israel’s future encapsulated in the single word globalization. “Globalization,” he informs us, “has taken the place of nationalism and boundaries in today’s marketplace. It seems that today, territories and boundaries have lost their importance.” Security fences? Defensible borders? Anachronisms. Symbols of a bygone age. “In the world of today,” Peres asserts, “science has taken the place of the earth and the place of the government has been taken by the globe. Today’s world proves that empires could be established without colonization or an army. You just need to look at the empire Bill Gates has built. Look how much power he has.”

We can’t be sure at this early stage in his ruminations whether Mr. Peres might be suggesting dropping George Bush in favor of a defense pact with Microsoft, but it might be an idea worth pursuing.

William Mehlman represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the Jerusalem-based internet magazine ZionNet (www.zionnet.net) .