The leadership of Israel has become absolutely pathetic. I don't know where to start, and I will probably ramble on here. This has been building up for days so I hope it is coherent.
The war has been completely mismanaged. At every stage, the government has approved the minimum, this has led to unnecessary casualties and lousy results. There has been a role reversal here. The army is supposed to protect the civilians. In this war, the civilians are protecting the army. The political leadership has so far refused to send in enough troops to at least minimize the number of rockets fired because they are worried about troop casualties. What this means is that over 1 million residents in the North are exposed to 150 rockets daily putting their lives and property in danger.
It is 30 days since the fighting started, 150 rockets a day have been falling all this time and only now is the government debating whether to mount a full scale invasion. What has the government been doing for the past 30 days?
I have 1 question for all those who are against expanding ground operations, how do you stop the rockets on the North? Give a realistic alternative to a ground invasion, nobody has and nobody will because there is none.
On Sunday, Amir Peretz declared, if the diplomatic efforts don't work I will tell the army to try to go full out to stop the rockets. Can you believe what you are hearing? What have we supposedly been doing for the past 30 days?
Why did the government wait until Wednesday to have the security cabinet meeting when already on Sunday everyone heard that the army was pushing for a scale invasion? The government is acting like nothing is going on and we have all the time in the world.
Talk about Orwellian speech, for 30 days, rockets have been raining down on the North, over 100 a day, but according to Olmert we already won.
Olmert's comment that Lebanon's call to send 15,000 troops is "interesting" was an idiotic comment. In the middle of a war where civilians and soldiers are being killed, rockets are falling, and the press around the world is hanging on your every word, you call the offer "interesting"?????
Olmert's refusal to fight a real ground war is very simple. If he does, he admits that territory and boots on the ground actually means something, something that he has denied for the past 2 years. The whole theory of the hitnatkut was that we don't need to be in Gaza, we can maintain security from the air. The same goes for the convergence plan. This is exactly what the army and Olmert have been trying in Lebanon and have failed miserably. Air power and limited ground incursions have utterly failed to stop teh hezbollah rockets. Territory and boots on the ground do count and therefore this spells the end to the convergence plan.
Tzachi Hanegbi, that great corrupt political opportunist who fled the Likud to Kadima showed his true colors again. he is head of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of the Knesset, a pretty important post in wartime. Yet, he went on vacation to the US last week. 1 million people are either homeless or sitting in shelters, thousands of miluimnikim have been called up, and he can't even do his cushy job in the Knesset.
