Olmert in the Shadows

Olmert in the Shadows

Ehud Olmert and the shady figures surrounding him are creatures of spin. They seem to believe, apparently with good reason, that they can get away with anything as long as they control the way it’s portrayed through the media. So far nobody has proved them wrong, but this may change in the next few weeks as the Talansky-Olmert probe bites deeper into the vitals of the government.

Olmert and people like him exhibit a diseased attitude to reality. To them, the world is a kind of amateur talent show writ large. As long as you can keep the crowd entertained, you can stay on the stage. People will call you Prime Minister, and the GSS will guard you and your family 24 hours a day. You will possess immense powers and perks that the public cannot see, in consequence of which rich and powerful men will seek your acquaintance and slip you envelopes full of money. All you have to do is make sure that the show goes on.

In the perception of the public there is another side of the job, one that has to do with running the country: Making hard budgetary choices, preparing the army and the country for war, taking the decision to nip the Hamas terror state in the bud so as to neutralize its influence when the really big war to the north and east starts. One gets the sense that for Olmert and his colleagues this is the shadowy part of the job, the one that doesn’t seems real and with which they never need, and never do, come to grips. Every politician of course has to manage his relationship with his public, in order to stay in power and in order to marshal resources and commit people to the things he really wants to accomplish. But for Olmert and his ilk, PR is the job. It’s not about accomplishing anything in particular, but about staying onstage.

Oh yes, I know, dangerous negotiations with the Palestinians and the Syrians are going on all the time. A year ago Olmert turned the Palestinian business over to Tzipi Livni and she’s going at it with devotion of a true believer. In the aftermath of his failure in the Second Lebanon War Olmert turned the IDF over to Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. We don’t know if Ashkenazi’s a strategic planner, but he does appear to know how to train regiments and battalions, the building blocks of an army. When Olmert can find someone competent to do a piece of his work he turns it over to them and something gets done. When it comes to hard decisions, though—to go to war in Gaza, to make Israel’s educational system function, or to provide more resources for defense without busting the budget—Olmert simply isn’t there.

Olmert is actually pretty clever, but his thought processes are ill suited to evaluating complex problems and pursuing a strategy. His vaunted peace overture to Syria was handled in an amateurish fashion. He acted as if Assad were Morris Talansky or Eli Yishai: Offer him something he wants (the Golan) and he’ll come around. Olmert doesn’t appear to have considered that for Assad to accept such an offer, he would have to be convinced that all other avenues lead to a dead end and that the prospect of war with Israel was getting more, not less dangerous. But Assad has good reason not to think that and he snubbed Olmert, publicly and insultingly. With Lebanon knuckling under to Hizbullah and the clock running down on the American military presence in Iraq, Assad probably figures that he’ll pick up a lot more than just the Golan when Iran’s plans for Israel come to fruition.

From Olmert’s perspective, George Bush’s visit to Israel was a disaster. For months everyone in Israel anticipated, with horror or with glee, that Olmert would use the Bush visit to state just what he’s willing to give up, as the overture to new elections. But the Talansky business rendered anything Olmert would say non-credible and if there are new elections now Olmert won’t be a candidate. Even when Olmert decided to confine himself to soothing generalities about peace, Hamas ruined his show. It blew in the roof of an Ashkelon mall just as Bush and Olmert were having their celebrated press conference. The conference got no coverage, and Olmert was forced to spend the next 24 hours talking about war with the Hamas rather than peace. From Olmert’s perspective the whole visit turned out to be a PR disaster.

But this is only of importance to Olmert and his ilk, who think that PR successes or disasters are the only significant successes or disasters there are. There is indeed a whole other, real world beside the shadow world of spin and show. Eventually reality catches up with you. It’s catching up with Olmert right now. He thought you can manipulate public opinion and sell the perquisites of office forever, and it turns out that not even he can do it. Come to think of it, the main characteristic of the criminal mind is inadequate grasp of reality, the inability to imagine or take seriously the consequences of one’s actions. That’s Olmert in a nutshell.

The real question of course is how an entire people can make an Olmert, or a Sharon, their leader and not see through them. That’s a lot more serious than the criminal propensities of this or that politician. Olmert ignored the law and now it’s catching up with him. He led Israelis, however, in ignoring the mounting strategic threat from both north and south, and now that threat is catching up with Israel with giant strides.