IDF got off too easily in Comptroller's report on Mavi Marmara
In an article that's behind a paywall, Evelyn Gordon reports on why State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss went too easy on the IDF in his report on the Mavi Marmara incident. This is not the entire article (I got it by email).
Kudos to Minister Without Portfolio Benny Begin for having the guts to speak the truth. The botched raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza in 2010, he told the Knesset State Control Committee last week, was due first and foremost to poor planning by the Israel Defense Forces.
This isn’t to say that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak don’t richly deserve the coals of fire heaped on their heads by last week’s state comptroller’s report on the flotilla. The first rule of government is “don’t believe everything your generals tell you,” and their failure to heed that rule led directly to the raid’s bloody consequences: nine naval commandos wounded and nine of their Turkish assailants killed.
Nevertheless, the most shocking failure revealed by the report was that of someone whom the media seems largely to have ignored: then-IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
According to the report, Ashkenazi repeatedly warned government officials that the commandos would be met by violence when they boarded, including at a meeting of the “Septet” of senior cabinet ministers five days before the raid. “I think it's an illusion to think that if 20 people descend onto a ship with 400 people aboard they will be met with applause,” he told that meeting. “They will fight them.”
Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor then asked the obvious question: “Do you have enough men?” To which Ashkenazi replied: “There will not be [enough men] in the beginning…gradually there will be.”
In other words, Ashkenazi predicted exactly what ultimately happened: The commandos would board the ship, be attacked, and be badly outnumbered. Such a scenario made it inevitable that some commandos would be wounded or even killed, and also that they would be forced to open fire in self-defense, since only superior weaponry could compensate for their vastly inferior numbers. Yet he still submitted this plan to the cabinet as his operational recommendation.
In short, he knowingly submitted a plan whose only possible outcome was the very disaster that in fact occurred. And despite this, he assured the Septet that everything would be okay: “I want to clarify that it isn't easy but we will do it,” he said. “Gradually there will be” enough men.
Clearly, Ashkenazi’s testimony to the Septet should have sounded warning bells to all the ministers present. By blindly accepting his plan, Netanyahu and Barak were guilty of precisely the same failure that ultimately toppled their respective predecessors, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz: During the Second Lebanon War, Olmert and Peretz blithely accepted then-Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s assurances that aerial bombardment alone would defeat Hezbollah, when in reality, it not only failed to keep the organization from launching some 4,000 rockets at Israel and killing 163 Israelis, but also did so little damage that Hezbollah has since tripled its arsenal and taken over all of Lebanon to boot. Then, too, evidence existed that should have made them suspicious of Halutz’s promises: After all, both men were MKs during the 1991 Gulf War, when six weeks of aerial bombardment by the U.S.-led coalition failed so utterly to defeat Saddam Hussein that ground forces finally had to be sent in; why should they have imagined Israel’s far smaller air force could achieve better results?
Nevertheless, the fact remains that most prime ministers aren’t experts in the nitty-gritty of military planning, and shouldn’t have to be: They should be able to rely on the people whose job this actually is – the IDF’s top brass – to present them with feasible options. Halutz’s failure to do so could have been dismissed as an aberration. But when two successive chiefs of staff present the government with such delusional plans for important operations, one can’t help suspecting that the IDF’s problems go far deeper than a single bad commander.
This, however, is precisely why Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss was right to emphasize the importance of building up the National Security Council as a counterweight to the IDF: A prime minister can’t make good decisions if he lacks options to choose among. In this case, because he was offered no other military options, Netanyahu’s choices (once diplomatic efforts had failed) boiled down to either approving the IDF’s delusional plan or letting the ships proceed unmolested, which would effectively have ended the blockade of Gaza. Had a strong NSC with the resources to devise its own operational proposals existed, Netanyahu might have had some better choices.
Hmmm.
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Gabi Ashkenazi, Mavi Marmara, Micha Lindenstrauss
Grounding foreign policy in reality
This afternoon I received an email urging me to sign on (or more likely to get others to sign on) to a letter urging Mitt Romney to reject President Obama's embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood. After reading Caroline Glick's column, I believe it's at least as important to convince Israelis to pursue a foreign policy that's grounded in reality, and to stop believing that the Europeans are going to overcome hundreds of years of anti-Semitism and become our best friends. They're not. And while we're at it, it's at least as important to convince Romney to cut off Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan as to cut off the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is a column that should almost be read bottom up. The most stunning thing about the State Comptroller's report - as I noted previously - was the statement that Prime Minister Netanyahu believed until a week before that he had reached an arrangement through third parties by which Turkish Prime Minister
Erdogan would stop the flotilla. Caroline explains what's so
insane about that belief.
THE NATURE OF the flotilla organizers was also known in the months ahead of its departure for Gaza. The IHH's ties to al-Qaida had been documented. Netanyahu's staff knew that the IHH was so extreme that the previous Turkish government had barred its operatives from participating in humanitarian relief efforts after the devastating 1999 earthquake. They feared the group would use its relief efforts to radicalize the local population.
In and of itself, the fact that Erdogan was openly supporting IHH's leading role in the flotilla told Israel everything it needed to know about the Turkish leader's intentions. And yet, up until a week before the flotilla set sail, Netanyahu was operating under the impression that he had struck a deal with Erdogan.
It is likely that Netanyahu was led to believe that a deal had been crafted by the Americans.
Obama is not the only American leader that has been seduced into believing that Erdogan and his Islamist AKP Party are trustworthy strategic partners for the US. Many key members of Congress share this delusional view.
According to a senior congressional source, Turkey's success in winning over the US Congress is the result of a massive Turkish lobbying effort. Through two or three front groups, the Turkish government has become one of the most active lobbying bodies in Washington. It brings US lawmakers and their aides on luxury trips to Turkey and hosts glittering, glamorous receptions and parties in Washington on a regular basis. And these efforts have paid off.
Turkey's bellicosity towards Israel as well as Greece and Cyprus has caused it no harm in Washington. Its request to purchase a hundred F-35 Joint Strike Fighters faced little serious opposition. The US continues to bow to its demands to disinvite Israel from international forum after international forum - most recently the upcoming US-hosted counter-terrorism summit in Istanbul.
Certainly Turkey's strategic transformation under Erdogan's leadership from a pro-Western democracy into an anti-Western Islamist police state has dire implications for American national interests. And the Americans would be well-served to look beyond the silken invitations to Turkish formal events at five-star hotels and see what is actually happening in the sole Muslim NATO member-state. But whether the US comes to its senses or not is its business.
Israel had no business buying into the fiction in 2010 that Erdogan could be reasoned with.
True, today no one in Israel operates under that delusion anymore. But the basic phenomenon of our leaders failing to distinguish between what they want to happen and what can happen continues to exist.
Amazingly, Israel is repeating the same mistakes with Catherine Ashton and the European Union (and actually has been making the same mistakes for longer with Ashton and the Europeans than with the Turks).
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Catherine Ashton, European Union, Mavi Marmara, Micha Lindenstrauss, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey
Did Erdogan double cross Netanyahu?
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have
double crossed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, resulting in Israel being unprepared for the arrival of the terror flotilla led by the Mavi Marmara in May 2010.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave Israel the impression through third parties that he would keep the Mavi Marmara from setting sail in May 2010, the Prime Minister's Office was quoted as saying in the State Comptroller's report released Wednesday.
"The Prime Minister worked intensively through diplomatic channels, principally with the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, to stop the flotilla," the state comptroller's report quoted the PMO as saying. "The efforts led to a high feasibility that the Turkish flotilla would be prevented."
The PMO told the state comptroller that Erdogan, contrary to the impression he created, refrained from stopping the flotilla, and that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was only briefed about that a week before the flotilla set sail.
The State Comptroller's report was critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman due to their handling of the flotilla.
Read the whole thing. More
here.
Labels: Avigdor Lieberman, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Mavi Marmara, Micha Lindenstrauss
State of Israel funded commendations for Mavi Marmara passengers
In his annual report, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss says that the State of Israel financed commendations to six Israeli Arab passengers on the Mavi Marmara terror ship in 2010. The commendations, which cost a total of NIS 5,000 ($1380), were presented by the Israeli Arab Ta'al party, and were
purchased with moneys received from the State of Israel.
A week after the flotilla, United Arab List-Ta'al Chairman MK Ibrahim Sarsur granted six commemorative plaques worth a total of NIS 5,000 ($1,380) to MK Hanin Zoabi (Balad), Islamic Movement leader Sheikh Ra'ad Salah and others.
That's Salah in the picture at the top (second from left).
According to the report, which examined the state's political party funding, the faction paid NIS 5,000 to buy the brass plaques, for the activists who took part in the flotilla on which IDF soldiers were brutally attacked and nine Turks were killed.
They listed the plaques as an expense aimed at keeping in touch with the party's supporters, as they were given out to well known people who represent an extensive section of the Arab Israeli sector.
The Comptroller noted in the report that the funds should never have been used to purchase the plaques and that their purchase could not be included in the "keeping in touch with the voters" clause as they were given as personal gifts directly to a small number of people. He added that their purchase from the public was illegitimate.
This is a case in which not only were public funds misappropriated, they were also uses to honor a group of people who took part in a flotilla against Israel.
...
MK Sarsur said he was summoned to the State Comptroller's office where he was told that he used the funds contrary to state procedure. "I told them that there was no clause forbidding what we did," the MK told Ynet.
He added that "the flotilla participants took steps in line with social and political activity and their stance is justified, a kind of defense of values." Sarsur stressed that he did not regret his actions.
As long as Israel's Arab community continues to elect the likes of Sarsur and Hanin Zoabi as its representatives to the Knesset, Israeli Jews will continue to be suspicious about which side Israel's Arab take and whether they'd rather live with the 'Palestinians.'
Labels: Hanin Zoabi, Ibrahim Sarsur, Israeli Arabs are a fifth column, Mavi Marmara, Micha Lindenstrauss, Raed Sallah
In an article that's behind a paywall, Evelyn Gordon reports on why State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss went too easy on the IDF in his report on the Mavi Marmara incident. This is not the entire article (I got it by email). 
