Electile dysfunction!

An intelligence report suggests GW moves closer to Moscow and Putin's view of how to handle Iran and this explains Sate Department Undersecretary Nicholas Burn's departure. (See 1 below.)

Avi Dichter takes strong exception to Olmert's handling of Hamas' missile attacks and argues a new approach must be devised and taken. (See 2 below.)

Bolton, visiting Israel for the IDC Herzliya Conference continue to express his view regarding the NIE Report that it has skewed out ability vis a vis Iran and has politicized intelligence. (See 3 below)

4) Jonathan Tobin believes Olmert could have stood up to GW and all he needed to do, if he wished, was to have GW visit Sderot. Tobin does not know what is in Olmert's mind but believes, based on Olmert's pronouncements, he intends to move forward on a deal with Abbas despite Abbas' ability to actually deliver anything enforceable. (See 4 below.)

Even Israel's top military commander, Gabi Ashkenazi, says the homefront is becoming the battle front, repeats his concerns about a nuclear Iran, which be believes is intolerable, and again stresses lessons learned from Lebanon. He states Israel must remain strong military in the face of its escalating confrontation with strengthened terrorist forces. (See 5 below.)

While I was away several states went through their voting and it reflects continued "up in the air" status on both sides. Hillary can claim victory in Nevada but won by a rather small majority and one can claim the decision of the Culinary Union throwing its weight behind Obama came too late to have much impact. One could also argue that the more Hillary and Bill go through their manipulative and disengenuos attacks on Obama the more they are alienating their party's black constituents.

Edwards was Obama's spoiler and might want to stay in to see can he becomes a king maker.

On the Republican side, McCain may have dealt Huckabee a blow from which Huckabee might not recover but one could also argue Thompson kept Hucakbee from possibly winning but lacks the clout of Edwards and Thompson would do himself and the remaining candidates a favor if he folded his tent.

Florida is obviously crucial for Giuliani as well as McCain and also Romney.

David Frum's new book (I only heard a PBS interview) is a fascinating explanation of where Republicans must journey if they choose to be viable going forward.



We are experiencing, politically speaking, the equivalence of electile dysfunction!

Dick


1)Washington lines up with Moscow’s soft diplomacy on Iran, Nicholas Burns drops out

Nicholas Burns’ retirement as US undersecretary for political affairs Friday, Jan. 18, and his replacement by US ambassador to Moscow William Burns, take the Bush administration’s strategy on Iran’s nuclear activities a stage closer to Moscow’s line of soft diplomacy.

State department spokesman Sean McCormack Saturday played down expectations that the six powers meeting in Berlin next Tuesday would produce a consensual UN sanctions resolution. The group - the US, Russia, China, UK, France and Germany - were deadlocked at previous meetings by Moscow and Beijing’s opposition to harsh measures. The change in Washington is indicated by McCormack’s reference to “multilateral diplomacy.”

The outgoing Nicholas Burns, in the No. 3 State Department spot, held the Iran portfolio and led the Bush administration’s drive for tough sanctions at the UN Security Council. (He is the 19th diplomat to quit the State Department in recent weeks). Ambassador Burns (no relation) is closer to the Russian approach.

Moscow sources note that President George W. Bush has in recent months taken strides towards closing the gap with the Kremlin on Iran.

President Valdimir Putin’s standard line - I have no information that Iran is developing nuclear arms – was corroborated by the US National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion in December that Tehran had shelved its military program in 2003.

Circles close to Putin maintain that the two presidents began working together quietly in October 2007, on the shared understanding that affirmative tactics were preferable to tough penalties for weaning Tehran away from uranium enrichment, even temporarily. Therefore, after long opposition, Bush surprisingly came out in favor of Moscow’s decision to consign uranium fuel rods for Iran’s atomic reactor in Bushehr.

Sources in the Persian Gulf and Vienna disclose, moreover, that the US president also lined up with Saudi King Abdullah on a decision to relegate the handling of Iran’s nuclear issues to the UN nuclear watchdog’s director Mohammed ElBaradei.

ElBaradei was therefore accorded the unusual honor of an audience with Iran’s supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei when he visited Tehran on Jan. 12. He was told he could expect full cooperation from the Iranian government and promised answers to his questions on the tough questions of the uranium enrichment process and plutonium production.

The US and Russian governments both believe that an important breakthrough has been achieved and a way forward for further diplomatic engagement on the hitherto intractable Iranian nuclear program.

The United States has therefore turned away from confrontation with Iran and consigned its clandestine nuclear projects to the routine diplomatic track.

This course is diametrically opposed to the policy pursued by Nicholas Burns in recent years. His resignation was therefore logical.

2)Minister raps "inadequate" Israeli army action in Gaza, jabs prime minister Olmert


Internal security minister Avi Dichter warned the Israeli cabinet meeting in Jerusalem Sunday, Jan. 20, that without a new kind of military deterrence to halt the Palestinian missile offensive from Gaza, Sderot would break down. He asked why the chief of staff was absent from the session.

The minister, a former Shin Bet director, took sharp issue with prime minister Ehud Olmert, who he said he was encouraged by finding less complaints and more appreciation for the IDF when he visited Sderot last Thursday.

Dichter went on to blast the defense minister and chief of staff: “Current tactics in Gaza are making no difference at all,” he said. Gazan [Russian] roulette against civilians is no basis for strategy. The people living within range of Gaza have lost hope in the face of a “thick-skinned government.”

There has to be a different kind of deterrence to stop the missiles, mortars and snipers coming at the rate of dozens a day, said the internal security minister. “And if there is no choice, let the Gazans pay the price and let there be ghost towns there, not here.”




3)The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, as well as the skewed reporting around it, is a sign of the "illegitimate politicization" of the American intelligence establishment, according to former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.



The document reportedly said Iran stopped its nuclear weapons production program in 2003.

While "Iran's nuclear program is continuing and expanding," Bolton told The Jerusalem Post at a book-signing in a Tel Aviv Steimatzky on Sunday, "the NIE has had a devastating impact on our global efforts to try and constrain Iran."

"I know the people who wrote this intelligence estimate," Bolton continued. "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."

The former ambassador decried the lack of separation between "intelligence and policy."

"Generating intelligence should be separated from policy-makers, but it should also be separated from intelligence analysts who impose their own policy views on the intelligence they generate," insisted Bolton, who is in the country to attend the Herzliya Conference this week.

Furthermore, said Bolton, the NIE "doesn't say what you probably think it says. Once you get past the first sentence or two, it doesn't come out that different from the 2005 NIE. All of the attention was focused on the one finding that [Iran halted the weapons-building] aspect of the weapons program, even though later they say that they only have 'moderate confidence' that this suspension has continued. That's a polite way of saying they don't have a clue what the situation is."

The document also defines the weapons program as "actual weaponization, that is, fabrication - only a tiny sliver of the total activity required for a country to have a nuclear weapons program. It still remains entirely within Iran's discretion when and under what circumstances it proceeds to a nuclear weapons capability."

The release of such a politicized report by those responsible for American intelligence analysis was possible, Bolton believes, because "there is still no effective supervision over the intelligence community. It's been a problem for a long time. The [newly-established] director of national intelligence position didn't solve it. So it remains and will be a significant challenge for the next president to get under control."

Bolton calls the NIE "a quasi-coup by the intelligence services," which was "intended to have a political and policy effect. I think that's illegitimate [for] the bureaucracy [to have done]. In our system, constitutional legitimacy flows from the president, who was elected, through his officials. It's not like a European system, where the foreign policy establishment really does develop foreign policy. Too much policy is developed by the bureaucracy independent of political control. It's a longstanding cultural problem, and it will take a long time to fix it."
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4)) Olmert Can Always Say ‘No’
By Jonathan Tobin

Bush and Rice are deluded, but the decision to push ahead on talks remains Israel's


If you believe the opinion polls — and there's no reason not to — George W. Bush doesn't have many fans. And last week, the dwindling number of Bush loyalists got a bit smaller.


For the majority of American Jews who are Democrats, nothing — not even Bush's first visit as president to Israel — was bound to win him much applause.


Despite the opposition to the Iraq war and bitterness that dates back to the 2000 election, the president has still been able to fall back on his reputation as the best friend Israel has had in the White House, a tag that was earned via steadfast support for the Jewish State during the worst of the second intifada and the 2005 fight against Hezbollah along the country's northern border.


But the Bush trip to Jerusalem last week did not result in general hosannas from the pro-Israel community. Indeed, for many of his most steadfast backers in this sector, the rhetoric coming out of the presidential party was nothing short of a disaster.

THE OLD RULEBOOK

The decision to press ahead with Israel-Palestinian peace talks after the Annapolis summit is exactly what Bush's opponents on the left have chided him for not doing the first seven years of his presidency. They have wanted him to embrace the peace process that former Bill Clinton embraced in his presidency and even blamed Bush for the absence of peace, even though the Palestinians are the ones to blame for choosing terror over peace.


Bush changed the course chosen by the Clinton administration by refusing to meet with Yasser Arafat. He proclaimed that the Palestinians would have to give up terror in order to get a state, and said that any peace deal would be based on the reality of Israeli settlements and not solely on the pre-1967 borders.


In 2002 and 2004, Bush had appeared to throw away the old rulebook of U.S. Middle East diplomacy, which "realists" who had dominated the State Department in his father's time had always championed. But in 2008, that rulebook, which emphasized pressure on Israel to make concessions in exchange for empty Arab promises, is back in place as Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have plunged head first into the diplomatic maelstrom.


Bush made it clear last week that he was prepared to apply "a little pressure" on Israel to get it to agree to a peace deal that few in the country believe is possible. Despite other comments that demonstrated his friendship for Israel, his goal of shepherding a Palestinian state into existence during his presidency seemed to be the priority. He even said that Israel was going to have to discuss the so-called Palestinian "right of return."


All this has left Americans — both Jewish and non-Jewish who liked Bush's former policies — stumped and saddened.


Some blame the influence of his father and elder Bush luminaries like former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker. Others point to the need to appease Arab public opinion for the sake of the war in Iraq. Still others point to the increased influence of Rice in the aftermath of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's departure in 2006.


That may all be true. Yet while both Americans and Israelis have attempted to parse the contradictions in Bush's policies and sought to find their authors inside the administration, the obvious answer to the decision to go ahead is right under their noses. Far from being Bush's helpless victim and subject to the awful "pressure" that Israel has always dreaded, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fully behind the current plan.


Olmert has been sending clear signals that he is ready to do a deal with the Palestinians, which replicates the wildly generous terms offered to Arafat by Ehud Barak at Taba. He has told Israelis that the world doesn't accept an undivided Jerusalem, and that they must learn to live with this. And he has made it clear that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is his peace partner, no matter what Fatah terrorists do.


No one but Olmert and his closest advisers know whether he really thinks that Abbas can sign a peace deal that accepts Israel as a Jewish state within any borders — or that he would survive if he did. It may be that domestic political considerations have led them to believe that pursuing a peace process, even a futile one, is his best bet to hang on to office, despite popularity ratings even lower than Bush. But while Bush is the senior partner in this alliance, Olmert is still the one in the driver's seat on this question. Anyone who thinks the prime minister is being dragged kicking and screaming to the table is dead wrong.


All of this leads us to the question that many refuse to contemplate: Could Olmert say "no" to Bush and Rice if he wanted to?


Despite Israel's dependence on the United States for military and diplomatic support, the answer is a resounding "yes."


Even as a lame duck with a secretary of state who is desperate for a diplomatic coup, there's nothing to indicate that Bush would implement this strategy if Olmert said it was dead on arrival.

GO TO SEDEROT

If Olmert wanted to, he could have said that anyone in the president's delegation who wanted to know why even Israelis who oppose settlements have no intention of handing over more territory to the Palestinians need only take a visit to Sederot.


That Israeli town within the 1949 armistice lines remains under siege as Kassam missiles launched from "Hamasistan" in Gaza — territory Israel left in 2005 — rain down on its people every day. If Israel backs up to the 1967 borders the same scene could be played out in 2009 at Ben-Gurion airport.


Olmert could have stated last week that until incitement against Israel and Jews on Abbas' own P.A.-controlled broadcast media ceased, peace was impossible. Indeed, 15 years of post-Oslo Palestinian autonomy has resulted in a new generation of Palestinians raised on hatred.


In response to suggestions that Israel negotiate about the "right of return," Olmert could have pointed out that several hundred thousand Jews were expelled or forced to flee from Arab countries after 1948, and are just as deserving of recognition and compensation as Arabs who fled Israel.


But for good or for ill, Olmert has done none of this.


The premier would certainly face some heat from Washington if he just said "no." But it's just as certain that if he did that and called on Israel's many friends in both major parties in the United States to back him up, Bush would not have persisted.


Those disillusioned by Bush's flip-flop are right to criticize him. But anyone who thinks that Israel is being forced to go along is focusing on the wrong end of the partnership. What happens in the next year — whether it turns out to be peace, war or the more likely option of a continued stalemate — remains a fate that Israel's democratically elected government is choosing of its own free will.

5) IDF chief: Home front becoming battlefront: Israel's top military man, Gabi Ashkenazi warns home front is becoming part of the battlefront in Herzliya Conference held in Knesset




"In every conflict, the threat on the home front is increasing and it is becoming part of the battlefront. We see this everyday in Gaza Vicinity communities," Ashkenazi said in a speech at the Herzliya Conference, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Center and held at the Knesset.



He added that the IDF operates in Gaza day and night in order to confront this threat.



Ashkenazi that the steadfastness of residents of Sderot and other Gaza Vicinity communities was exemplary.



Ashkenazi also mentioned that a nuclear-armed Iran represented a threat to the Middle East as whole that Israel could not allow.



"The IDF is geared up to deal with the complicated reality of future challenge as well as all essential issues. Among them are learning and implementing lessons learned from the Second Lebanon War: The power of new weapons, readiness to fight, the quality of human resources and taking care of them, the training of the chain of command and more."



Ashkenazi also said that "in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel as an independent country, democratic and prosperous, we must maintain a strong army that can confront the spectrum of threats."



"We have in front of us a Middle East that is undergoing change. The IDF must be ready for any escalation. The IDF is tasked with dealing with armies, some of which are armed with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations."



The IDF chief stressed that Israeli society must be ready to pay the price for maintaining an army outfitted to meet the threats of tomorrow. In order to do so, he called for the lengthening of national service and for a comprehensive effort to fight the phenomenon of draft-dodging.



President Shimon Peres said in the conference that "all eyes are on the peace process, it is possible that 2008 will be the key year for peace. The destiny of peace is not only thrust upon our opponents but is also for us (to decide). If the ambition for peace unites, the price of peace divides."



Referring to the fighting in the south, the president said that "Gaza is a security problem more than a political one. No one is suggesting that (we) return and settle in Gaza. Logic dictates that we will come to a national agreement on the Gaza issue -- an agreement that will include ways to deal with responding (to attacks from Gaza), fortification, and dealing (Gaza) residents' needs."



Peres called for people to stop being complacent and to have social solidarity. He said that Israel's "social strength is up against some serious tests. First and foremost, a test of the educational (system)…The educational system has been affected by the strike. The government, teachers and employers must meet before additional strikes and come to an agreement over wages for the next five years."


Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, said that "the ability to govern in Israel is restricted and we must find ways to enable more stable governing."


She asked people to send blessings to all those operating to defend residents of the western Negev and Sderot whome she described as "those standing under a murderous terrorist attack for seven years. It is the right of residents of the western Negev and Sderot to live in quiet and security and this obligates Israel to let go off the vestiges of its restraint that are left."