Fix the 'Mediocracy'

A mediocracy. That's what we're living in. And don't take my word for it. In fact it's not my word at all. It was coined for me this week by, of all people, a serving member of the Israeli cabinet. He should know.

He spoke to me, off the record and in tones approaching despair, of a rotten leadership culture - emblemized by a president under investigation for sexual harassment, a minister resigned amid charges of the same, and the swirl of corruption at every level.

He heaped criticism on the rotten management of the war....He listed tactical intelligence failures so basic as to be almost inconceivable - confirming, for instance, the blindness that confounded the IDF immediately across the Lebanon border. It was, he said, "a miracle" that Israel didn't send columns of ground forces into Lebanon in those early days of fighting, because we'd had no idea of the extent to which Hezbollah had booby-trapped the roads and paths with massive explosive devices - the very kind that blew apart the first tank that crossed in pursuit of the original kidnappers on that first fateful Wednesday.

And his were some of the milder criticisms I heard this week....

The initial reliance on air power had gradually given way to an attempt to use elite units to tackle Hezbollah, before it was eventually realized "that a critical mass of ground force was needed. [But] I don't think that there was a single serious discussion on this issue at the decision-making echelon," said [ex-deputy chief of General Staff Matan] Vilna'i. "Who decided that we were going to war? In my opinion, no one."

Such fuzziness about what exactly Israel was doing in Lebanon, according to a third interviewee, also a former cabinet minister, lies at the heart of the disconnect between the prime minister, adamant this week that "Hezbollah has been beaten," and his critics, including a substantial proportion of the public, who carry the strong sense that our most dangerous enemies have been emboldened....

It became ever more damagingly and humiliatingly clear that Israel had no answer to the shorter-range rockets.

Yet as The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday, Israel's political and military leadership knew full well in advance of the fighting that we had no answer to the Katyusha threat. A report on Israel's defense doctrine for the next decade, compiled from information within the IDF and presented to then-defense minister Shaul Mofaz in April as well as to the General Staff, dealt specifically with the possibility of a conflict such as the war with Hezbollah and flagged as "urgent" Israel's vulnerability to Katyushas.

What went wrong, as Matan Vilna'i summed up with terrible bluntness, is that "nobody internalized the catastrophic significance of the short-range rocket capability."