Unlike the Rabin-Peres government's decision to embark on the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza did not take years to be discredited. It took moments.
As the last IDF personnel left Gaza, the Palestinians began torching the synagogues Israel abandoned. Within minutes of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza's border with Egypt, the Palestinians blew up the border wall. They immediately began transferring unprecedented quantities of heavy weaponry into Gaza - a practice that has continued to this day.
Another important distinction between the Oslo policy and the withdrawal policy is that at least Oslo asked the Palestinians to give Israel something in exchange for the land, money, arms and political legitimacy Israel lavished on them. As events would show, Israel asked the Palestinians for too little. But at least Israel asked them for something. The withdrawal policy, in contrast, demanded nothing from the Palestinians. It was simply an unconditional surrender of land. As a result, Hamas -- the terror group which has distinguished itself from Fatah by refusing to even pay lip service to peace -- was the chief beneficiary of Israel's retreat.
The first harbingers of Hamas's ascendance to power came the day after Israel completed its withdrawal. Tens of thousands of armed Hamas terrorists, clad in spanking new uniforms, goose-stepped through the streets of Gaza in their victory parade. The then-ruling Fatah government's own parade was dingy and poorly attended in comparison.
Hamas's pageantry was followed with the jihadist group's decisive electoral victory over Fatah in January 2006. This led to the further weakening of Fatah in March 2007 with the signing of the Mecca accord that rendered Fatah a junior member of Hamas's ruling coalition. The Mecca accord also signaled a shift in the Arab world's sympathies from Fatah to Hamas. That agreement then paved the way for Hamas's violent ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza in June 2007 and its rising challenge to Fatah's leadership in Judea and Samaria.
It should be pointed out that Hamas's victory over Fatah was not a victory of extremists over moderates in any real sense of the terms. Both Hamas and Fatah share the aim of destroying Israel. This was made clear most recently in the lead-up to the Annapolis conference last November. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the coming of peace, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.
Moreover, there is little to distinguish between the groups' embrace of terrorism as a means of achieving their aim of destroying Israel. Fatah forces have carried out more attacks against Israel than Hamas has.
Hamas's refusal to even pretend that it is willing to live at peace with Israel is what distinguishes it from Fatah. And the Palestinians' embrace of Hamas after Israel withdrew from Gaza demonstrated that the withdrawal increased the popularity of the prospect of continuous war against Israel among the Palestinians.
Hamas's rise to power has changed the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel in a fundamental way. It is not simply that Hamas has abandoned the rhetoric of Arab nationalism for the rhetoric of Islamic jihad and so changed the nature of the Palestinian war from a limited struggle to an unlimited war for Islamic domination.
Unlike Fatah, which was beholden to several Islamic countries at once, Hamas is a wholly-owned Iranian proxy. Consequently Gaza, like Lebanon, has become an Iranian colony. And as Hamas's star rises in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and within the Israeli Arab community, Iran's influence over events in those quarters rises. This was made clear this week with the revelation that Khaled Kashkoush, an Israeli Arab from Kalansuwa, last month became the latest Israeli Arab arrested for spying for Hizbullah.
GIVEN THE absolute, obvious failure of the Gaza withdrawal, what is most distressing about the initiative is that three years on, Israeli society has managed not to discuss why it failed or to learn the lessons stemming from its failure. There has been no chastening of the political leaders involved. No heads have rolled. There has been no official inquiry into how decisions regarding the withdrawal were made. Indeed, many of the plan's chief proponents have prospered.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert succeeded Sharon to power due in large part to his support for the plan. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni built her entire political career on her role as one of the architects of the expulsion of Israeli civilians from their homes. And today she is the frontrunner to succeed Olmert as head of Kadima and replace him as prime minister until the next elections are held. Her chief opponent, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, was defense minister during the operation and an active participant in implementing the ill-conceived initiative.
In contrast, those who opposed the withdrawal remain in the opposition. They are never recognized for their attempts to divert their country from this disastrous course. Indeed, they continue to be castigated as somehow extremist for the fact that they oppose basing Israel's national strategies on capitulation and faith in other people's willingness to defend us.
There are three main reasons that there has never been an accounting for the failure of the withdrawal from Gaza. The first reason is luck. Sharon got "lucky." He was felled by a debilitating stroke and slipped into a coma before the dimensions of the failure of his most significant policy became widely understood.
Since Sharon pushed the withdrawal plan through against the wishes of his government colleagues, his voters and his party by turning the plan into a popularity contest that pit himself against his opponents, once he was gone, there was no way to hold him to account. And his incapacitation itself made discussing the failure of the withdrawal somehow unseemly. After all, it was said, the poor man can no longer defend himself, how dare you add insult to injury by noting that his most significant action while in power imperiled the country? In this manner, not only Sharon, but all his supporters in his government, were immunized from criticism and the need to account for their strategic imbecility.
Israel is presented with a similar situation today with Olmert. Like Sharon, Olmert has not had to face the voters to account for his failures in the Second Lebanon War; for his refusal to act against Hamas's Iranian-backed regime in Gaza; or for his apparent willingness to expand on those failures by seeking to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and so enable Iranian proxies to surround Israel on all sides.
And now, with his announcement that he will leave office not for his substantive incompetence but for his suspected criminal activities, Olmert has removed the substantive causes of his failure in office from the national agenda. In so doing, he has immunized his cohorts, and particularly Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, from the need to account for their continued strategic imbecility.
IT IS the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's serial incompetence that ironically serves as the second reason that there has been no accounting for the failure of the Gaza withdrawal plan. Quite simply, the government has moved from failure to failure so quickly that there has been no opportunity to confront the results of the last failure before the next one is spun out of the government's policy chop-shop.
The most recent example of this high-speed bungling is the government's penchant for releasing terrorists from prison. The public has scarcely had a chance to digest the colossal stupidity and inherent danger of the government's terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap with Hizbullah last month. No serious review of that policy - which enhanced Hizbullah's popularity sufficiently to compel the Lebanese government to formally accept its right to attack Israel at will - has been conducted. And already on Wednesday, fresh from that failure, Olmert announced his intention to expand it by releasing another 150 terrorists from prison by the end of the month.
THE FINAL reason that the failed Gaza withdrawal has not led to any change in either the public discourse or in the general tenor and direction of government policy is because of the debilitating impact the withdrawal had on Israeli democracy. In order to build the public's support for his inhumane and strategically irredeemable decision to expel 10,000 Jews from their homes and destroy their communities in Gaza and northern Samaria in exchange for nothing, Sharon and his colleagues worked systematically to demoralize, disenfranchise and criminalize his political opponents.
He demoralized them by castigating them as criminals, extremists and enemies of the people in general. He disenfranchised them by ignoring the results of the Likud's referendum on his plan that he himself initiated.
In all his activities, Sharon received crucial assistance from the law enforcement system and the media which were themselves corrupted by his plan. As Ha'aretz's left-wing military commentator Amir Oren noted five months after the plan was carried out, Sharon was given a free ride by Israel's elites due to their common "hatred of the settlers."
To enable Sharon to carry out the expulsions they so desired, the state prosecution, backed by the Supreme Court, was willing to close corruption probes of Sharon. As retired Supreme Court justice Michel Cheshin explained, "If Sharon had stood trial, there would have been no disengagement."
More egregiously, as public protests against the withdrawal gained force, Israel's law enforcement system became a tool of political repression, and the media became apologists for that repression. The police conducted mass arrests of law-abiding demonstrators, used brutal force against them and suspended the civil rights of opponents of the plan. The state prosecution and the courts sent thousands of protesters - including children - to jail for weeks and months without filing charges against them.
Then too, Sharon's personalization of the withdrawal distorted the country's public discourse by moving it from substantive discussions of government policies to superficial discussions of personalities. And this transformation has remained in effect until today. It was most recently in evidence in the media's rendering of the debate over the terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap as the personal struggle of the Goldwasser and Regev families against the government.
Sharon's successful repression and castigation of his opponents, and Olmert's successful repetition of Sharon's behavior both in the brutal repression of demonstrators at Amona in February 2006 and in his dismissive attitude towards the protest movement in the wake of the Second Lebanon War, have imbued the public as a whole with a sense of powerlessness. This sense manifested itself with the historically low voter turnout in the 2006 elections.
Israel's prolonged failure to reckon with the disastrous outcome of the Gaza withdrawal bodes ill for the country's prospects. Until the country reckons with the mistakes that led to that withdrawal, and forces those responsible to account for their failings, we will be doomed to repeat those mistakes with those same incompetents leading us over and over and over.
Clinton to forfeit $13 mil loan, unless…
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Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who once deducted $6 on their taxes for donating three pairs of his underwear, plan to take a $13-million hit to their personal bank account by forfeiting loans she made to her failed presidential campaign.
The campaign will allow to expire a mid-September deadline for paying them back, sources close to the campaign told Politico, at which point they will automatically be recategorized as contributions, confirming a decision by Clinton to forego repayment that many had expected her to make.
However, Clinton could get some post-deadline wiggle room to repay herself — and possibly with less of a public backlash — if Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) prevails in a little-noticed challenge to a rule requiring candidates to pay back loans of more than $250,000 within 20 days of the election.
For the Clinton campaign, the 20-day loan-repayment clock will start ticking when her vanquisher Barack Obama officially ends the Democratic primary by accepting the party’s presidential nomination Aug. 28 at Invesco Field in Denver.
Clinton’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
But it’s unlikely her campaign would have been able to pay herself back in full before the clock ran out, given how difficult it’s been for her to raise cash since she conceded to Obama in June. Still, her campaign has raised enough money to go toward retiring the $25 million debt it reported at the end of June — which included the personal loans plus $12 million owed to vendors — that it could have written her a check for several million dollars before the deadline.
The Clintons’ willingness to forego partial repayment before the deadline is likely a recognition of the public relations drubbing they would have endured had the campaign paid the couple back millions before repaying campaign vendors, many of them small businesses far outside the Washington Beltway.
The financial sacrifice nonetheless stands out against the Clintons’ reputation for seizing sometimes eyebrow-raising opportunities to enrich themselves and enhance their lifestyles.
The couple came under intense scrutiny during Bill Clinton’s presidency for the astonishing profits made by the then-first lady in a string of late-1970s commodities trades and the couples’ investment in an Arkansas land deal that resulted in the convictions of their business partners.
Since the couple left the White House in 2001, Bill Clinton has spent almost as much on taxpayer-funded perks as the other two living presidents combined and has lived the high life partly on the dimes (and the private jets) of his billionaire buddies, even as the couple pulled in more than $110 million through huge book deals and speaking fees.
The money loaned to the campaign may be worth less to them than the hit to their public images (and her political prospects), should they collect millions while stiffing mom-and-pop businesses.
Clinton endured just such a run of bad press in April after Politico revealed her campaign for months put off paying hundreds of small vendors’ bills to free up cash for critical media buys at a time when she was falling badly behind Obama in the cash race.
Since dropping out of the race, she’s repeatedly emphasized that the contributions she’s soliciting will be used to pay off her debts to small vendors, not her loans.
In a video message posted on her website last week, she told her supporters she was “incredibly moved” by their “continued commitment. You’ve helped me so much make progress on raising the funds to retire the campaign debt to pay the small vendors who helped us take our message across the country.”
But cash for debt retirement is among the most difficult fundraising lifts in politics, and in June, the most recent month for which campaign finance data is available, she raised only $2.7 million towards retiring her debt.
Clinton insiders have grumbled that Obama hasn’t done much towards fulfilling a promise to help her raise cash from his donors, who have chipped in an estimated $500,000 to date. Perhaps as a result, Clinton made a final $1 million loan to her campaign after she’d already dropped out of the race, partly to pay back colleges and universities from which the campaign rented facilities.
n June, the campaign also paid back $150,000 it owed CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield for employee health insurance — a debt that caused headaches for her campaign, given her ardent advocacy for universal health care — and $14,000 to food service vendors including Gueros Taco Bar in Austin, Texas.
But it didn’t pay off any of the $5.3 million it owed pollster and strategist Mark Penn (in fact, his firm billed $667,000 in June), the $921,000 it owed its direct mail firm or the $267,000 owed to the company of top spokesman Howard Wolfson.
Political firms or those run by allies are likely to be a low priority in the debt repayment. That’s because they understand lingering bills from losing campaigns are part of the business and are unlikely to sue or complain to the press, realizing they’ll get their money when their client’s political — and fundraising — prospects improve.
Former candidates used to be able to raise money well after an election to pay back their own personal loans. But in 2002, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill instituted the 20-day deadline, after which former candidates can only pay themselves back $250,000 of any loans, plus interest (Clinton had charged her campaign $37,000 in interest at the end of June).
The idea was to avoid the specter of special interest contributions going straight into newly elected or reelected office-holders’ pockets.
But Lautenberg, who loaned his Senate campaign $1.7 million, contends in a letter to the Federal Election Commission that the provision should be rendered moot by a June Supreme Court ruling overturning a McCain-Feingold provision known as the Millionaire’s Amendment. The Court found that the amendment, which allowed opponents of self-funding candidates to accept larger contributions, infringed on wealthy candidates’ free speech rights. And Lautenberg’s lawyer asserts in the letter that the $250,000 loan repayment cap “is constitutionally suspect under the Court's ruling.”
If the FEC agrees with Lautenberg, that would “absolutely” clear Clinton to repay her loans well after the convention, said Jason Torchinsky, a campaign finance lawyer for the failed presidential bid of Republican Rudy Giuliani.
Torchinsky said if Lautenberg gets the all-clear, Clinton would be able to gradually pay herself back from funds raised by her presidential committee or her 2012 Senate reelection committee.
“Whether she will do that politically is another question that she probably won't answer for awhile,” Torchinsky said.
Clinton has scheduled debt-retirement fundraisers for after the convention, but neither her campaign’s spokesman nor its general counsel responded to e-mails asking if the campaign would take advantage if Lautenberg gets his way.
7 worrisome signs for Obama
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A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge.
Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls – with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters, according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics – while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide.
“It’s not that people think McCain will win – it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. “This election is about Barack Obama — not John McCain — it's about whether Barack Obama passes muster. Every poll shows that people want a Democratic president, the problem is they’re not sure they want Barack Obama.”
Obama’s aides point to the stability of his small national lead, say they aren’t worried about his summer stall and think his numbers will improve when voters begin tuning in to the conventions.
“This is a country that is looking for a fundamentally different direction, and John McCain offers nothing but the status quo,” said spokesman Bill Burton, adding that he wasn’t “losing any sleep” over Obama's rough patch.
The campaign’s confidence may turn out to be justified, but two weeks prior to the national convention there are more than a few worrisome signs for Obama. Here are seven:
1. Race. “The idea that Obama was going to win in a blowout was always preposterous,” says former Nebraska senator and onetime presidential hopeful Bob Kerrey, an Obama backer. “A big piece of this, of course, is whether white people are going to support a black guy. ... If [Obama] is a tall, skinny white guy named Paul Jones, it's a different story.”
Obama is running nearly neck-and-neck with McCain among white voters in most polls, a major cause for optimism considering that John Kerry lost the white vote by 17 points and that Al Gore lost it by 12 points. Among whites, he does well with women, the affluent and college grads but fares poorly among low-income earners and Catholics — key swing groups that handed Hillary Rodham Clinton stunning blowouts in West Virginia and Kentucky.
How much does his race factor into tightening contests in Missouri, Wisconsin, Florida, Minnesota and Ohio? Nobody knows — and that’s the problem.
A huge challenge for Obama, insiders say, is simply determining how much skin color will matter in November. Race is nearly impossible to poll — no one ever says “I’m a racist” — and no campaign wants it revealed they are even asking questions on the issue.
“It’s the uncertainty that kills me — we know it’s going to be factor, but how big a factor?” asks a Democratic operative with ties to the Obama camp. “How do you even measure such a thing?
Adding to the jitters: GOP surrogates like New York Rep. Peter King have vowed to make Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a centerpiece during the homestretch.
2. Obama’s strength in Virginia may be overhyped. His chances of ending the Democrats 44-year losing streak in the commonwealth are pretty good — thanks to the explosive growth of the liberal D.C. suburbs, and a 147,000 spike in voter registration sure to benefit Democrats. But Obama’s aides privately concede his odds in Virginia are probably no better than 50-50 and that the state is far from a lock-solid hedge if he loses Ohio and Florida.
3. Michigan’s in play for McCain. In the year of the downturn, the hard-hit upper Midwest should be prime Obama country. Instead it’s a potential minefield. Obama is still ahead by two to five points there — similar to margins of victory enjoyed by Gore and Kerry in the last two presidential contests — but McCain has quietly crept up over the past month and could vault ahead if he anoints ex-Gov. Mitt Romney as his running mate. Simmering tensions between predominantly black Detroit and its white suburbs could hurt Obama. And McCain’s surrogates were handed a gift in the jailing of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, an Obama supporter.
“Watch Michigan — the Democrats think they've got it but they don't,” says Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown, a longtime Michigan observer. “Obama should be killing [McCain] there, but there's a lot more racial tension in Michigan than in other states.”
Obama also hasn’t pulled away in other Democrat-friendly neighboring states, watching leads in Wisconsin and Minnesota erode over the last month.
4. Bad times could be good for McCain. If anger helps Democrats, fear works to the advantage of Republicans. A growing number of Democratic strategists worry that some swing state voters may opt for McCain if the economy veers from merely awful to downright terrifying. The typical political calculus —that bad economic times will deliver the White House to Democrats — may not hold if people start viewing the downturn as, essentially, a national security crisis that can’t be entrusted to a novice. And that was McCain’s underlying message in his Paris Hilton ad: Bank failures, soaring gas prices and plummeting house values are forms of economic terrorism, and he’s an all-purpose anti-terror warrior.
“John McCain is a known quantity,” says Bob Kerrey, who thinks Obama will ultimately prevail. “You don't look at John and say, ‘Who the heck is he?’. He's a veteran, he's a guy who got pretty banged up in Vietnam. He can deal with crisis. There's some uncertainty about Senator Obama.”
The good news for Obama, of course, is that McCain — who infamously admitted he “never understood” economics — is loathed by unions, was somnambulant at the dawn of the housing meltdown and still gropes for a coherent economic policy that doesn’t include the words “offshore drilling.” But he doesn’t have to win the argument, just reinforce doubts about Obama with wavering swing state voters. The Illinois senator still enjoys a major edge on the economic issues, but his 20-point June lead on the question of who can best fix the economy slipped to a 17-point edge in July, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Obama wins on the economy,” said Guy Cecil, Hillary Clinton’s field director during the primaries. “But it will be interesting to see if McCain’s able to close the economic gap.”
5. Where have you gone, Ross Perot? Bill Clinton, the lone two-term Democratic president since FDR, wouldn’t have been elected if independent Ross Perot hadn’t siphoned 19 percent of the vote in 1992. Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, staging an indie bid from McCain’s right, has little cash and doesn’t seem to be a factor in competitive states.
6. The Legacy of LBJ, Jimmy and Bubba. Barack Obama would have been a trailblazer no matter what —but the Democrats’ trail to the White House has been remarkably narrow since 1960, accommodating only Southern whites with border-state strength: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (Add Al Gore if you’re counting the popular vote.)
7. Americans may want divided government. Some Democratic operatives think a possible landslide for their party in congressional races could backfire on Obama.
“Fairly or not, folks think he’s pretty liberal and nobody wants a pair of Pelosis running things,” says a New York-based Democratic consultant.
Adds Bob Kerrey: “The country's still pretty divided … people may want a divided government. They want change, but I'm not sure that the Democratic agenda has the support of a majority of Americans.”
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