Bolton pulls rug from under Olmert

Via email from Israel, by Daniel Jackson

Haaretz reports of former American UN Ambassador John Bolton's visit to Israel. Bolton essentially cuts Olmert's legs out from under him. The message is incredibly blunt:

John Bolton, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Second Lebanon War, rejects Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's version of he launched [sic] a failed ground offensive during the war's final days.

"The Israeli military operation did not play a role in the talks on drafting UN Security Council Resolution 1701," which ended the war, Bolton told Haaretz Sunday. He was in Israel to attend the Herzliya Conference.

Bolton, who has warned in the past about the possibility of nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria, also said that both the United States and Israel owe their citizens a full report on what kind of facility Israel bombed in Syria last September. Media reports have identified the target as a nuclear facility.

Bolton was Washington's point man for the negotiations over 1701. He told Haaretz that on August 5, 2006, six days before the Security Council approved the resolution, he and his French colleague, who was unofficially representing Lebanon's interests, had agreed on the wording. But the Arab League objected, "so we had to make changes to obtain the Lebanese government's support and make the Arabs happy. We also understood that we had to prevent a Russian-Chinese veto in the Security Council."

However, the former ambassador said, the main reason for America's retreat from its initial position was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who "changed her mind fundamentally" after an Israeli aerial assault killed 28 civilians in Kana on July 30. "Rice exerted enormous pressure on me to reach an agreement already," he said. "Until Kana, the U.S. wasn't interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated."

After the war, Olmert claimed that he launched the 11th-hour ground operation, in which 33 soldiers were killed, because the draft UN resolution that Israel received on August 11 was detrimental to its interests. The operation, he added, improved the resolution.

Bolton, however, rejected both assertions.

The Herzliya Conference, an annual political science event (several years old) over the weekend (during Shabbat, of course) is about as neocon as it gets here in Israel. It has already become a forum where US politicians come to speak to Israeli conservatives on US Israeli policy. Bolton is essentially telling Israelis that not only was Olmert totally ineffectual in executing the war, but that he really is "All-Merde," as many Israelis have nicknamed him.

The timing of this talk is not accidental, either in the larger picture or the smaller one--the Winograd Report is due at the end of the month and already the cracks are showing in the coalition. Leiberman has left the group, Shas is on the way out, and the polls, while rejecting the imput of Jews and Jewish groups outside Israel in deciding Jerusalem's fate, clearly show that no political sector here trusts Olmert at all--Peres talks of referendum, some talk about the Knesset deciding (in true Kibbutz fashion), but no one is saying, "You Go, Ehud", to either Ehud for that matter.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but it would seem to silly old me that Olmert has been cut loose, or rather set adrift.

Be that as it may, the idea that Rice would "suddenly" have a change of heart over the collateral damage in Kana when the daily rain of rockets then in the north and now over S'derot is just too outrageous for words. Where is her outrage over the homicidal acts of terrorism conducted intentionally and willfully against women, children, and the elderly that has become the hallmark of Middle Eastern warfare during the last 20 years?

Daniel Jackson, writing from Israel