French President Nicolas Sarkozy's statements Tuesday in support of stiffer sanctions against Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons were justifiably heartening to many. Sarkozy's remarks, like his Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner's trip to Iraq last week, marked a refreshing departure from his predecessor Jacques Chirac's knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

Yet while Sarkozy's open support for sanctions serves to distinguish him from Chirac, his justification of his position indicates that although much has changed, much has also remained the same in France. By Sarkozy's lights, "This [sanctions] initiative is the only one that can allow us to escape an alternative that I can only call catastrophic: an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

Praising Sarkozy on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal was quick to conflate his remarks with those made by Sen. John McCain a few months ago about the prospect of a US military strike against Iran's nuclear installations. McCain said, "There's only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option; that is a nuclear-armed Iran."

But these statements are not the same. A moral chasm divides them. Unlike McCain, Sarkozy makes no moral distinctions between a nuclear-armed Teheran and a military strike aimed at preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. For him, they are the same.

Sarkozy's moral blindness is rooted in post-World War II Europe's instrumental treatment of the legacy of that war. For the Europeans - and first and foremost for the Germans, and for the Dutch, French and Belgians who collaborated with the Germans during the war - the main lesson of the war was that militarism and nationalism are bad. This view informed post-war Europe's ideological embrace of pacifism and transnationalism.

But in truth, militarism and nationalism did not cause WWII. The true cause of that war was Germany's decision to embrace evil and depravity as its guiding philosophy and the willingness of the nations of Europe that collaborated with German authorities to also embrace this evil. That is, the real legacy of the war is a moral one and the real lesson to be learned from it is not that nations must allow themselves to be gobbled up into transnational entities or that they must eschew war at all costs. Rather, the true lesson is that nations should embrace morality that sanctifies life and freedom and that holds men and women accountable for their choices.

Europe's refusal to reckon with this central truth is what brings leaders like Sarkozy to ignore the real reason why Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons. As a regime that embraces evil and preaches genocide and global domination, Teheran cannot be trusted with weapons of genocide and global domination. War waged to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power is preferable and less catastrophic than a war the Islamic Republic would wage if it were to acquire such weapons.

EUROPE IS far from unique in its refusal to accept and contend with the true legacy of its wars. Humanity as a whole more often than not prefers to evade the difficult lessons of war - and especially of lost wars. We see this very clearly today in the Islamic world, where the forces of global jihad base their efforts to destroy human freedom on their refusal to accept the reasons that Western nations, organized around the Judeo-Christian notion of human liberty, have defeated their forces in war for the past 500 years.

The refusal to reckon with the lessons of war is also the central unifying characteristic of Israel's political and intellectual establishment. The Israeli establishment's denials of the lessons of its military history began at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and extend to the 1982 Lebanon War, the Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, the Oslo process, the 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the war in Lebanon last summer.

In the midst of all this evasion, something refreshing and, indeed, inspiring is happening today in America. There, a debate about the legacy of an unpopular lost war has recently begun in earnest. That war, of course, is the Vietnam War.

Last Wednesday, US President George W. Bush gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars where he discussed the consequences of America's defeat in Vietnam. Bush did not speak of the conflict itself. He did not connect then-president Lyndon Johnson's failure to explain the war to the American people to the US media's decision, made around 1967, to actively sue for American defeat at the hands of the Soviet and Chinese-backed Communists in North Vietnam. He did not discuss the defeat of the members of the American establishment at the hands of their children.

Bush made no mention of the fact that Congress's refusal to provide military assistance to the South Vietnamese made their loss of freedom a foregone conclusion. He didn't discuss how then-president Gerald Ford betrayed South Vietnam when he refused to provide air and naval support when the North Vietnamese invaded in 1975.

Bush did not discuss the reasons the US was defeated at all. He limited his remarks to the consequences of that defeat on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and on the US's position in the world to this very day. He noted that some two million Cambodians died at the hands of Pol Pot's murderous Communist regime, which rose to power after South Vietnam was overrun. He recalled the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who were imprisoned in concentration camps, the tens of thousands who were killed and the hundreds of thousands who took to sea in rickety boats in a desperate bid to find freedom in the America that had just abandoned them. He noted statements by Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri asserting the US defeat in Vietnam as proof that the US can and will be defeated by Islam.

The US mass media reacted to Bush's speech with fits of hysterical rage. The New York Times, which together with CBS News led the media war against the US defense of South Vietnam, dismissed the president's remarks as "bizarre." Major newspapers and television networks excoriated Bush for remembering the heavy and abiding toll of that lost war and for warning against repeating the mistake by embracing defeat in Iraq.

Christopher Hitchens' response to Bush's speech in The Observer was emblematic of the Left's condemnations. Hitchens wrote: "If one question is rightly settled in the American and, indeed, the international memory, it is that the Vietnam War was at best a titanic blunder and at worst a campaign of atrocity and aggression."

But contrary to the claims of Hitchens and his comrades, the question of America's memory of Vietnam was never settled. They never managed to successfully dictate America's national memory, even as they succeeded in squelching popular debate of history.

THIS WEEK, author Robert Kaplan published an article in The Atlantic Monthly pointing out the unbridgeable gap between popular histories of the Vietnam War, which are largely based on the views of that war espoused by Hitchens and The New York Times, and the literature of the war read by the American military. In an article entitled "Re-reading Vietnam," Kaplan gives an overview of that literature, which in contrast to the Left's bestsellers, has generally been published by boutique presses.

These books tell the stories of the warriors who fought in Vietnam. They discuss the stoic heroism of the American POWs who were subjected to years of physical torture and unrelenting psychological abuse during their captivity in North Vietnamese prison camps. They describe the counterinsurgency tactics employed by anti-communist forces that by 1970 had succeeded in politically defeating the Viet Cong in 90 percent of South Vietnam.

As Kaplan notes, in recent years these books have been supplemented by new histories, like Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, which examine the strategic success of the American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command from Gen. William Westmoreland in 1968.

After the September 11 attacks, the American public began expressing a willingness to reassess Vietnam. This newfound openness was manifested in the public's belated embrace of Vietnam veterans, who had been shunned and silenced upon their return home.

The force of that embrace was felt strongly in the 2004 presidential elections.

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry had built his political career on public condemnations of his brothers in arms when he joined the anti-war movement after being released from the US Navy in 1970. The veterans banded together and, with massive public support, launched a successful campaign against him.

Although the Left has denounced Bush for his use of Vietnam as a warning for what will occur if the US is defeated in Iraq, the war's opponents have made near obsessive use of the Vietnam War as a means of convincing the American public that the war in Iraq is unwinnable. Just a week after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, major media outlets were invoking Vietnam and warning that "a Vietnam-like quagmire" was ensuing in Iraq.

In a recently released study of the US media's treatment of the war in Iraq, the Internet blog "Media Busters" noted that a document search showed that since March 2003, The New York Times has published some 2,500 articles that make mention of both Vietnam and Iraq. CNN has run more than 3,000 stories that discuss the wars side by side. And always, the message is the same: As then, so today, the US cannot win, and so every American life sacrificed in Iraq is sacrificed in vain.

BUSH'S CHALLENGE to the received wisdom about the Vietnam War came then against the backdrop of these cultural crosscurrents, which also inform the current debate on the war in Iraq and the war against Islamic fascism in general. Bush is to be applauded for raising the story of Vietnam's legacy. His entrance into the debate will no doubt speed up the long-delayed moral reckoning with the legacy of Vietnam - of America's betrayal of its South Vietnamese allies, and of the consequences of that betrayal for America's international standing and its own self-assessment.

Hopefully, America's newfound readiness to reckon with the lessons of Vietnam will bring about a renewed and realistic American assessment and discussion of the current war against Islamic fascism.

And perhaps America's willingness to examine the demons of its past will prompt Europe and Israel, and perhaps one day even the Islamic world, to honestly study their military pasts. For until we recognize the causes of our past failures, we will be doomed to repeat them, time after time after time.
 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency Director Muhammad ElBaradei is a man of dubious integrity. In 2005 he was vaunted to the heights of the international stratosphere when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee extolled him for his "efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes."

Yet the facts indicate that the opposite is true. In his five-term tenure at the IAEA, ElBaradei has used his power to facilitate the proliferation of nuclear energy for military purposes. This he has done by working to prevent responsible states, like the United States, from taking action to prevent rogue states from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Take Iraq for example. Right up to the US-British invasion of Iraq in March 2003, ElBaradei consistently maintained that he either couldn't tell if Iraq was or was not pursuing nuclear weapons, or that he could see no evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. Indeed, just before the war, in an effort to scuttle US-British efforts to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution approving the use of force against Saddam Hussein's regime, ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that Iraq had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

Then, in October 2004, with the still-same object of denying international legitimacy to US operations in Iraq, ElBaradei indirectly acknowledged his previous mendacity. He announced that since the invasion, equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear bombs had disappeared from Iraq.

As he told it, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion, entire buildings related to Saddam's nuclear weapons programs had been dismantled without any record being made of their contents. High precision "dual use" items such as milling machines, electron beam welders, and high strength aluminum all turned up missing.

Suddenly, the same ElBaradei who had insisted that Iraq had no nuclear program warned, "The disappearance of such equipment and materials may be of proliferation significance." In the months ahead of the US-led invasion - months which ElBaradei spent buying time for Saddam by prolonging inspections that could be relied on to never end conclusively - then prime minister Ariel Sharon warned that satellite imagery had shown large truck convoys of suspicious materials moving from Iraq to Syria. Former IDF chief of General Staff Maj.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya'alon later reiterated Sharon's claims.

US AIR FORCE intelligence operative David Gaubatz, who was sent to Iraq between March and July 2003 to search for nuclear, chemical and biological installations found four suspicious, reinforced, underground sites in southern Iraq around Nasiriyah and Basra. For reasons that remain to be examined, the US failed to inspect the sites. Medical examinations of Gaubatz and his team taken after their site visits showed that they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.

As Melanie Phillips reported in the British Spectator in April, Gaubatz stated that he subsequently learned from CIA, British and Iraqi intelligence agents that the sites were stripped by Iraqi, Syrian, and Russian operatives who moved their contents to Syria.

In a move exposing his own cynical refusal to take seriously the threat posed by nuclear proliferation, ElBaradei ended his October 2004 warning regarding the disappearance of the Iraqi nuclear equipment by asking anyone with information about the whereabouts of Iraq's nuclear program to give his office a telephone call.

In November 2006, the IAEA again expressed concern regarding the Iraqi nuclear program whose existence it had denied ahead of the US-British invasion. This time, it decried the administration's posting of certain captured Iraqi documents on the Internet. Those captured documents included Iraqi nuclear bomb designs that could be useful for other states working to build a nuclear arsenal.

WHILE DISMISSING as non-threatening Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan and Egyptian nuclear activities, ElBaradei has repeatedly expressed deep concerns about one Middle Eastern country's nuclear program. In July 2004 ElBaradei paid a visit to Israel. At the time he visited, Iran was defying his call to end its uranium enrichment activities and Western intelligence agencies believed that Iran would achieve a nuclear break-out capacity within a year.

ElBaradei used his visit as attempt to place Israel in the same category as Iran and insisted that Israel open its Dimona nuclear site to IAEA inspection and control. The next month, during a home visit in Cairo, ElBaradei proposed convening a conference on establishing a "nuclear-free zone" in the Middle East whose aim would be Israeli dismantling of its presumptive nuclear arsenal.

Indeed, ElBaradei has been unrelenting in his attacks against Israel. Over the weekend he gave an interview to Austrian television in which he harshly criticized the US decision to increase its military assistance to Israel by $30 billion over the next ten years claiming that the assistance could lead to a regional arms race.

Since Iranian opposition forces first exposed Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program in August 2002, ElBaradei has been Iran's primary international defender. Knowingly acting in breach of the IAEA's charter, ElBaradei used his office to repeatedly stall US bids to refer Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council.

The IAEA charter stipulates that in the event that there is any evidence that a state signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is acting in a non-transparent manner regarding its nuclear activities, that state must be referred to the Security Council. In spite of the fact that since its nuclear program was first exposed Iran has been consistently behaving in a non-transparent manner, ElBaradei took four years to refer Iran to the Security Council. His determined and illegal defense of Iran bought the mullahs four years to develop their program without fear of UN sanctions or military action against it.

Last August, the IAEA sent a letter to US Representative Peter Hokstra, then chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence condemning a committee report that concluded that Iran's nuclear program is military, not civilian. The report further alleged that the IAEA was working to prevent any conclusions from being drawn about the nature of Iran's program in order to prevent international action from being taken against it.

The IAEA's assault on the Congressional report is part and parcel of ElBaradei's insistence that the US take no concerted action against Iran's program. To this end, he works diligently to demonize American voices calling for Iran to be prevented - by force of arms if necessary - from becoming a nuclear power.

IN AN interview with the BBC in May, the man who is charter-bound to prevent nuclear proliferation had an interesting take on his international role. ElBaradei said, "I have no brief other than to make sure we don't go into another war or that we go crazy into killing each other. You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say 'Let's go and bomb Iran.'"

ElBaradei, who claims that Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons is preferable to any nation taking action to militarily prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, has consistently sought to demoralize Iran's foes and potential victims by claiming that the cat is already out of the bag so any attempt to stop Iran is doomed to fail. In the same interview with the BBC, ElBaradei claimed that military strikes would be worthless because you cannot "bomb knowledge."

And it isn't only military force that ElBaradei opposes. He also opposes sanctions. After a meeting in February with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, in which Larijani repeated Iran's refusal to end its uranium enrichment activities in spite of UN Security Council sanctions, ElBaradei condemned not Iran, but the use of sanctions.

In his words, "Our experience without exception is that sanctions alone do not work and in most cases radicalize the regime and hurt the people who are not supposed to be hurt…. [S]anctions have to be coupled at all times with incentives and a real search for a compromise based on face-saving, based on respect."

TODAY BARADEI and his IAEA are in open conflict with the US. In a move to preempt US efforts to pass a third sanctions resolution against Iran in the Security Council next month, ElBaradei acceded to a new "framework" agreement with the Iranians last week. In three rounds of talks that have taken place since last month, Iran agreed to give the IAEA some answers to some undefined questions about its nuclear program that it has refused to answer for the past five years. It also allowed IAEA inspectors to enter its heavy water plutonium production facility in Arak - a largely insignificant concession since the plant won't be operational for two years.

Gleefully extolling this great "breakthrough," IAEA spokesmen have announced that in ElBaradei's report to his board of governors and to the Security Council next month, he will use this meaningless agreement as an excuse to block a third sanctions resolution from being passed.

It is clear where all of this is leading. By undermining coercive diplomatic steps aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear program without war, ElBaradei is leading the international community to one of two inevitable futures. Either Iran will acquire nuclear weapons - as he no doubt hopes it will, or force will have to be used to prevent it from acquiring those weapons.

In the event that Iran is attacked, as his duplicitous behavior ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq demonstrates clearly, that war will be launched and fought against the backdrop of international condemnation led by ElBaradei and his nuclear proliferating supporters at the IAEA, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and the UN. And if, instead it is Iran that drops the bomb, well, ElBaradei will say, Israel had it coming to it, and so did the American "crazies."

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

As the cliché goes, "A conservative is a liberal whos has been mugged by reality." Like most clichés, this one exposes a larger truth. Namely, people often base their views on their fantasies of how the world should be, rather than on the reality of how the world actually is.

Following this line, the September 11, 2001 attacks can be seen as a large-scale mugging. After the attacks, the same American people that had ignored the threat of totalitarian Islam since the Iranian revolution first categorized the US as the Great Satan back in 1979, acknowledged the danger and recognized it was at war. The overwhelming majority of Americans supported President George W. Bush when he said that the US would fight to destroy all global terror organizations and take down the regimes that sponsor them.

But even before the fires were put out in Lower Manhattan, voices from two quarters were already claiming that the US should stay in Dreamland. First, there were the radical leftists like Susan Sontag and Michael Moore who wrapped themselves in the banner of the human rights of the wretched of the Earth. They claimed that al-Qaida was simply giving Americans their comeuppance for dominating the world through McDonalds and Levis.

Next there were people like former presidents Carter and Bush's national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, assorted university professors, and CIA analysts who wrapped themselves in the banner of realism. They claimed that American support for Israel is what brought the Islamic world to hate the country and kill thousands of its citizens by flying hijacked airplanes into buildings.

In both cases, the fantasists ignored completely Osama bin Laden's declarations that his goal is to conquer the world in the name of Islam. They disregarded the political and cultural milieus marked by inexhaustible envy towards the West and the US that gave rise to al-Qaida and its sister organizations. Rather than acknowledge the reality of real war with real enemies, both camps of fantasists argued that instead of slaying these twin dragons, the US should appease them by serving them Israel for lunch.

These voices were relegated to the margins of public debate until the lead up to the 2004 presidential elections. Ahead of those elections, backed by George Soros's financial muscle, the fantasists had an enormous impact of the debate in the Democratic Party. Politicians who until then had supported the war generally, and in Iraq particularly, clamored to decry it.

THIS WEEK, two leftist institutions - the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine - published a survey of conservative, moderate and liberal foreign policy experts. The results of the survey show clearly that while still a minority, the fantasists are far from marginal today.

Fourteen percent of those surveyed believe that Israel is the US's least helpful ally. While unfortunate, this is far from the survey's most troubling result.

The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group's report, which was released last December, recommended that the administration sell Israel off in order to buy Iranian, Syrian and Saudi cooperation in Iraq that could pave the way to an orderly American retreat from the country. Uber fantasists James Baker and Lee Hamilton asserted that if the US forces Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria and Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem to the Palestinians, all will be well with Iraq. Eighty-eight percent of the foreign policy experts surveyed agreed with them.

Fifty-three percent of the experts (38% of the conservatives, 59% of the moderates and 59% of the liberals) believe that the US should recognize Hamas. Forty-seven percent (29% of the conservatives, 49% of the moderates and 61% of the liberals) believe that the US should recognize Hizbullah.

As for Iran, 68 percent of the survey's participants think that the Iranian threat can be contained through negotiations. Only 10 percent think that the US should attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Indeed, a significant minority is of the opinion that the world stands to benefit from a nuclear-armed Iran. A quarter of the conservatives, 29% of the moderates and 41% of the liberal experts claimed that Iran will behave more responsibly if it acquires nuclear capabilities. Only 32 percent think that Iran will attack Israel with nuclear bombs. Only 24 percent think it likely that Iran would transfer nuclear devices to terrorists.

A BRIEF look at recent statements by Iran's leaders and its terrorist vassals suffice to show how cut off these views are from reality. Last Saturday, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei said, "America and its followers are stuck in a whirlpool and they sink deeper as time passes. A dangerous future is predicted for them." Wednesday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad signaled that Iran will share its nuclear know-how with others saying, "If nuclear energy is something good, all nations should enjoy it on the basis of law."

In an interview with Britain's Independent, Iraqi Shiite terror boss Muqtada al Sadr admitted that his group trains with Hizbullah. Sadr said, "We have formal links with Hizbullah…. We copy Hizbullah in the way they fight and their tactics, we teach each other and we are getting better through this."

On the occasion of the one-year anniversary of last year's war against Israel, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah told Iranian television that Hizbullah acts at Teheran's pleasure. "I am a lowly soldier of the Imam Khamenei. Hizbullah youths acted on behalf of the Imam Khomeini… and sent their blessings to the Iranian people," Nasrallah said.

On August 6, Osama Hamdan, Hamas's representative in Lebanon, told al-Kawthar television that Hamas is preparing for war not because expects it Israel to attack, "but because the final goal of the resistance is to wipe this entity [Israel] off the face of the Earth. This goal necessitates the development of the capabilities of the resistance, until this entity is wiped out."

ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT Bush insistently rejects the fantasists' approach to world affairs, his current policies towards Iran and Israel reflect their views. Indeed the administration's policies towards both countries read like a page out of the Baker-Hamilton playbook.

The administration maintains its slavish devotion to negotiating with Iran over its nuclear weapons program in spite of the fact that the diplomatic track failed demonstrably three years ago. It recently expanded its diplomatic offensive to include conducting direct talks with the Iranians on Iraq. Iran has responded to America's conciliatory stance by expanding its uranium enrichment activities and escalating attacks in Iraq.

As to Israel, the Americans are pressuring Israel to conduct negotiations with Fatah towards an Israeli surrender of Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. Such withdrawals would foment the rise of yet another base for global jihad run by Iran's Palestinian proxies in the center of the shriveled Jewish state.

To advance this aim, the US pressured Israel to pardon some 178 Fatah terror fugitives and is now pressuring it to pardon another hundred. This is despite the fact that this week the Fatah terrorists announced they would renew their attacks on Israel.

The Americans have pledged to renew training of Fatah's Force 17 militia. This week the New York Sun published an interview with Abu Yusuf, a Force 17 commander who admitted that previous US training sessions enabled Fatah to murder Israelis more effectively.

Other Fatah leaders told The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh this week that Fatah forces are openly cooperating with Hamas cells in Judea and Samaria.

IF THE Americans want to know what will happen if their foreign policy fantasists take charge of their affairs, they have only to cast a glance at what is happening in Israel today. Because in Israel, the fantasists are firmly in charge of policy. With the twin goals of fostering peace and enhancing Israel's international standing, Israel's fantasist leaders are driving the country to the outer reaches of La La Land.

In the name of peace, the Olmert government is conducting semi-secret negotiations with Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas. According to press reports Olmert and his colleagues are offering Abbas 92 percent of Judea and Samaria, the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and land in the Negev which will connect Gaza to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. Furthermore, according to press reports, the Olmert government is willing to accept Israeli responsibility for the fate of the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and for their descendants. What this means in the real world is that Israel is seeking to extend Iran's control over Gaza to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and then to fill these Iranian enclaves with hostile foreign Arabs.

In the interests of enhancing Israel's international cache, Israel is courting the UN which in the Olmert government's fantasy world is Israel's friend. To foster good relations, Sunday the government endorsed the extension of UNIFIL's mandate in south Lebanon despite the fact that UNIFIL's 13,000 soldiers did nothing to prevent Hizbullah's rearmament and reassertion of control over Lebanon's border with Israel over the past year.

On November 29, the government is planning to have Israel's parliamentarians reenact the General Assembly's decision to partition the Land of Israel on November 29, 1947 and so promote the fiction that Israel owes its existence to the UN. The government has asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to preside over the session.

In the real world, the UN is a hostile institution controlled by tyrannies that works actively to delegitimize Israel's right to exist. To this end, next week, the UN will convene two anti-Israel forums in Europe. First, the European Parliament will host an anti-Israel hate fest sponsored by the UN's Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Second, in Geneva, the UN will convene the first planning session for its second anti-racism conference scheduled to take place in 2009. That the conference will be a reenactment of the anti-Semitic orgy of hatred which took place in Durban, South Africa in 2001 is made clear by the fact that Libya is chairing the planning session. Iran, Cuba and Pakistan are all members of the planning committee.

FANTASIES ARE alluring. Peddling them can even get you elected. But the majority of Americans who reject fantasy as a basis for making real world decisions should take heed of Israel's example.

That example shows that despite the fantasists' fervent efforts to smother it, reality never goes away. Sooner or later, it mugs you. Sometimes, all it does is pick your pocket. But the longer you ignore it, the more dangerous it becomes.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Education Minister Yuli Tamir has been much in the news. Two weeks ago she went on a well-publicized visit to authoritarian Singapore to learn the secret of its school system's success.

Tamir summed up her visit in an interview with Yediot Aharonot, saying, "What most entranced me about [Singaporean schoolchildren] was that while there is discipline, it doesn't look like repression. I didn't see fear in the children's eyes."

It makes sense that this would be the aspect of Singapore's education system that most impressed Tamir. Her moves back home are all aimed at foisting her political agenda on schoolchildren while blocking all forms of dissent. Dissent, after all, could make her agenda appear repressive.

Tamir's political agenda has been alternately described as pro-peace, anti-Zionist, pro-democracy, anti-democracy, pluralistic and anti-Semitic.

To understand what her agenda actually holds in store for our future, we need to move beyond labels and assess her policies themselves.

Last December, Tamir ordered that from now on, all maps of the country in new textbooks must clearly demark the 1949 armistice lines. As Tamir sees it, the demarcation of the 1949 armistice lines is crucial for advancing peace. Speaking to Ha'aretz, she said, "We cannot demand that our Arab neighbors mark the borders from 4 June 1967, when our own Education Ministry has erased them from the textbooks and from the students' consciousness."

SINCE ISRAEL has applied its laws to the entirety of unified Jerusalem and to the Golan Heights, it is clear that the reason they don't appear in school textbooks is because they are irrelevant to the study of Israel's borders. Aside from that, when the cease-fire lines were drawn, neither Israel nor any of its neighbors accepted them as borders and, moreover, in the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, those lines did not serve as the basis for determining the borders between them. And so, not only does her move ignore Israel's own determination of its sovereignty, it also ignores historical fact.

As one of the founders of the EU-funded radical Peace Now movement, Tamir opposes all Israeli building beyond the 1949 lines. Her animus was given expression this month with the Council for Higher Education of Judea and Samaria's decision to upgrade Ariel College to the status of university center. Immediately after the institute, which confers bachelor's and master's degrees on its 8,500 students, changed its name to the Ariel University Center of Samaria, Tamir pledged to cut off its government funding and to ignore any correspondence with the institution if it referred to itself as a university center.

The Ariel University Center of Samaria's location is not Tamir's only beef with it. Its overt Zionism also sets her off. The school requires all its students to take one course per semester in either Jewish- or Zionist-related subjects. It also requires that the national flag be displayed in all classrooms.

THESE POLICIES fly in the face of Tamir's efforts to suppress Zionist and Jewish education.

This month she supported the Finance Ministry's decision to cut the government's support for pre-army leadership academies by 50 percent. Students at these academies receive a year-long deferment of their military service. During that year they study Jewish history, Zionist history and Talmud. They volunteer for community service. They undergo pre-military physical fitness regimens, and they hike throughout the country. Seventy percent of graduates serve in combat units and 30% become officers. Among the girls, the majority serve as officers.

In short, in the space of a year, the pre-army academies imbue their students with their Jewish and Israeli heritage and the students, in turn, form the backbone of the IDF's combat soldier and officer corps. And Tamir has decided to slash their budgets.

As to the general school system, Tamir is advancing a plan to cut the course load by 30% over the next five years. History and Zionist education will be the areas most immediately affected. As she put it, "Rather than learn a lot of material - we'll learn thinking.Today it is important to process information, not memorize things."

ON SUNDAY, Yediot reported that as part of her plan to limit the materials and control the content of the lessons taught to students, Tamir is moving against Jewish and Zionist studies teachers who teach in the framework of their National Service. Most of the teachers in National Service are Orthodox teenage girls. Due to their religious observance, most Orthodox girls opt to do national service rather than serve in the military.

According to the report, and subsequent follow-ups, Tamir has decided to cut the number of Orthodox teenagers employed through National Service institutions as Jewish and Zionist studies teachers in elementary schools by 50%. As Education Ministry officials put it to Yediot, the girls are "too right-wing," and so they must be removed from classrooms lest they infect schoolchildren with their commitment to the state and to Jewish heritage.

In silencing dissenting voices, Tamir has not been shy about being ruthless.

Take the example of Rabbi Yisrael Shiran. In 2000, when Tamir was serving as tourism minister, Shiran worked as a Jewish studies teacher at the Moriah national religious school in Haifa. He raised Tamir's hackles when he refused an Education Ministry directive to teach slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin's "legacy" of the Oslo peace process with the PLO in the framework of his lesson plans for commemorating his murder. As Shiran saw it, Oslo was controversial, and so it couldn't simply be taught in a positive light. Tamir moved to have him fired. Shiran petitioned the High Court of Justice, and she relented.

In 2002, he transferred to another school. Now the parents at Moriah want him back. But Tamir is refusing to approve his transfer. Just to teach him a lesson.

TAMIR WISHES to replace Zionism and Jewish studies with "democratic citizenship" studies. As she explained to Yediot, "In Israel there is a real lack of democratic citizenship studies. As I pledged, the school system is moving this year to teach the subject of citizenship at a level of two credit units [for the high school matriculation exams]. In the future we will continue to expand citizenship classes to the level of three, four and five credits. People aren't born citizens. They are educated to be citizens."

Or re-educated.

In Tamir's view, a good citizen is one who gives equal weight to both Israel's actual history and to the Arab world's distorted version of that history. Last month, she approved a third-grade textbook for Arab Israelis that teaches children that Arabs view the 1948 War of Independence, in which the infant state warded off the invading armies of five Arab states determined to annihilate its Jewish population, as "the nakba," or catastrophe.

Arab Israeli children will now be taught that from the Arab perspective, Israel's establishment was an act of Jewish aggression. And as Tamir sees it, "I also think it is important for Jewish children to learn about the nakba."

IN HER latest gambit, this week Tamir informed Israeli Islamic Movement leader and MK Ibrahim Sarsour that she will seriously consider his request to make Islamic religion and culture a required subject for Israeli Arabs. While here too, Tamir's move is clearly aimed at advancing the distorted Arab narrative in the interest of promoting her vision of good "citizenship," the fact is that Sarsour does not share her goal of promoting a multicultural Israel.

In February 2006, reacting to Hamas's victory in the Palestinian Authority elections the previous month, Sarsour declared that the Israeli Arab public supports the Palestinian and global jihad forces working to destroy Israel and conquer the Western world.

In his words, "The entire Arab public, but especially the Muslim public, is in the crosshairs. It is the target of global attack. As the Islamic Movement, we wish to see establishment of the Islamic caliphate without borders, and this is what scares the West."

This March, speaking at a conference on Jerusalem in Ramallah, Sarsour called on the Palestinians to conquer Israel's capital city. "Just as the Muslims once liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, so must we today believe we can liberate Jerusalem. It is not an impossible dream," he said.

Given Sarsour's objective of destroying the State of Israel, Tamir's willingness to consider his demands means that she supports the indoctrination of Arab Israelis to work toward the destruction of the state as a whole. When taken together with her war against Zionist and Jewish education, educators and institutions, it is clear that not only does Tamir's vision involve indoctrinating Israel's Arabs to become its enemies; it also involves indoctrinating (without repression) a new generation of Israelis in a manner that will render them defenseless in the face of the Arab onslaught against the country.
 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Sometimes terror doesn't have to pay. Reports last week that Fatah Prime Minister Salaam Fayad had paid the annual salaries of members of Hamas's army in Gaza caused US Congressman Eric Cantor to shoot off a livid letter to Fayad.

Cantor, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, had just returned from leading a Republican Congressional delegation to Israel and the Palestinian Authority where he met with Fayad in Ramallah. He wrote: "Without further explanation from you, I will feel compelled… to forewarn my colleagues in the Congress that any visits with your government offer little value toward bringing peace and security to Palestinians and Israelis. Furthermore, I will help lead opposition in Congress to any proposed call for additional US taxpayer dollars being sent to the Palestinian Authority."

Cantor has good reason as an American to be angry at Fayad. Hamas forces in Gaza, which are trained and commanded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, constitute a key member of the axis of global jihad against which the US is fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world. By strengthening Hamas, Fayad is not simply harming Israel. He is acting in a manner that strengthens the axis as a whole. And so he is harming US national security interests.

In defending his move, Fayad initially claimed that the payment was a regrettable error caused by a computer glitch. In his updated story, Fayad claimed that a Hamas agent in his Ministry of Finance was responsible for the move.

Fayad's excuses naturally raise the question: If Fatah opposes Hamas, why are all the names and bank account numbers of Hamas's soldiers conveniently located in Fatah's Ministry of Finance's computer files? Aside from that, it is hard to believe that Fayad objected to paying the jihad forces. Since Hamas took over Gaza in June, Fayad has regularly paid the salaries of Hamas legislators, civil servants in Hamas's government, and Hamas terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails.

Moreover, Fayad's assertions that Fatah opposes Hamas are hardly believable given that Fatah is engaged in intense negotiations with Hamas toward a reunification of their forces. Wednesday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas stated openly that he seeks to reconcile with Hamas. In his joint press briefing with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso, Abbas called for a "return to national unity." He said, "The split [between Judea and Samaria and Gaza which happened] as a result of Hamas's coup is temporary and will be removed."

The fact that Fatah is itself a jihadist terror group also helps explain why it has no problem paying the salaries of Hamas's terror army. The inconvenient truth of Fatah's commitment to terror was brought home this week with the indictment of Fatah legislator and deputy commander of its General Intelligence militia Jamal Tirawi. Tirawi is accused of dispatching the suicide bomber who blew up at the Coffee Shop cafe in Tel Aviv in March 2002. He is also accused of training and commanding other terrorists who carried out suicide and shooting attacks against Israelis.

Tirawi's indictment was further evidence that Fatah undermines US interests. As Aaron Klein reported Wednesday in World News Daily, as deputy commander of Fatah's General Intelligence militia, Tirawi held extensive contacts with US Security Coordinator Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton and received US weapons.

But of course America is not Fatah's primary victim.

IDF forces, which engaged Hamas's army in southern Gaza this week, reported that Hamas today is a much more formidable foe than it ever was before: It fights much like Hizbullah, it has advanced arms and equipment and is organized in disciplined units.

Since Fayad paid these forces with funds that Israel transferred to him, it could have been expected that the Olmert government would be joining Cantor in condemning him. But, in yet another sign of the government's strategic dementia, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rushed to Fayad's defense.

Speaking to a visiting delegation of Democratic congressmen, Olmert and Livni insisted that Fayad was telling the truth when he said that his payments to Hamas's army were the result of a computer glitch. As Representative Steny Hoyer told The Jerusalem Post, Olmert, Livni and the US consul general in Jerusalem, Jacob Walles, all "said they believed that this was a clerical, bureaucratic mistake, not a conscious effort to help Hamas.

"In light of the fact that Israel's foreign minister, Israel's prime minister and our consul general all agreed on that fact, Mr. Fayad's representations had more credibility with us when we brought it up with him," Hoyer concluded.

ON THE most basic level, it is deeply disturbing that Olmert and Livni are acting as Fatah's public relations team. But beyond that, their insistent support for Fatah demonstrates that they fail to understand or reconcile themselves to three basic facts.

First, Livni and Olmert show that they are incapable of accepting that Fatah is Israel's enemy. Their commitment to appeasing Fatah and establishing a Palestinian state is so strong, that they cling to it even when Fatah's inherent hostility is staring them in the face.

Second, they fail to understand the potential impact of Cantor's letter on US policy toward the Palestinians. In defending Fayad against Cantor's rebuke, Livni and Olmert made clear that for them, there ought not, and indeed, cannot be a US policy toward the Palestinians other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's policy of pressuring Israel to give land, money, statehood and guns to the Fatah terror organization.

Finally, by supporting Rice's policy of appeasing Palestinian terrorists, Olmert and Livni ignore the fact that both Israel and the US are treating the Palestinian jihad in a manner that completely contradicts the US's strategy for contending with the forces of jihad everywhere else in the world. In stark contrast to the administration's embrace of Fatah and Palestinian statehood, everywhere else in the world, the US works to defeat terrorists and deny them control of territory. The fact that the current US-Israeli policy toward Palestinian terrorists is antithetical to the Bush administration's overall strategy for fighting terror is reason enough to expect that many Americans might not believe that Rice's support for Fatah and Palestinian statehood advances US interests.

ALTHOUGH OLMERT and Livni refuse to see any of this, Rice herself openly acknowledges that hers is not the only possible view of the Palestinian jihad against Israel. Last month, in a conversation with members of Congress, Rice explained that she feels compelled to devote her energies to creating a Palestinian state quickly because she cannot trust that the next administration will see the situation as she does.

The strongest voices calling for the US to apply the same policies toward the Palestinians that it applies to terror forces throughout the world are heard in President George W. Bush's own Republican Party. Former New York mayor and Republican presidential frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani has been the strongest Republican voice calling for change.

In an article published this week in Foreign Affairs, Giuliani supported Bush's view that the aim of the US war is to destroy both the global terrorist movement and its radical Islamic-fascist ideology. But Giuliani expressed deep misgivings regarding Bush's actual policies, which he believes have been inconsistent and insufficiently strong.

Giuliani makes his call for consistency most clearly in his discussion of the Palestinians and Israel. In his words: "Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians - negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again. It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism."

He added, "America's commitment to Israel's security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy."

By so couching his argument, Giuliani made clear that, from his perspective, there is no difference between the jihad against Israel and the jihad throughout the world. As a result, in his view, the US should align its policy toward the Palestinians with its policy against jihad everywhere in the world.

While Giuliani has been the most candid in his critique of Bush's policy toward the Palestinians, his views are not out of sync with the general tenor of the Republican presidential debate. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former senator Fred Thompson have similarly made clear that they believe the US must be more forthright and consistent in fighting the war.

THE REPUBLICAN debate should be signaling two things to Israel. First, it shows that there is a reasonable chance that in January 2009 Israel will be greeted by a US administration that does not share the Olmert government's enthusiasm for appeasing Palestinian terrorists.

Second it indicates that as the 2008 elections draw nearer, the Republican candidates may force Bush to dampen his support for Fatah. Rice may not be able to force her way to the finish line.

Here in Israel, after Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu's stunning victory in the Likud leadership primaries Tuesday, we are also moving into pre-election mode. Israeli voters will expect Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the Labor Party leader, and Netanyahu to present their visions of where Israel should be going.

Since Barak owes his primary victory to Labor's Arab voters, no one expects him to give up on his commitment to Palestinian statehood. But Netanyahu is a different story. It would make perfect sense for the Likud to base its electoral platform on recognizing that Fatah is Israel's enemy, and by rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state. And Netanyahu is better qualified than any politician to convince Israeli voters to support such a reality-based platform.

In addressing Iran's nuclear weapons program, Netanyahu recognized that there is a strong coalition in the US that is eager to act more forcefully to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons than either the Olmert government or the Bush administration. Netanyahu wisely supported these forces and helped them to pressure the administration to intensify its efforts to stop the Iranians. One consequence of that pressure was the administration's decision this week to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

As Cantor's letter and Giuliani's article make clear, there also is a strong coalition in the US that is willing to recognize that Fatah is a member of the enemy camp and to accept that a terror-supporting Palestinian state would harm US national security interests. Yet, as Steny Hoyer made clear, only Israelis can stand at the helm of such a coalition. Israelis and Americans alike must hope that Netanyahu will embrace his duty to lead that coalition.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

According to a spate of recent media reports, Iran's economy is on the skids. It works out that aside from being a messianic, genocidal killer, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also an economic dunce.

Ahmadinejad entered office two years ago after running a populist campaign pledging to share Iran's oil and gas revenues with the Iranian people. As his campaign slogan put it, Ahmadinejad would "put petroleum income on people's tables." But two years into his tenure, the economy is failing. While the government places inflation rates at 12-13 percent, Radio Farda reported that Iran's Parliament Research Center indicates that the rate is actually closer to 20 percent.

Interviewed on Radio Farda, Iranian economist Fereidun Khavand explained that most of Iran's economic woes are the direct result of Ahmadinejad's economic foolishness. The chaotic economic situation, Khavand noted came after Ahmadinejad "shifted the circle of economic decision-making from the Ministry of Finance and Economics, the Planning and Management Committee, and the Iranian Central Bank to the presidential administration solely."

Ahmadinejad's economic mismanagement, which includes discouraging international investment by destabilizing the region politically through his bellicose rhetoric and frenetic advance of Iran's nuclear weapons program and support for global jihad, has singled him out for opprobrium by Iran's intellectual elites. In June, 57 Iranian economists signed an open letter condemning Ahmadinejad's policies and accusing him of "ignoring the basic principles of economics." The economists warned that "government mismanagement is inflicting a huge cost on the economy and underscores that high oil revenues over the last two years can only delay the imminent economic crisis."

THE BASIC problem with Iran's economy is that the government spends more subsidizing prices than it takes in from oil and gas revenues. The government sells gasoline to the public for one-fifth the cost of production. As the Associated Press reported on Sunday, in 2006 Iran earned $50 billion in oil and gas revenues. But it spent $60 billion on fuel and other subsidies.

Iran would be able to cover its costs more successfully if it were able to attract foreign investors to develop its increasingly antiquated oil and gas fields. While there is much foreign interest in developing Iran's oil and gas sectors, two factors work to depress such investment. First there are the US efforts to discourage foreign investment in Iran's energy sector. Second, as AP reported, Iran itself discourages foreign investors in its energy sector by offering deals with low rates of return. Mikkal Herberg, a former oil executive, told the wire service that Iran today offers rates of return of between 6-10 percent to foreign investors. As Herberg put it, "In a very low-risk environment, you want to see 10 to 12 percent returns. In a high risk environment [like Iran], you need 15 percent plus to make sense."

Iran's low-ball offers have put off investors who have no problem with investing in a nuclear-proliferating rogue state. China's Sinopec's deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field is being delayed because the rate of return Iran offered the Chinese was too low.

For its part, Iran maintains that foreign investment is high. Last week Iranian parliamentarian Ahmad Nejabat boasted that Iran had secured some $10 billion in European investment in its oil and gas sectors in recent years. Iran also announced that from March 2006-March 2007, its volume of non-oil trade with the Arab world stood at some $16 billion.

YET EVEN if the picture is mixed, it is clear that Iran's economy is on a downward trajectory. That this is the case has caused many to believe that the Iranians' economic dissatisfaction will cause the Iranian regime to take a more conciliatory position toward the international community by putting its nuclear program aside. It is similarly argued that Iran's economic woes will bring Ahmadinejad's more moderate political opponents to power in next year's parliamentary elections. Additionally, for the past several months, it has been forecast that Iran's economic weakness will eventually cause the regime to collapse and so end the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Unfortunately, the probability that in the foreseeable future Iran's economic problems will cause the regime to moderate its policies or bring regime opponents to power in Iran's parliament is not high.

Sunday, the regime's Guardians Council appointed four radical mullahs to form Iran's elections panel. This panel is responsible for approving political candidates and overseeing the voting processes. In 2004, the elections panel disqualified moderate candidates from running and so ensured that that hardliners would control the parliament. Sunday's announcement by the Guardians Council ensures that the 2008 elections will similarly maintain the power of the radicals.

Moreover, Ahmadinejad has responded to his economic failures by further strengthening his control over the economy. Sunday the Iranian media announced that Ahmadinejad had sacked the country's oil and industry ministers. Both men had worked to prevent Ahmadinejad from completing his takeover of the economy. With the two powerful ministries now under his full control, there is little doubt that he will intensify both his consolidation of power and his repression of his critics.

While it is possible that Ahmadinejad's economic mismanagement may at the end of the day capsize his regime by bankrupting the country, there is no reason to believe that this will occur before Iran acquires nuclear weapons. Today Iran is enriching uranium in some 3,000 centrifuges at its nuclear installation in Natanz. Last month, an Iranian official stated that this is sufficient make a nuclear bomb.

IF IRAN acquires nuclear weapons, the desirability of investing in its oil sector may rise. European countries eager to appease the Iranians in the hope of removing themselves from the nuclear-armed mullahs' enemies list may decide that a 6- or even 3-percent return on their investment is a deal to be had. And so a nuclear-armed Iran may be more economically viable than a non-nuclear armed Iran.

Finally, even if the regime collapses as a result of its economic incompetence, it is far from guaranteed that a new regime would be more friendly to the outside world, or pose less of a threat to global security in the medium and long term than the current regime. To understand why this is the case it is worth considering post-Soviet Russia.

THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Union did not cause the Russian people to revisit the basic ideological and moral assumptions on which the Soviet regime was predicated, or link those assumptions to the eventual implosion of the Soviet empire. As Reuben Johnson noted this week in the Weekly Standard, the Russians attributed the fall of the USSR to betrayal - by disloyal officials and by the outside world. By scapegoating others for the collapse of the regime, the Russians spared themselves the need to accept the moral failure of the Soviet model and to strike out on a new course.

The fact that the Russians have not come to terms with the evil nature of Soviet Communism was brought to the fore in 2003, when 53 percent of Russians claimed that Josef Stalin was a great leader and 36 percent said that he was more good than bad. As Boris Nemstov, the former deputy prime minister and current regime opponent wrote recently in the Vedemosti newspaper, the fact that "40 percent of Russians are prepared to vote for whomever [Russian President Vladimir] Putin supports" in next year's presidential elections is testament to the fact that the Russian people themselves oppose democracy.

Russia today is challenging the US on every conceivable level. It is pushing out in a neo-imperialist direction. This is brought home most clearly in its assertion of sovereignty over the North Pole, its treatment of the former Soviet republics and its stated aim to build a permanent naval station in Syria. In light of Russia's hostility, and its rejection of democracy, it is evident that the fall of the Soviet Union did not foment a change in Russia's moral or psychological make-up.

Noting Russia's refusal to reckon with the legacy of the Soviet Union, Russia scholar David Satter presciently warned in the National Review in 2002 that "The 'era of good feelings' in US-Russian relations… may prove short lived… Geopolitical interests notwithstanding, the Russian leadership has made no real effort to adopt Western values, particularly respect for the individual and the value of human life."

THE SAME could easily be the case in Iran if economic failure, unaccompanied by moral rebuke, foments the fall of the regime. To prevent a successor regime in Iran from looking like an Iranian version of Putin's Russia, it is insufficient to weaken Iran's economy. The US, Israel and other outside forces should be actively cultivating, supporting and organizing an alternative leadership that can take charge and move Iran in a new moral and ideological direction after the regime falls.

From all of this it is clear that while Iran's economic failure is a positive development which should be capitalized and built upon, it alone is no indication that Iran's threat to global security is weakening. To prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening the world in the long run, the promotion of its economic failure must be accompanied by military policies aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities, and political policies aimed at ensuring that Iran's next regime will be better than the current one.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Building and maintaining coalitions is one of the most difficult tasks of a nation at war. On the one hand, a state must ensure that its coalition partners share enough common goals and interests to ensure that their cooperation is effective. On the other hand, a state must constantly weigh the political and diplomatic benefits of maintaining its coalition against the price it must pay in terms of military effectiveness by delegating responsibility to others.

The price of maintaining coalitions is starkly exposed by the British military's failure to rein in radical Shi'ite forces and Iranian influence in Basra, Iraq's port city and oil hub. The question of whether having coalitions advances a nation's interests at all is brought to bear in Israel's diplomatic and strategic handling of its relations with the Palestinians and of the emerging situation in southern Lebanon.

Tuesday, a US intelligence official was quoted by the Washington Post saying, "The British have basically been defeated in the South." The Post article goes on to explain that the British "are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as 'surrounded like cowboys and Indians' by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional US Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months."

The British defeat in Basra was eminently foreseeable. Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003, some 100,000 Iraqi exiles who had lived in Iran since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s entered the city. Under the command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, during their time in exile, these Iraqis had organized a number of militias, including the Badr Brigade, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa party, as well as several smaller militias. Muqtada el-Sadr's Mahdi Army, although Iraq-based, was also supported by the Iranians.

These Iranian-backed forces were the most organized groups in the city in the chaos that engulfed Basra after the regime fell. Capitalizing on their organizational advantage, the groups volunteered to serve in the police and security services the British were raising to run the city. So it came to pass that within a short period of time, radical Shi'ite forces, backed by Iran, successfully took over Basra.

This radical Shi'ite takeover precipitated a reign of terror and intimidation in the city. As freelance reporter Steven Vincent chronicled before he was murdered in Basra in August 2005, the militias instituted a Khomeinist regime in the city, replete with death squads, generally comprised of off-duty policemen, which executed hundreds of civilians they accused of ties to the Ba'ath Party; the brutalization of women caught unveiled in public; the takeover of Basra's university and hospitals; and the extortion of businessmen in mafia-like protection rackets. All the while, the British turned a blind eye to the devolution of the city into an Iranian enclave.

In an interview with the BBC, Air Chief Marshall and chief of the British Defense Staff Jock Stirrup made clear that Britain never considered it its business how post-Saddam Iraq developed. Insisting that the British mission in Basra has been a success, Stirrup allowed that one's judgment of the British mission depended on "what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place." As he put it, Britain viewed its mission as limited to getting "the place and the people to a state where the Iraqis could run this part of the country, if they chose to."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government is keen to withdraw Britain's remaining forces from Iraq in the fall. Given Britain's performance in Basra, a British withdrawal would probably advance rather than harm the US's strategic interests in Iraq.

And yet, for all the difficulties that the British forces in Iraq have created for the Americans (and for the Iraqis who are interested in living in a free society), there is no doubt that both countries perceive themselves as strong allies. To this end, the Americans refrain from publicly criticizing the British military's dismal performance. For their part, the British have made clear that they will withdraw their forces in a manner that will minimize embarrassment to the US.

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN alliance is a clear example of a true, but problematic partnership. In contrast, the Olmert government's representations of Fatah and Egypt as Israel's coalition partners against Hamas on the one hand, and the UNIFIL forces as Israel's coalition partner against Hizbullah on the other hand, are a sham.

The Olmert government's policies towards Hamas today are driven by its presumption of a partnership with Fatah and Egypt. The government asserts that both Fatah and Egypt share Israel's goal of limiting Hamas's power to the Gaza Strip in the short run and overthrowing the jihadist movement in the long run. But reality tells a different tale.

This week, we learned that the $100 million that Israel transferred to Salaam Fayad's Fatah government last month was used to pay the annual salaries of soldiers in Hamas's army in Gaza. Then too, this week it was reported that far from eschewing Hamas politically, Fatah is engaged in intense discussions with Hamas towards the establishment of a new Hamas-Fatah government. Far from cooperating with Israel in weakening Hamas, Fatah is actively maintaining Hamas's strength.

Then there is Egypt. Although successive Israeli governments have insisted that Egypt is a moderating force on Palestinian society, for the past seven years, Egypt has worked steadily to strengthen Palestinian terror forces against Israel.

This state of affairs is most blatant in Egypt's embrace of Hamas through its hosting of Palestinian "unity" talks for the past seven years, and in its facilitation of the weapons flow into Gaza through Egypt. That Hamas itself views Egypt as an ally rather than a foe was made abundantly clear this week when Hamas leaders offered to transfer control over security forces' headquarters in Gaza to Egypt as a first step towards reconciling with Fatah.

Then there are the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. Speaking to Kadima party members Wednesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged that the security situation in northern Israel and southern Lebanon has never been better. Olmert added, "The commanders of the international forces say so, too."

In this statement, and in countless similar statements he has made over the past year, Olmert has presented UNIFIL as a friendly force which shares Israel's goal of neutralizing Hizbullah. But here, too, reality tells a different tale.

During last summer's war, UNIFIL directly assisted Hizbullah by reporting IDF troop movements in real time on its Web site. Since the war ended, UNIFIL forces have done nothing to prevent Hizbullah's massive rearmament.

Under the protective cover of UNIFIL forces, Hizbullah has reasserted its control over the villages in the South and prevented their Christian residents who fled during the war from returning home. Hizbullah's unqualified control over south Lebanon is attested to by foreign visitors who report that they must receive Hizbullah travel permits in order to enter south Lebanon. Then too, this week Lebanon's An Nahar newspaper reported that Hizbullah was moving to extend its independent telephone network to the south. Needless to say, UNIFIL has taken no action to prevent any of this.

UNIFIL's treatment of Hizbullah demonstrates that like Fatah and Egypt, UNIFIL does not construe its interests or goals in a manner that adheres to any Israeli interests or goals. Indeed, UNIFIL's goals and interests are antithetical and hostile to Israel's national security interests.

Yet Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and their cabinet colleagues consistently represent UNIFIL as an ally and have worked fastidiously to strengthen it. During the ceasefire negotiations last summer, the government insisted on enlarging the UNIFIL force and extending its mandate. After the war ended, in the interest of strengthening UNIFIL, the government made no effective protest against UNIFIL's inclusion of forces from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, whose governments are allied with Iran.

UNIFIL's mandate expires on August 31. Next week the UN Security Council is scheduled to convene to extend its mandate for another year. Rather than acknowledge UNIFIL's institutional hostility towards Israel, the Olmert government supports the extension of its mandate. As The Jerusalem Post reported this week, the government even hopes that UNIFIL's renewed mandate will empower it to increase its presence in Lebanese villages - as if there is any chance that UNIFIL would use its widened role to fight Hizbullah.

DUE TO the rampantly anti-American atmosphere in Britain and to Britain's refusal to view the threat that Middle Eastern rogue regimes pose to its national security in the same way as the US perceives the threat, there have always been tensions in the countries' alliance that have led to their starkly different strategies in Iraq. The main reason that these divergent strategies receive attention today is because the US military's recent successes in Iraq make Britain's failures impossible to ignore.

The administration changed course in Iraq because domestic pressure forced it to acknowledge that its previous course was failing. So indirectly, it was public pressure on the administration that exposed the operational disparity between the British and the American militaries. The exposure of this disparity is now forcing the administration to contend with the fact that the coalition with Britain is not as useful as it had hoped. No doubt, as a result, the US military will soon be forced to operate in Basra regardless of whether the British remain in Iraq or withdraw.

Sadly, in Israel, the Olmert government refuses to acknowledge, let alone respond to domestic criticisms of its mishandling of the situation with the Palestinians and its mismanagement of Lebanon. Rather than acknowledge that Fatah, Egypt and UNIFIL share none of Israel's national interests, the government continues to embrace them and hopes that no one will notice that its imaginary coalition partners endanger, rather than advance Israel's national security.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Compare and contrast two separate actions taken last month by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Last month, after a five-year campaign by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies which culminated in the publication of a petition signed by some 100 Holocaust scholars, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum decided to add to its permanent exhibition the story of the Bergson Group's efforts to rescue European Jewry during the Holocaust.

The Bergson Group, named after its leader Peter Bergson, who served as the Irgun Tzvai Leumi's representative in the US during the war, was formed in 1943 to pressure the Roosevelt administration to take active measures to save the Jews of Europe from annihilation.

Bergson, whose real name was Hillel Kook, arrived in the US in 1940 as part of Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky's delegation to the US. Jabotinsky formed the delegation to ramp up US support for Zionism against the British government's illegal decision to block Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel.

In 1943, as news of the slaughter of European Jewry began filtering into press reports, Bergson decided to put his Zionist efforts on hold and devote all his energies to saving Europe's Jews. His efforts ran afoul of the American Jewish establishment, led by American Jewish Congress leader Stephen Wise, who felt that an activist response to the genocide would increase anti-Semitism in the US and alienate the Roosevelt administration.

Rather than pressure President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to do something to save Europe's Jews, Wise acted as an apologist for the administration to the Jewish community. He embraced the administration's line that the best thing for European Jewry was for American Jews to support the war effort and not make waves about the genocide.

BERGSON WOULD have none of it. He organized a group of supporters that spanned the political spectrum, from Communist fellow travelers to Southern reactionaries. With the help of Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, he galvanized the great stars of Hollywood to the cause of European Jews. His organization, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, published more than 200 full-page advertisements in major US newspapers to promote awareness of the Holocaust and motivate politicians to act.

Though constantly undercut by Wise and his allies, Bergson's group carried out a massive national campaign that included a Broadway play written by Ben Hecht and composer Kurt Weil, starring Marlon Brando, which demanded action to save European Jews; a march of some 400 rabbis in Washington to demand that Roosevelt do something to save European Jews, and a major lobbying effort on Capitol Hill among both Democrats and Republicans to force the Roosevelt administration to act on behalf of European Jewry.

IT WAS the large-scale support of Republicans, and the threat of losing Jewish support for the Democratic Party in the 1944 elections, that finally prompted Roosevelt to take action. As a result of Congressional pressure, in 1944 Roosevelt formed the War Refugee Board, which ultimately saved the lives of 200,000 Jews, mainly in Hungary. It was the only significant effort Roosevelt took throughout the war to save European Jewry, and it came about only because of the tireless efforts of the Bergson Group.

That the American Jewish establishment was unforgiving of the Bergson group's activities is made clear by the fact that it took 14 years and a public pressure campaign to convince the museum to recognize the group's efforts.

Indeed, press reports of the museum's decision make clear that even today there remains an underlying hostility toward Bergson's activities.

Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, University of Toronto historian Michael Marrus complained that there is "an unspoken political dimension" to the debate about Bergson. He alleged that in lobbying the museum to recognize Bergson, the Wyman Institute was trying to advance the right-wing agenda of Jewish activism that Bergson and the Revisionists embraced.

So even 70 years after the Holocaust, when it is clear that the Bergson's group's efforts led to the only US action to save Europe's Jews, supporting and upholding those efforts is considered a provocative political act. Yet memorializing men like Wise, who actively sought to undermine those efforts in order to maintain his warm relationship with Roosevelt, is considered uncontroversial.

As irksome as the lingering attempts to push Bergson into a political cubbyhole are, at least the public campaign launched by the Wyman Institute succeeded in convincing the Holocaust Museum to give his efforts the institutional recognition they deserve.

MORE IRKSOME than the abiding hostility toward Bergson is Yad Vashem's decision last month to hold a ceremony where it accepted the personal archive of Rudolf Kastner and extolled as a "hero" the man who served during the war as the deputy head of the Labor Zionist-affiliated Relief and Rescue Committee of Hungarian Jews.

Kastner may have been many things, but he certainly was not a hero.

The annihilation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews began only in 1944. In early 1944, Kastner was warned by two Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, who had escaped from Auschwitz, that the Nazis planned to deport Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz. The men's "Auschwitz Protocol" provided a detailed account of the Nazis' plans.

Rather than alert his fellow Jews to the coming dangers, Kastner made a deal with Nazi chief Adolf Eichmann to buy the freedom of some 1,685 Hungarian Jewish notables, including his relatives.

Kastner maintained close relations with Nazi war criminal Kurt Becher, who played a major role in the genocide of Hungarian Jews. He went so far as to testify on Becher's behalf during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals.

After the war Kastner moved to Israel and ran for Knesset on the Mapai slate. In 1952 he was working as a spokesman and party official at Israel's Industry Ministry when Malkiel Grunwald self-published a pamphlet in which he accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Nazis. The state sued Grunwald for libel.

In the course of a 10-month trial, the facts of Kastner's collaboration became clear. Presiding Judge Binyamin Halevy dismissed the suit in 1955. He ruled that "Kastner sold his soul to the devil." Kastner was murdered in 1957. In 1958, the government appealed Halevy's verdict to the Supreme Court. While accepting much of the evidence of Kastner's betrayal, including his post-war testimony on behalf of Becher, the court ruled, in a split 3-2 decision, that Kastner had not collaborated with the Nazis.

The debate over Kastner's role in the genocide of Hungarian Jewry continues to this day. While historical and court evidence as well as survivors' testimony clearly point to the conclusion that he collaborated with the Nazis, the Labor Zionist establishment in Israel has never accepted the allegations against him. And now, the establishment, in the form of Yad Vashem, has decided to uphold this man, who refused to warn his fellow Jews of the danger, as a hero.

SPEAKING TO The Jerusalem Post's Elliot Jager last week, Yad Vashem president Yosef Lapid argued that Kastner was acting honorably by testifying on Becher's behalf because during the war he had pledged to the Nazi that he would defend him.

Lapid excused Kastner's failure to warn his fellow Jews that the trains they were being placed on would take them to Auschwitz and not to a labor camp in Rumania, as the Nazis said. In Lapid's view, warning them, and so giving them a chance to fight for their lives would have been deadly.

"A revolt by Hungarian Jewish women and children would have resulted in an immediate massacre. (The men had already been taken for forced labor.) The object was to buy time in any way possible," he said.

Lapid has apparently decided to ignore the simple fact that these innocent women and children were murdered at Auschwitz. The only ones who benefited from the "bought time" were the Nazis. Due to Kastner's refusal to warn his fellow Jews of the fate that awaited them, the Nazis were able to carry out the deportations to Auschwitz without risking a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Budapest.

Yad Vashem's execrable decision to honor Kastner on the one hand, and the controversy over the US Holocaust Museum's decision to belatedly give the Bergson Group the recognition it deserves on the other demonstrate two things.

First, they show that in times of crisis it may be necessary to buck the establishment in order to save lives. Second, they show that the establishment will not embrace success or acknowledge perfidy if it believes that doing so will harm its reputation.

The stories of the Bergson Group and Kastner could not be more relevant today as the Jewish people again faces the prospect of annihilation at the hands of an Iranian nuclear bomb. The stories of the men and women who confronted the establishment during the Holocaust, and that of the establishment man who enabled it, should serve as a warning as the Israeli government today insists on taking a back seat to others in contending with Iran's threat to commit a second Holocaust.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week last year, Israel was in the midst of a terrible war which its government refused to acknowledge. As rockets and missiles rained down on northern Israel, the Olmert government refused to call up IDF reservists or launch a ground campaign in Lebanon. Ignoring reality, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stood before the graduating class of the IDF's National Security College and announced that Israel had won.

Olmert said, "If the military campaign were to end today, already today it could be said with certainty that the face of the Middle East has changed… Now [Hizbullah] can never threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it - because this nation is contending with these missiles and beating them."

The next morning, in an interview with the Associated Press, Olmert expanded on his delusion, declaring that the IDF had destroyed all of Hizbullah's military infrastructures in south Lebanon. Even before his interview hit the airwaves, Hizbullah opened its largest bombardment until that point. That day 231 missiles fell on Israel.

Olmert also used the AP interview to set out his post-victory plans. Israel's big win, he said, would pave the way for its withdrawal from Judea and Samaria.

Back then, even the generally supportive media attacked him for his bold-faced lies and for his willingness to discuss the notion of more Israeli withdrawals when the war itself was the direct result of previous Israeli retreats. When the war ended a week later in Israeli defeat, no one expected that a year later Olmert would still be in power.

But here we are, one year on, Olmert is still the prime minister, and he is still telling lies at National Security College graduation ceremonies. While last year he ignored the reality of war, at his commencement speech Tuesday, Olmert ignored the coming war. By his telling, there is no war on the horizon because, "In the north and in the east live millions of people who want tranquility, a quality of life and quiet - just like we do."

One year on, Olmert's government looks more stable than ever. As former minister Natan Sharansky, who now heads the Shalem Center's Institute for National Strategies, notes, "With nine percent approval ratings, Olmert's government is more stable than Binyamin Netanyahu's government was with 45-65 percent approval ratings."

Indifferent to public rejection, Olmert and his ministers pursue diplomatic and security goals that bear no relation to the regional and global realities facing Israel.

Today Olmert has one overriding policy objective: He wants to get his picture taken with the Saudis.

Since US President George W. Bush announced his intention to organize a regional conference of Arab leaders to pressure Israel to give land to the Fatah terrorist organization, the most urgent order of business for Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has been to convince the Saudis to come to the conference. To achieve this goal they are ready to give up Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. To achieve this goal they are willing to cut Israel in two to enable the Palestinians to have "territorial contiguity" between Gaza and Judea.

Furthermore, over the opposition of the defense establishment, Olmert and his ministers are willing to end their opposition to the US plan to supply Saudi Arabia with JDAM precision bombs. That Israel has no way of defending itself against JDAM assault, that the Saudi regime and military are crawling from head to tail with al-Qaida operatives is immaterial.

So excited are they at the prospect of meeting the Saudis, Olmert and his colleagues never seem to have considered the idea of demanding that the Saudis pay for the honor of meeting Israelis. They have made no demand that Saudi Arabia stop financing and distributing genocidal anti-Semitic propaganda worldwide. They have not demanded that the Saudis end their economic boycott of Israel. They just want the Saudis to say "cheese."

The Saudi photo-op policy is not the only delusional policy the Olmert government is advancing. There is also Defense Minister Ehud Barak's new missile defense plan. This week Barak announced that within three years, he wishes to develop and deploy a missile shield that will block everything from Palestinian Kassam rockets to Iranian Shihab ballistic missiles.

Although Israel needs a missile defense system, the plan that Barak outlines is sheer fantasy. First, there is no chance that Israel will be able to build and deploy a comprehensive missile defense within three years. Second, there is no chance than any system will be able to defend Israel in the eminently foreseeable event that it is attacked by thousands of missiles in a joint Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian missile offensive.

Barak claims that his missile defense system will enable Israel to vacate Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights. But this is ridiculous. If last summer's war proved anything, it proved that to prevent missile attack, Israel must control territory and actively destroy its enemies' missile arsenals in their silos. Hizbullah would never have been able to launch its war if Barak hadn't withdrawn the IDF from Lebanon in 2000.

A COMMON thread runs through Olmert and Barak's fairytales. The Israeli public has no role to play in either of them. Both policies start from the assumption that the interests and opinions of the public are irrelevant and its participation in crafting and implementing national policies is undesirable. For Olmert and Barak, the citizens of Israel are mere spectators in their government-produced reality TV shows.

Many factors contribute to the fact that Olmert's unpopular government is able to cling to power and behave as if there is nothing wrong. But the main cause for the government's longevity is the deep crisis which plagues Israel's democratic system.

In Sharansky's view, there are two causes for the current crisis: Political leaders perceive their positions as career opportunities rather than opportunities to serve the public; and the public doesn't demand that its elected leaders reassess their perception.

This state of affairs is disastrous because the main strength of democratic societies is their ability to embrace the individual strengths of their citizens to advance the national interest. As Sharansky explains, "A national strategy must be based on the values of its nation. Israel is predicated on two core values: the fact that it is a Jewish state and the fact that it is a free society."

For the past generation, Israel's leaders have underrated the strength of the county's core values. "Already back in the 1980s, Shimon Peres was saying that the nation is weak. Barak said the same thing before he went to the Camp David summit [in 2000]. Ariel Sharon said the same thing before the withdrawal from Gaza. But during last summer's war we saw that the opposite was true. The nation is strong. Our leaders are weak. And today our leaders continue to base their policies on the same mistaken perception that the nation has no strength."

It is no doubt true that the Israeli public's repeated willingness to elect weak leaders contributes to our leaders' low estimation of our strength. For democracies to work, the people must choose leaders capable of advancing their national interests. And such leaders are not men and women who promise the public utopias. Such leaders are men and women who look reality in the face and ask the nation to work with them in advancing national goals in accordance with the reality on the ground.

In the next general elections, Israeli voters will be asked to choose between three alternative leaders - Olmert, Barak and Netanyahu. As Sharansky sees it, Netanyahu is the only one with a realistic understanding of global realities and a true appreciation for the strength of Israeli democracy. Netanyahu's economic reforms, which fuelled Israel's prosperity, were predicated on the liberal view that national wealth is created by a nation's citizenry, not by the government. Unlike Barak and Olmert, Netanyahu grasps that the key to national strength is the empowerment of the nation.

WHILE NATIONAL elections seem light years away, in 10 days, Netanyahu will stand for reelection as the leader of Likud. He is facing off in the Likud primaries against Moshe Feiglin, who heads the Jewish Leadership faction.

What is striking about these primaries is the similarity between Feiglin and Barak and Olmert. Although Feiglin comes from the post-Zionist Right rather than the post-Zionist Left, like Barak and Olmert, he bases his post-Zionist vision for the country on fantasy. Whereas in Olmert and Barak's leftist visions Israel has no enemies, in Feiglin's vision, there is no outside world at all. There is no US administration. There is no European Union. There is no United Nations. There is no media. There is nothing. No worries. Feiglin will just tell the West and the Arabs to leave us alone because this is our land and it's our God given right to be here, and everyone will understand and no one will bother us anymore.

Sharansky's main problem with Feiglin's candidacy is that if he makes a strong showing he will frighten away disaffected Kadima, Yisrael Beitenu and Shas voters who do not ascribe to his post-Zionist, religious worldview. While this is true enough, it is not the central problem with Feiglin.

The Zionist ideal which Feiglin, like Olmert and Barak, insists on replacing is the only viable path to ensure the survivability of the State of Israel. It is the Zionist vision, which postulates a free Jewish nation state, where the sum total of creativity and wisdom of both democratic institutions and the Jewish traditions of faith in human freedom can build on one another, which guarantees that the core values and inherent strengths of the nation will be brought to bear in moving the country forward.

Sharansky himself believes strongly that Zionism is the core of Israeli strength. As he puts it, "As a Jewish nation state, we have the will power of a people that returned to Zion and built a free country. These are powerful foundations for a national strategy."

But to bring these strengths to bear, the nation must understand that it must defend itself from poor leaders. "Democracy isn't only leaders. It is also the willingness of the people to protect democracy. We can't expect for the prime minister to just get up and resign. The public needs to pressure government ministers and members of Knesset. Today they do not feel that they will pay a particularly heavy price for their support of this terribly unpopular government."

Democracy is based on people making choices. The success of democracies is ensured only when people choose wisely and embrace their power and responsibility as citizens.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.