This week the Bush Administration legitimized Arab anti-Semitism. In an effort to please the Saudis and their Arab brothers, the Bush administration agreed to physically separate the Jews from the Arabs at the Annapolis conference in a manner that aligns with the apartheid policies of the Arab world which prohibit Israelis from setting foot on Arab soil.

Evident everywhere, the discrimination against Israel received its starkest expression at the main assembly of the Annapolis conference on Tuesday. There, in accordance with Saudi demands, the Americans prohibited Israeli representatives from entering the hall through the same door as the Arabs.

At the meeting of foreign ministers on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called her Arab counterparts to task for their discriminatory treatment. "Why doesn't anyone want to shake my hand? Why doesn't anyone want to be seen speaking to me?" she asked pointedly.

Israel's humiliated foreign minister did not receive support from her American counterpart. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent her childhood years in the segregated American South, sided with the Arabs. Although polite enough to note that she doesn't support the slaughter of Israelis, she made no bones about the fact that her true sympathies lie with the racist Arabs.

As she put it, "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness."

Rice's remarks make clear that for the Secretary of State there is no difference between Israelis trying to defend themselves from a jihadist Palestinian society which supports the destruction of the Jewish state and bigoted white Southerners who oppressed African Americans because of the color of their skin. It is true that Israel has security concerns, but as far as Rice is concerned, the Palestinians are the innocent victims. They are the ones who are discriminated against and humiliated, not Livni, who was forced - by Rice - to enter the conference through the service entrance.

The Bush administration's tolerance for discrimination against Israel was not merely ceremonial. Diplomatically, the conference was equally prejudicial. At Annapolis, the US joined the Arabs in placing the lion's share of blame for the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians on Israel. But you wouldn't know that from listening to Olmert, who is working steadily to hide what happened there.

Olmert obfuscates the truth because his political stability rests in the hands of his hawkish coalition partners Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas. Both warned before the summit that if Olmert made any concessions on either Jerusalem or the so-called outpost communities in Judea and Samaria they would bolt his coalition and so spur new elections.

Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the summit. Both Shas leader Eli Yishai and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman dismissed Annapolis as a pathetic joke and claimed that there is no reason for them to resign from the Olmert government. But these assertions are deliberately misleading.

The fact that the Israeli-PLO joint statement made no specific mention of Jerusalem, and that the government didn't announce a timetable for destroying the so-called outpost communities and expelling the hundreds of Israeli families who live in them, doesn't mean that Israel made no concessions on these issues. In fact, the Olmert government made massive concessions on these issues.

The Israel-PLO joint statement at Annapolis contains a joint pledge "to propagate a culture of peace and nonviolence; to confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis."

Although Olmert, Lieberman and Yishai dismiss this Israeli acceptance of moral equivalence with Palestinian jihadists as a meaningless rhetorical concession, the government's move is rife with political and legal implications. US Ambassador Richard Jones's unprecedented meeting this week with Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch made clear that the US demands that Israeli courts interpret Israeli law in a prejudicial manner in order to demonize Israeli opponents of Palestinian statehood and the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Judea and Samaria.

Their meeting also signaled that the US expects Israel to treat lawful building activities by Jews in Judea and Samaria and even in sections of Jerusalem as criminal acts. Since the Olmert government accepts that Israel is morally indistinguishable from the Palestinian Authority, it is hard to foresee it preventing the criminalization of its political opponents. From now on, Israelis who oppose the diplomatic moves of the Olmert government can expect to be treated as the moral equivalents of Palestinian terrorists.

At Annapolis the Americans accepted the role of sole arbiter of Israeli and Palestinian compliance with their commitments to the so-called 'Roadmap' and the peace process. They also committed themselves to reaching a comprehensive peace treaty by the end of 2008. But as former US Middle East mediator during the Clinton administration Dennis Ross has admitted, these goals are contradictory. It is impossible to both ensure Palestinian compliance and the achievement of a peace treaty in that timetable.

Writing in The Washington Post after the Oslo peace process collapsed at Camp David and the Palestinian jihad had begun, Ross explained, "The prudential issues of compliance were neglected and politicized by the Americans in favor of keeping the peace process afloat….Every time there was a behavior, or an incident, or an event that was inconsistent with what the peace process was about, the impulse was to rationalize it, finesse it, find a way around it, and not to allow it to break the process."

"What the peace process was about" for the Clinton administration was signing peace agreements. It was not about ensuring that the Palestinians were actually interested in living at peace with Israel. When Rice stated that "failure is not an option," in the coming peace process, she made clear that the same is the case for the Bush administration today. She wants an agreement. Whether the Palestinians are serious about peace or not is none of her business.

Although reporting on Palestinian non-compliance with their commitments to fight terror will harm prospects for speedy "progress," accusing Israel of filching on its commitments will actually speed things along. Alleging Israeli non-compliance will force the pliant Olmert government to make further concessions to the Palestinians.

In light of this, it is clear that contrary to Yishai and Lieberman's dismissive treatment of what happened at Annapolis, Olmert's acceptance of the Americans as both judge of compliance and guarantor of "progress" means that Israel already made massive concessions.

On Jerusalem, for instance, although Yishai is right that Jerusalem is not specifically mentioned in the joint statement, the fact is that Israel agreed to negotiate the status of its capital city by agreeing to discuss all outstanding issues. Since the Americans want a Palestinian state within a year and they know that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas will not make any concessions on Jerusalem, they can be expected to pressure Israel to accept the Palestinian position. The thousands of Arab Jerusalemites now applying for Israeli citizenship are a clear sign that the Arabs understand that Israel has already made massive concessions on the city. And Yishai must know this.

The American status as arbiters of compliance has far reaching implications for Israel's ability to cope effectively with the security situation in Gaza and the Western Negev. Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in June, Abbas has opposed any wide-scale IDF counter-terror offensive on the area. Abbas has claimed - probably rightly - that an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza would weaken his position in Palestinian society since the Palestinians support Hamas's positions more than they support him. Given that the Americans are committed to strengthening Abbas, it is obvious that they will veto any Israeli plan to conduct an offensive in Gaza aimed at restoring security to the Western Negev.

Then there is Judea and Samaria. Lieberman claims that he can remain in the government because Olmert has yet to announce a timetable for throwing the Jews out of their homes in the so-called outpost communities. But that isn't Olmert's responsibility anymore. He ceded it to the Americans at Annapolis. They will set the timetable for expulsions, not Olmert. And it isn't only the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria that are now at risk.

By anointing the State Department arbiter of Israeli compliance, the Olmert government gave the Americans the right to veto IDF operations in Judea and Samaria. As the guarantors of progress in the peace process, the Americans will tell the IDF where it can - or more precisely where it cannot - erect roadblocks. The Americans will tell the Israelis what cities and towns to transfer to Fatah control. They will tell Israel what guns and armor to transfer to the Palestinians, what to do with terror fugitives and when and how many terrorists it must release from its prisons.

Actually, the US has been constraining Israel's counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria for months now. That these American efforts have harmed the effectiveness of the IDF's operations is something that Ido Zoldan's widow can attest to. Zoldan, after all, was murdered last week by Fatah terrorists who owed their ability to move about freely to Israel's decision to bow to American pressure and dismantle 24 roadblocks and curb its efforts to arrest Fatah terror bosses.

In essence, what we see in Olmert's and Livni's machinations is a repeat of Ariel Sharon's and Livni's political maneuvering in the period that preceded the withdrawal from Gaza. In both cases, Israel's senior leaders abide by the basic political understanding that a fight postponed is a fight won.

In 2004 Sharon lacked the political strength to announce openly that he was going to completely withdraw from Gaza and destroy all the Israeli communities in the area. So he allowed the Likud to hold a referendum on his plan to withdraw and authorized Livni to draft the so-called compromise plan according to which the destruction of Israeli communities would take place in four stages over several months and that each stage would require separate government approval.

By the time the Likud rejected his plan, Sharon was strong enough to ignore the will of his party. And when the withdrawal took place, far from taking place in four stages, it took place in four days. Livni and Sharon could ignore their previous commitments because when the time came to pay the piper, they had already destroyed their opponents.

Today, by pretending that the joint declaration at Annapolis was a big nothing, Olmert and Livni are repeating the maneuver. By the time they start throwing Jews out of their homes, they won't need Shas or Yisrael Beiteinu anymore.

Lieberman and Yishai are under no obligation to leave the government. They can stay for as long as they like. But they cannot pretend that by staying they are not full partners in the government's policies. As Annapolis made clear, those policies include dividing Jerusalem, destroying the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and compromising the security of the State of Israel.
 
Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

There is a bit of perverse poetry in the fact that the Annapolis conference is taking place the same week as the 60th anniversary of the UN General Assembly's resolution recommending that the British Mandate of Palestine be partitioned between a Jewish and Arab state.

What the confluence of events serves to show is just how little has changed in the past 60 years.

Both the 1947 UN resolution and the Annapolis conference are dedicated to the task of forcing the Jewish people to compromise their rights in a bid to appease Israel's neighbors who still 60 years on maintain their refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty over their land. And both are presented as diplomatic achievements by the Israeli government.

The Olmert government, backed by the leftist Israeli media, has presented the decision of Arab and Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan and Indonesia which do not accept Israel's right to exist to participate in the Annapolis conference as a major breakthrough. But this is nonsense. The representatives of these states will use their American-provided platform to condemn Israel, just as they use every other available international platform to do so.

Similarly, the Olmert government, backed by Israel's leftist media celebrates the 1947 UN resolution as if it were the foundation of Israel's international legitimacy. Not only is this incorrect, over the years, the perception that Israel owes its legitimacy to that UN resolution has had corrosive effect on Israel's ability to conduct foreign policy in a manner that advances its national interest. This effect is clearly evident in the Olmert government's handling of foreign policy.

ON NOVEMBER 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 181. As a General Assembly resolution, 181 had no force of international law. The international legal basis for the Jewish state was the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine which charged the British government with administering the area earmarked as the future Jewish state.

Indeed, if anything, resolution 181 sought to legitimize illegal moves taken by Britain throughout the term of its mandate. As the League of Nations mandate made clear, Britain was supposed to preside over the territory of the Mandatory Palestine and to foster the establishment of a Jewish state which would eventually replace the British mandatory government. Yet almost from the get-go the British did just the opposite. They established the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan on the majority of the land slated for the Jewish state. Moreover, they took all possible steps to prevent the Jews from establishing a state on the remainder of the land. They blocked Jewish immigration and limited the right of Jews to purchase and settle the land to a tiny portion of the territory - which they believed would be too small to sustain a sovereign state.

It was due to the British failure to destroy Zionism and block the Jewish people from establishing their state that the UN partition plan was brought into being. That is, far from establishing a Jewish state, 181 simply accepted an already existing national entity. Despite the best efforts of Britain, the Jews had already established their state in 1947. It would have existed even if the resolution had not passed.

Unfortunately, rather than recognize the actual legal foundation of Israel and though it, its own rights to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, Israel acts as though its legitimate boundaries were determined by the UN Security Council. Its misplaced gratitude to the UN has caused successive Israeli government's to ignore and downplay the UN's mistreatment of Israel.

For the past 40 years, far from living up to Israel's high opinion of it, the UN has been the primary engine behind the campaign to deny Israel's right to exist. The UN has relegated Israel to the status of second class citizen that suffers from systematic discrimination throughout the UN system. The UN's unfair treatment of Israel places the UN in violation of its own charter's assertion that all states must be treated equally. And indeed, it has corrupted the organization beyond repair.

BACK IN 1975, Israel's UN ambassador Chaim Herzog stood before the General Assembly and tore up the body's anti-Semitic resolution defining Zionism as a form of racism. But over the past 15 years, Israel's ability to stand up to UN discrimination has eroded. This erosion of Israel's ability to recognize the UN's belligerence as such has been driven to new depths under the Olmert government. Far from giving the UN a wide berth, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have embraced the hostile body and empowered it to determine international policy on the three largest threats to Israel's national security: Iran's nuclear weapons program; Hizbullah's power in Lebanon; and Palestinian terror and political warfare against the Jewish state.

Since the Iranian nuclear weapons program was first exposed in 2002, Israel has supported US efforts to handle the threat through the UN Security Council. In light of Chinese and Russian support for Iran, this policy never made sense. And yet, as Iran has moved ever closer to nuclear capabilities, for five years Israel has subordinated its efforts to thwart Iran's nuclear progress to a body that is institutionally incapable of doing anything to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.

During the war with Hizbullah in 2006, the UN Security Council led the charge in condemning Israel. Yet rather than sideline the hostile body, the Olmert government chose to empower it still further. The Security Council, which daily held special sessions to attack Israel and accuse it of war crimes was authorized to set the terms of the cease-fire. And Israel embraced its cease-fire resolution which enabled Hizbullah to rearm and assert control not only over south Lebanon but north of the Litani River.

Israel also enthusiastically pushed for the expansion of the UNIFIL force in south Lebanon under whose watch Hizbullah has been allowed to rearm and Israel has been barred from taking military action to neutralize the burgeoning threat to its territory.

FINALLY THERE are the Palestinians. The day that Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of resolution 181, the UN will mourn it in an official day of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Indeed, the UN will mark the anniversary by passing a dozen resolutions condemning Israel - most authored by the same countries that sent representatives to Annapolis to condemn Israel.

As with Iran and Hizbullah, so with the Palestinians, the Olmert government has responded to the increased radicalization of Palestinian society by expanding UN authority over the conflict. This is nowhere more apparent than in the government's promotion of the UN Relief Works Agency.

After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Israel called for the international community to expand its financial support for UNRWA. UNRWA, which runs the Palestinian refugee camps has allowed those camps to be used as terror bases. The sole purpose of UNRWA is to perpetuate the plight of the so-called Palestinian refugees and their descendents by preventing them from being permanently resettled in the countries where they have lived for four generations. And yet, the Olmert government has become one of the agencies most fervent advocates.

The Olmert government denigrates its critics who point out that the Annapolis conference is harmful to Israel's national security interests as anti-peace. By the same token, it attacks Israel's supporters who criticize the UN for its anti-Israel policies. On November 18, experts on international law, US lawmakers and retired Israeli diplomats convened in New York at a conference entitled: "Hijacking Human Rights: The Demonization of Israel by the United Nations" sponsored by Touro College, The Hudson Institute and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. The UN's sole defender at the conclave was Deputy UN Ambassador Daniel Carmon.

Carmon trivialized the effect of the UN's discriminatory treatment of Israel as a merely unpleasant and upheld the UN as useful on Iran, the Palestinians and Lebanon. He chided Israel's defenders for attacking the UN and generally did everything in his power to demoralize his audience.

As Esther Kandel, a Jewish activist who has been lobbying the US Congress to cut off funding for UNRWA due to its support for terrorism told the Jewish Week, "It doesn't help when we are working on educating members of Congress about the fraud and evil-doing in UNRWA to have a representative of Israel say that UNRWA is a good thing. I feel undercut and undermined by the government of Israel on this issue."

The problem that Israel's supporters face in contending with the Olmert government is the same as that experienced by Israelis who understand just how dangerous and self-defeating the government's foreign policy is. In both cases, the same blind officials who think they have accomplished something when Arab and Islamic states agree to sit at the same table as Israelis and condemn the Jewish state to their faces, and who view a legally insignificant failed UN resolution as a great diplomatic achievement, are calling the shots.

Until Israel gets leaders who run a foreign policy based on a recognition of reality and a celebration of the Jewish people's accomplishments in building and securing the state, Israel's supporters will continue to be confounded by the Israeli government, and the Israeli people will continue to be attacked and humiliated.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The mood is dark in the IDF's General Staff ahead of next week's "peace" conference in Annapolis. As one senior officer directly involved in the negotiations with the Palestinians and the Americans said, "As bad as it might look from the outside, the truth is 10 times worse. This is a nightmare. The Americans have never been so hostile."

On Thursday a draft of the joint statement that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are discussing ahead of the conference was leaked to the media. A reading of the document bears out the IDF's concerns.

The draft document shows that the Palestinians and the Israelis differ not only on every issue, but differ on the purpose of the document. It also shows that the US firmly backs the Palestinians against Israel.

As the draft document makes clear, Israel is trying to avoid committing itself to anything at Annapolis. For their part, the Palestinians are trying to force Israel's hand by tying it to diplomatic formulas that presuppose an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines and an Israeli acceptance of the so-called "right of return" or free immigration of foreign Arabs to Israel.

The Palestinians are also trying to take away Israel's right to determine for itself whether to trust the Palestinians and continue making diplomatic and security concessions or not by making it the responsibility of outside parties to decide the pace of the concessions and whether or not the Palestinians should be trusted.

As the leaked draft document shows, the Americans have sided with the Palestinians against Israel. Specifically, the Americans have taken for themselves the sole right to judge whether or not the Palestinians and the Israelis are abiding by their commitments and whether and at what pace the negotiations will proceed.

But the Americans have shown themselves to be unworthy of Israel's trust. By refusing to acknowledge Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party's direct involvement in terrorism and indeed the direct involvement of his official Fatah "security forces" in terrorism, the Americans have shown that their benchmarks for Palestinian compliance with their commitments to Israel are not necessarily based on the reality on the ground. Then too, the US demands for wide-ranging Israeli security concessions to the Palestinians even before the "peace" conference at Annapolis have shown that Israel's security is of little concern to the State Department.

IDF sources blame the shooting murder of Ido Zoldan on Monday night by Fatah terrorists on Israel's decision to bow to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's demand to take down 24 security roadblocks in Judea and Samaria. If it hadn't been for US pressure, they say, it is quite possible that the 29-year-old father of two small children would be alive today.

But this is of no concern for Washington. As Rice has made clear repeatedly, the US wants to see "signs of progress." Since the Palestinians are taking no action against terror and doing nothing to lessen their society's jihadist fervor, the only way to achieve "signs of progress" is by forcing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. And so that is exactly what Rice and her associates are doing.

Rice is able to force Israel to accept her demands because she faces the weakest Israeli leaders the country has ever produced. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are all incapable of standing up to the Americans or even arguing with them. Olmert's and Livni's weakness has been apparent since their mishandling of the war with Hizbullah last summer and their negotiations over the cease-fire agreement with Rice. For his part, throughout his brief and disastrous tenure as prime minister, Barak behaved as though he were then president Bill Clinton's employee.

BUT IF Olmert's, Livni's and Barak's willingness to compromise their nation's security is a function of their weakness, what explains Rice's and Bush's behavior? Why are they weakening Israel and pushing for the establishment of yet another Middle Eastern terror state? What US interest do they think they are advancing by acting as they are?

Over the past several weeks, a number of theories have been raised to explain their behavior. The most frequent explanation is that Rice and Bush are championing Palestinian statehood at Israel's expense in a bid to mobilize a coalition of Sunni Arab states to cooperate with the US against Iran.

According to this theory, if Annapolis is seen as a success, then the Arab states will be convinced that the US is worth supporting on Iran. This theory has several flaws. First, as the US's treatment of Israel makes clear, success in Annapolis involves weakening Israel whose destruction Iran seeks and empowering the Palestinians whom Iran supports. This means that far from weakening Iran, success at Annapolis advances Iran's interests.

But beyond that, whether wittingly or unwittingly, by convening the conference next week, the Bush administration has directly empowered Iran. Today the determination of whether the administration emerges unscathed or humiliated from Annapolis is entirely in Iran's hands. Iran will decide whether the conference opens and closes peacefully or whether it is convened as Lebanon is submerged in civil war by Iran's proxies Syria and Hizbullah.

According to the Lebanese constitution, Saturday is the last day on which a new Lebanese president can be elected. Lebanon's president must be elected by two-thirds of the members of Lebanon's parliament. Through their campaign of assassination, Syria and Hizbullah have taken away the two-thirds majority that anti-Syrian forces won in the 2005 elections. As a result, Hizbullah has veto power over the election. And so far, Iran and Syria have refused to allow Hizbullah to back any candidate. This is the case despite the anti-Syrian majority's willingness to support a pro-Syrian presidential candidate.

Due to the Iranian-Syrian induced impasse, today there are two possible scenarios for what may happen in the next few days in Lebanon. Either Iran and Syria will allow elections to take place and an agent of their regimes and Hizbullah will take over the presidency, or elections will not take place and two governments - one anti-Syrian under Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and one pro-Syrian - will be formed. The pro-Syrian government will be supported by Hizbullah and the Lebanese army. The anti-Syrian government will be supported by Christian, Sunni and Druse militias. A civil war will ensue. Syria, Hizbullah and Iran will win.

In a bid to induce the first scenario, Bush has been lobbying every leader he can think of to appeal to Teheran and Damascus to relent and allow elections to go through. To this end, he even asked their primary arms supplier Russian President Vladimir Putin to intervene. Olmert's decision to allow Fatah security forces to receive 25 advanced Russian armored personnel carriers in spite of IDF objections was no doubt a consequence of Bush's appeal to Putin for help.

If the Americans believe the key to countering Iran is to build an anti-Iranian Arab coalition, the crisis in Lebanon shows just how futile their efforts are. Just as the Sunni Arab states oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, so they oppose Iranian control over Lebanon. Yet in spite of this, they have done nothing to prevent Iran and its proxies from taking control of the country. To the contrary, the Saudis have encouraged the Siniora government to support pro-Syrian candidates for the presidency.

So if the administration has decided to embrace the Palestinians as a means of weakening Iran, its decision is wrong on three counts. First, given Iran's support for the Palestinians, empowering them against Israel simply advances Iran's interest. Second, the Annapolis conference has become a hostage of Iranian goodwill which is non-existent. And finally, even if it were formed, an anti-Iranian Arab coalition would be powerless to check Iran's power.

EVEN THOUGH the summit at Annapolis weakens the US's position vis-à-vis Iran, it might still make sense for Bush and Rice to support Palestinian statehood if doing so enhanced public support for the administration. But the opposite is occurring. Bush's and Rice's seeming obsession with Palestinian statehood is being criticized from all sides of the aisle.

Critics on the left like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and former Clinton negotiator and Palestinian apologist Robert Malley have expressed mystification at the administration's insistent advance of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians when there is no chance that those negotiations will bring peace. So too, over the past few weeks, four Republican presidential candidates - Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson - have criticized Bush's and Rice's Palestinian policies generally and the convening of the conference at Annapolis in particular.

There is also the theory that the pair's primary concern in pushing for Palestinian statehood is their legacies. Rice's stated intention of seeing a Palestinian state established before Bush leaves office lends weight to this view. But of course, given that the maximum that Israel is willing to concede to the Palestinians is less than the minimum that the Palestinians are willing to accept, and given that the Olmert government will be brought down if Olmert agrees to any major concessions, it is clear that there is no chance that Rice will succeed.

Finally there is the thought that Rice and Bush understand that there is no chance of achieving peace, but that they think that their legacies will be strengthened just for having tried. After all, Bill Clinton is remembered well for his attempts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians in spite of the fact that his attempts brought war rather than peace. But Clinton's example is no longer applicable because the conditions under which Clinton pursued peace were far different than those that exist today.

Clinton's peace policies caused a war that began only at the end of his presidency. Until then, they seemed like relatively safe and cost-free moves. On the other hand, Bush's presidency has occurred in its entirety against the backdrop of the Palestinian jihad. Every attempt he has made at peacemaking, from the Tenet Plan through the road map and Sharm e-Sheikh and onto Annapolis, has been blown apart through violence before it could get off the ground.

So then there is no good excuse for the Bush administration's decision to embrace the Palestinians at Israel's expense. It all comes down to Bush and Rice not thinking through the consequences of their moves.

It is a singular tragedy that Israel's elected leaders are too weak to make them understand that by harming Israel, they are harming the United States and making fools of themselves.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

According to foreign reports, Israel destroyed a nuclear weapons installation in Syria in September. Never has a larger story been pushed under the rug by so many so quickly. What are we to make of this?

Over the weekend former federal prosecutor and the head of the non-governmental International Intelligence Summit, John Loftus, released a report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. His report was based on a private study of captured Iraqi documents. These were the unread Arabic language documents that US forces seized, but had not managed to translate after overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003.

After a prolonged battle between Congress and then director of US National Intelligence John Negroponte, President George W. Bush ordered those documents posted on a public access Web site last year. They were taken down after it was discovered that among the Iraqi documents were precise descriptions of how to build nuclear weapons.

As Loftus summarized, "The gist of the new evidence is this: Roughly one-quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid-to-late-1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam's entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans' noses."

Loftus then cites Israeli sources who claim that the Iraqi nuclear program was transferred to the Deir az Zour province in Syria.

LOFTUS'S REPORT jibes with a report published on the Web site of Kuwait's Al Seyassah's newspaper on September 25, 2006. That report, which I noted last November, cited European intelligence sources and claimed that in late 2004 Syria began developing a nuclear program near its border with Turkey. Syria's program, which was run by President Bashar Assad's brother Maher and defended by an Iranian Revolutionary Guards brigade, had by mid-2006 "reached the stage of medium activity." The Kuwaiti report stated that the Syrian nuclear program was based "on equipment and materials that the sons of the deposed Iraqi leader, Uday and Qusai transferred to Syria by using dozens of civilian trucks and trains, before and after the US-British invasion in March 2003." The program, which was run by Iranians with assistance from Iraqi scientists and scientists from the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, "was originally built on the remains of the Iraqi program after it was wholly transferred to Syria."

These reports and several others like them which have surfaced over the past several years tell us interesting and disturbing things. First, they show just how difficult it is to gather accurate information on the status of weapons of mass destruction programs.

From 1991 Gulf War until the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs were a top issue on the international agenda. And yet, year in and year out, UN inspectors, who were on the ground throughout most of the period, failed to provide an accurate picture of those programs. Indeed, the documents and reports regarding the transfer of those programs to Syria show those inspection reports were wildly off the mark.

And not only did the UN fail. The US itself also failed. After invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam's regime, the US military and intelligence arms took almost no action to ensure that suspected sites were secured and searched. The US failed to pursue clear intelligence reports indicating that in the weeks before the invasion, suspicious truck convoys had traveled from Iraq to Syria carrying what were presumed to be weapons of mass destruction components.

As for Syria, still today, after Israel reportedly destroyed the Syrian nuclear installation at Deir az Zour, the US and the international community as a whole behave as though nothing is out of order. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with her Syrian counterpart Waleed Muallem on November 3 and invited Syria to demand the Golan Heights from Israel at her peace conference at Annapolis later this month.

THE SYRIAN and Iraqi cases also show that political courage and intellectual honesty are the keys to intelligence collection and analysis regarding weapons of mass destruction programs. When leaders and intelligence officials are uninterested in finding information about these programs, they are guaranteed to discover nothing. And when they wish to do nothing about information that they have, they can easily argue that their information was inconclusive. In contrast, if they decide to act on intelligence information that challenges preconceived notions and entrenched political interests, they are guaranteed to suffer the condemnations of those who have an interest in continuing to downplay or deny the dangers those programs manifest.

Against the backdrop of the international and American inability and unwillingness to handle the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs, the reports coming out from Iran regarding the mullocracy's nuclear program and the American and Israeli responses to it are nothing less than terrifying.

Last week, the IAEA acknowledged that Iran is currently operating 3,000 centrifuges. At this rate of uranium enrichment, Iran will be capable of producing an atomic bomb in a year. This means that diplomacy today is a dead letter. It is too late to talk Iran out of its nuclear program.

Perhaps more disturbing than the IAEA report - written by Muhammad ElBaradei, who with the exception of the mullahs themselves is probably the man least interested in taking action against Iran's program - were the Israeli and US responses to it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly told his ministers that Israel needs to develop contingencies for the day after Iran joins the nuclear club.

THE US is not merely developing contingencies for the day after. It is working to whitewash Iran's role in fomenting the insurgency in Iraq in an effort to restart direct negotiations with Teheran. According to the New York Sun, Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are so eager to ascribe a decrease in Iraqi violence to Iran that they are willing to pooh-pooh the US military's own achievements in its "surge" in Iraq.

The danger implicit in the US and Israeli decisions to plan for the day after Iran gets the bomb is made clear by two recent developments.

First, Sunday The New York Times reported that since Sept.11, the US has been assisting the Pakistanis in securing their nuclear facilities. Speaking to the Times, John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the CIA, said, "I am confident of two things, that the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it."

This story makes clear that even if a regime is considered trustworthy, if threatened by jihadists there is a danger that its nuclear weapons will fall into their hands. If that happens, the notion of deterrence is thrown out the window.

THE LATEST developments in the investigation of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires provide even more reason for worry. Thirteen years ago, Iran ordered its terror arm Hizbullah to attack the AMIA building. Eighty-five people were killed.

Two weeks ago, Argentina requested that Interpol issue international arrest warrants against five Iranians and one Lebanese man implicated in the bombing. Interpol complied. Last week, Iran responded to Interpol's move by demanding that Interpol issue arrest warrants against five Argentines involved in the investigation of the AMIA bombing. Iran accused them of the "crime" of insulting Iran.

This is an unsettling state of affairs on several levels. The AMIA bombing involved a state contracting a terror group to carry out a massive attack against innocent civilians simply because they were Jewish. For years, for political reasons, the Argentine government derailed its own investigation of the attack. Indeed, it took 14 long years for Argentina to request that Interpol issue arrest warrants.

And then, in a sign of contempt for the international community, Iran announced its counter-warrant demand. And the world has said nothing.

The point is, even if one believes the dubious argument that the Iranian regime can be trusted with nuclear weapons, given the AMIA precedent there is no reason to doubt that Iran would eventually transfer its weapons to Hizbullah or some other Iranian terror group to detonate in Israel.

What the Iranians learned, and indeed what Israel should have learned from the investigation of the AMIA bombing, is that no one will automatically point a finger at Iran for an attack carried out by Iran's terror proxies.

AND SO we return to Iran's nuclear bomb program, which like the Syrian and Iraqi programs, is partially hidden from view, but which the pro-Iranian IAEA claims is just a year from completion. And we return to the US and Israel acting as though it is possible to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

We look at all of this, and we ask: How can Washington and Jerusalem be so irresponsible? We look at Olmert's reported willingness to countenance a nuclear-armed Iran, and we wonder, how can he try to wish away an impending threat of nuclear annihilation?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On the eve of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "peace summit" in Annapolis, the political house of cards which is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima government is poised to collapse.

Olmert owes his parliamentary majority and his governing coalition to two sectoral right-wing parties - Shas, the haredi Sephardic party, and Yisrael Beiteinu, the Russian immigrant party. Today both are being pressured by the Likud and their own voters to leave the government against the backdrop of Olmert's intention to offer massive concessions to the Palestinians at Annapolis. If they bolt his coalition, Olmert will be going to Annapolis without a governing majority.

As far as Israel's national security is concerned, the government can't fall fast enough.

The Kadima-led government has been a national disaster. Kadima is a party of fantasists. It was established by the fantasists who pushed Israel's withdrawal from Gaza two years ago. With the active assistance of the delusional Israeli media, during the 2006 election Kadima was able to hide the dire consequences of that retreat from the voters until after the elections.

As the public swallowed Kadima's promises of peace and prosperity, Gaza was transformed from a tactical nuisance into a strategic threat.

While Kadima's leaders promised the country responsible, honest government, terrorists from Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt marched into Gaza. Advanced weaponry, money and indoctrination materials flowed freely across the border between Egypt and Gaza that Kadima's leaders - against the stated opposition of the IDF - ordered the IDF to vacate. The destroyed Israeli settlements were turned into terror training bases and launch pads for rocket and mortar attacks against the Western Negev.

Since launching a major ground operation against Gaza would involve an acknowledgement of the fact that the withdrawal was a colossal mistake, for the past two years the government has refused to act. As Kadima clings to its delusions, some 40,000 Israelis under rocket and mortar attack are beset by the reality that they have been abandoned by their government which refuses to defend them. Not wishing to die for the government's delusions, some fifty percent of the residents of Sderot have already fled their homes.

In the meantime, as Hamas's 15,000-man Iranian-trained army, formed after the 2005 withdrawal, improves its rocket and mortar arsenals and increases their range, another 250,000 Israelis - residents of Ashkelon, Kiryat Gat, Netivot and Ashdod - look on with worry knowing they are next in line.

Rather than contend with the failure of their grand retreat strategy in Gaza, ahead of last year's elections Kadima's leaders announced their next big plan. They called for an Israeli retreat from Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem. Indeed, in the early months of their tenure, Olmert and his colleagues were so busy harassing settlers and building walls between neighborhoods in Jerusalem that they failed to note the approach of war. And so they were caught by surprise when on July 12, 2006, 10 days after Hamas and Fatah attacked Israel from Gaza and abducted Cpl. Gilead Schalit, Hizbullah attacked in the North - kidnapping IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and shelling northern communities with Katyusha rockets.

In reacting to Hizbullah's campaign, Kadima ha maintained their penchant for delusion. Rather than waging a real war against Israel's enemies, they decided to wage a pretend war.

In their testimony before the Winograd Committee, senior cabinet members and IDF commanders testified that during the government's meetings in the two days following Hizbullah's attacks, they didn't think that Israel was at war.

Apparently they never got the memo. The government's decisions during the war only make sense when viewed as the moves of a government that refused to recognize reality. Its refusal to draft reservists; its insistence on not launching a ground offensive until after the UN Security Council had already passed the cease-fire resolution; its decision not to bomb Hizbullah targets in Syria; its refusal to declare a state of emergency and evacuate residents of the North, and its insistence that Israel achieved all its goals only make sense when seen in the context of a governmental campaign to ignore reality.

And now, with the Winograd Committee poised to release its final report, rather than contend with the wreckage of their last failure, Kadima's leaders are marching towards their next failure at Rice's peace parley in Annapolis.

Kadima's leaders promise us that we have nothing to worry about. They learned the lessons of the Gaza withdrawal.

Unfortunately, it seems that they have learned the wrong lessons. The decision to withdraw from Gaza was founded on an understanding that there were no Palestinian leaders willing to make peace with the Jewish state. Instead of fight to victory and so enable a peaceful Palestinian leadership to emerge, Israel opted to cut and run.

Far from learning that cutting and running is a bad strategy, Kadima's leaders embrace it. What they learned from Gaza is that they were wrong to acknowledge that there are no Palestinian leaders interested in making peace with Israel. So rather than repeat that "mistake," they invented the fiction of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a credible leader.

If Kadima's leaders are allowed to go forward with their "peace" talks with their fictional Palestinian partner, the consequence will be the transformation of Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem into the second Gaza. And this is something that Israel cannot allow. While the Gaza terror state directly threatens 250,000 Israelis, the Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem terror state would place millions in its crosshairs. Every major city is within rocket range of the areas. A partitioned Jerusalem would become uninhabitable for Jews.

Unfortunately, Kadima's leaders don't care. What is important to Kadima's leaders is, in Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's words, "to create processes." Livni, it would seem, has taken on the role of chief defender of the government's new big strategy. Speaking at the Knesset this week, she claimed that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Israel's concessions will only be implemented after the Palestinians fight terrorism. Of course by agreeing to conduct negotiations, Israel surrendered its former position that nothing could be discussed until after the Palestinians fought terrorism.

As for Olmert, in the current iteration of Kadima's strategic myopia, he shows that he learned nothing from Lebanon. There he decided to launch a counter-strike without accepting that Israel was at war. He then spent the next five weeks pushing policies that were aimed at forcing reality to bend to his imagination.

Today, as then, Olmert moves ahead with negotiations with Abbas and Rice without any consideration for the consequences. Indeed, like Livni, he denies that there are consequences. He refuses to consider the effects of his support for Abbas - a leader with no followers, who already lost an election to Hamas in 2006 and lost Gaza to Hamas in 2007. He thinks that the fact that he is offering Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to a leader of a society that refuses to accept Israel's right to exist is cost-free.

Of course, this isn't the case. His willingness to offer such enormous concessions has radicalized his powerless interlocutor still further.

Then too, Olmert's willingness to accept Abbas as a negotiating partner and embrace the fantasy that his Fatah group is something other than a terrorist organization has had dire consequences for Israel's relations with the US. Seizing on Israel's willingness to deal with irreconcilable foes, Rice invited Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to send a representative to Annapolis. There, Iran's junior partner in nuclear weapons development will demand that Israel surrender the Golan Heights to its Iranian-trained army.

Against this backdrop, led by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, Wednesday Olmert's political opponents began their offensive against the Olmert-Livni government. First, the Knesset moved to begin checking Olmert's power to concede Jerusalem. By an overwhelming majority, its members approved - in a preliminary reading - Likud MK Gideon Sa'ar's bill requiring the approval of two-thirds of the Knesset for any plan to limit Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.

Joined by MKs from Kadima, Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu, Netanyahu and his Likud colleagues then reconnoitered at the City of David. There, nestled between the Temple Mount and the Kidron Valley, the parliamentarians vowed to block any concessions on Jerusalem.

As one would have expected, sitting among politicians who base their policies on reality, the representatives of Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu looked a little embarrassed. Here they were, announcing that they reject the Olmert's new delusional flagship policy, while enabling him to implement it by remaining in his government.

And that's the thing of it. It would seem that Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu haven't decided yet where they stand on the reality-delusion spectrum. Yishai and Lieberman apparently believe that simply by denying the self-evident dangers of Kadima's policies, they will be immune from criticism when those policies fail. But their voters are not so easily gulled.

Monday, Netanyahu and Sa'ar paid a visit to Shas's spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in a bid to impress on him the dangers of the moment and to convince him to withdraw Shas from the government. As they exited the rabbi's home a young Shas voter approached Netanyahu and asked, "Why is Shas still in the government?" The two parties claim that they will leave the government if it damages Israel in any way. But of course, it already is damaging Israel. From a security standpoint, the government's decisions to release terrorists from prison; grant "clemency" to wanted terrorists; curtail IDF counter-terror operations and continue to do nothing in Gaza in the interest of the peace process, are endangering the country.

And then there is the symbolic damage. By announcing a freeze of all Jewish building activity in Judea and Samaria, the government has effectively said that Jews have no right to Judea and Samaria. By agreeing to discuss massive territorial concessions in Jerusalem, the government has effectively provided the Palestinians with veto power over Israeli sovereignty in the city.

For the past three years, Kadima's leaders have annually introduced a new "grand strategy" for solving Israel's woes. In each case, after their grand strategy collapsed, before the country could force them to pay the price for their idiocy, they moved on to their next grand strategy that then collapsed.

The only way to prevent Kadima from moving forward with its most dangerous grand strategy to date is to bring down the government by forcing Israel Beiteinu and Shas to bolt the coalition. They are feeling the heat. But it has to be turned up several notches.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Throughout the world, one of the most prevalent causes of war, terrorism and political instability is the ongoing weakening of the nation-state system. There are several reasons that the nation-state as a political unit of sovereignty is under threat. One of the most basic causes of this continuous erosion of national power throughout the world is the transformation of minority-dominated enclaves within nation-states into ungovernable areas where state power is either not applied or applied in a haphazard and generally unconstructive manner.

While domestic strife between majority and minority populations has been an enduring feature of democratic and indeed all societies throughout history, the current turbulence constitutes a unique challenge to the nation-state system. This is because much of the internal strife between minority and majority populations within states today is financed and often directed from outside the country.

Traditionally, minorities used various local means to engage the majority population in a bid to influence the political direction or cultural norms of the nation state. The classic examples of this traditional minority-majority engagement are the black civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s and the labor movements in the West throughout the 20th century. By and large, these movements were domestic protests informed by national sensibilities even when they enjoyed the support of foreign governments.

Today while similar movements continue to flourish, they are now being superseded by a new type of minority challenge to national majorities.

This challenge is not primarily the result of domestic injustice but the consequence of foreign agitation. The roots of these minority challenges are found outside the borders of the targeted states. And their goals are not limited to a call for the reform of national institutions and politics. Rather they set their sights on weakening national institutions and eroding national sovereignty.

MUSLIM MINORITIES throughout the world are being financed and ideologically trained in Saudi and UAE funded mosques and Islamic centers. These minorities act in strikingly similar manners in the countries where they are situated throughout the world. On the one hand, their local political leaders demand extraordinary communal rights, rights accorded neither to the national majority nor to other minority populations. On the other hand, Muslim neighborhoods, particularly in Europe, but also in Israel, the Philippines and Australia, are rendered increasingly ungovernable as arms of the state like the police and tax authorities come under attack when they attempt to assert state power in these Muslim communities.

Logic would have it that targeted states would respond to the threat to their authority through a dual strategy. On the one hand, they would firmly assert their authority by enforcing their laws against both individual lawbreakers and against subversive, foreign financed institutions that incite the overthrow of their governments and their replacement with Islamic governments. On the other hand, they would seek out and empower local Muslims who accept the authority and legitimacy of their states and their rule of law.

Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the Howard government in Australia, in country after country, governments respond to this challenge by attempting to appease Muslim irredentists and their state sponsors. The British responded to the July 7, 2005 bombings by giving representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood an official role in crafting and carrying out counter-terror policies.

In 2003, then French president Jacques Chirac sent then interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy to Egypt to seek the permission of Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of the Islamist al-Azhar mosque for the French parliament's plan to outlaw hijabs in French schools.

In the US, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI asked the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations to conduct sensitivity training for FBI agents.

In Holland last year, the Dutch government effectively expelled anti-Islamist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the interest of currying favor with Holland's restive Muslim minority.

THE FOREIGN policy aspect of the rush to appease is twofold. First, targeted states refuse to support one another when individual governments attempt to use the tools of law enforcement to handle their domestic jihad threat. For instance, European states have harshly criticized the US Patriot Act while the US criticized the French decision to prohibit the hijab in public schools.

More acutely, targeted states lead the charge in calling for the establishment of Muslim-only states. Today the US and the EU are leading the charge towards the establishment of a Palestinian state and the creation of an independent state of Kosovo.

In two weeks, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host the Annapolis conference where together with her European and Arab counterparts, she will exert enormous pressure on the Olmert government to agree to the establishment of a jihadist Palestinian state in Israel's heartland with its capital in Jerusalem and its sovereignty extending over Judaism's most sacred site, the Temple Mount.

The establishment of the sought-for Palestinian state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of at a minimum 80,000 Israelis from their homes and communities simply because they are Jews. Jews of course will be prohibited from living in Palestine.

FOR ITS part, the Palestinian leadership to which Israel will be expected to communicate its acceptance of the establishment of Palestine, is one part criminal, and two parts jihadist. As Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues have made clear, while they are willing to accept Israel's concessions, they are not willing to accept Israel. This is why they refuse to acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

A rare consensus exists today in Israel. From the far-left to the far-right, from IDF Military Intelligence to the Mossad, all agree that the Annapolis conference will fail to bring a peace accord. Since Rice's approach to reaching just such an accord has been to apply unrelenting pressure on Israel, it is fairly clear that she will blame Israel for the conference's preordained failure and cause a further deterioration in US-Israeli relations.

While Israel is supposed to accept a Jew-free Palestine, it goes without saying that its own 20 percent Arab minority will continue to enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizenship. Yet one of the direct consequences of the establishment of a Jew-free, pro-jihadist State of Palestine will be the further radicalization of Israeli Arabs. They will intensify their current rejection of Israel's national identity.

With Palestinian and outside support, they will intensify their irredentist activities and so exert an even more devastating attack on Israel's sovereignty and right to national self-determination.

SHORTLY AFTER the Annapolis conference fails, and no doubt in a bid to buck up its standing with the Arab world, the US may well stand by its stated intention to recognize the independence of Kosovo.

On December 10, the UN-sponsored troika from the US, Russia and Germany is due to present their report on the ongoing UN-sponsored negotiations between the Kosovo Muslims and the Serbian government regarding the future of the restive province of Serbia. Since the Kosovo Muslims insist on full sovereignty and Serbia's government refuses to accept Kosovo's independence, those talks are deadlocked. Since Russia refuses to support Kosovo's removal from Serbia, there is no chance that the UN Security Council will pass a resolution calling for Kosovar independence.

The push for Kosovar independence was begun by the Clinton administration. It was the natural consequence of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Yet the basic assumptions of that bombing campaign have been turned on their head in recent years. In 1999, Serbia was run by a murderous dictator Slobodan Milosovic. He stood accused of ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its Muslim population which was perceived as innocent. Today, led by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia is taking bold steps towards becoming a liberal democracy which abjures ethnic cleansing and political violence. On the other hand, the Saudi-financed Kosovo Muslims have destroyed more than 150 churches over the past several years, and have terrorized Kosovar Christians and so led to their mass exodus from the province.

As Julia Gorin documented in a recent article in Jewish World Review, Kosovo's connections with Albanian criminal syndicates and global jihadists are legion. Moreover, Kosovar independence would likely spur irredentist movements among the Muslim minorities in all Balkan states. In Macedonia for instance, a quarter of the population is Muslim. These irredentist movements in turn would increase Muslim irredentism throughout Europe just as Palestinian statehood will foment an intensification of the Islamization of Israel's Arab minority.

The Kosovo government announced last month that given the diplomatic impasse, it plans to declare its independence next month. Currently, the Bush administration is signaling its willingness to recognize an independent Kosovo even though doing so will threaten US-Russian relations.

In a bid both to prevent the Bush administration from turning on Israel in the aftermath of the failure of the Annapolis conference and to make clear Israel's own rejection of the notion that a "solution" to the Palestinian conflict with Israel can be imposed by foreign powers, the Olmert government should immediately and loudly restate its opposition to the imposition of Kosovar independence on Serbia.

In the interest of defending the nation-state system, on which American sovereignty and foreign policy is based, the US should reassess the logic of its support for the establishment of Muslim-only states. It should similarly revisit its refusal to openly support the right of non-Islamic states like Israel, Serbia and even France, to assert their rights to defend their sovereignty, national security and national character from outside-sponsored domestic Islamic subversion.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Battle of Iraq is nearly over. And the Americans have nearly won. Their enemies are on the run. Al-Qaida forces have lost or are losing their bases of operations. Its fighters are being killed and captured in ever increasing numbers. Iraq's Sunni citizens, who, until recently, refused to take any part in the post-Saddam regime, are joining the army and citizens' watch groups by the thousands.

Local sheikhs in Baghdad, following the example set earlier by Sunni sheikhs in Anbar province, are ordering their people to fight with the Americans against al-Qaida. For their part, the Shi'ite militias know that they are next in line for defeat. As a result, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Shi'ite militiamen to cease their attacks.

The numbers speak for themselves. Over the past month, some 46,000 Iraqi refugees returned home. Since May, the number of civilian casualties has decreased by 75 percent. US military casualties have also dropped precipitously after the death rate rose in recent months of hard fighting. Neighborhoods in Baghdad that had ceased to function under al-Qaida's reign of terror have come back to life.

Businesses are reopening. People are rebuilding their homes. Even churches are reopening their doors. This is what victory looks like.

Yet the promise of Baghdad is a lone ray of light in an otherwise darkened field of failed US policies. As President George W. Bush prepares to enter his last year in office, America's international standing is at a low point. The forces of jihad, while being defeated in Iraq, are rising everywhere else. The price of oil races toward the once inconceivable price of $100 a barrel. New jihadist mosques open daily throughout the world. Pakistan is a disaster. Iran is closing in on the bomb.

TO UNDERSTAND America's manifold failures, it makes sense to begin with a look at why Iraq is different. For the new, successful American strategy in Iraq is not only different from what preceded it there. It is also different from the US strategy that is failing everywhere else.

The new American strategy in Iraq is based on a fairly simple assumption: The US goal in Iraq is to defeat its enemies, and to defeat its enemies the US must target them with the aim of defeating them. This is a strategy based on common sense.

Unfortunately, common sense seems to be the rarest of commodities in US foreign policy circles today. Outside of Iraq, and until recently in Iraq as well, the US has based its policies on the notion that it can bend its adversaries to its will by on the one hand signaling them in a threatening way, and on the other hand by trying to appease them where possible. And this is the heart of the failure.

In the lead-up to Iraq, it was clear to US strategic planners that of the three states - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - that Bush labeled as members of the "Axis of Evil," Iraq was the least dangerous. It sponsored terror less than Iran. Its weapons of mass destruction programs were less developed that those of Iran and North Korea.

As a result, there were some voices - particularly in Israel - which suggested that given that the US was uninterested in targeting more than one country in addition to Afghanistan, the US should direct its fire at Iran rather than Iraq. But for their own reasons - among them the collapse of the UN sanctions regime on Iraq, the fact that Iraq alone was under UN Security Council authority, and Iraq's relative weakness - the Americans chose to go after Saddam.

They assumed that the invasion itself would strengthen America's deterrent capability and so work to America's advantage in its dealings with Iran and North Korea. Here, then, we see that the decision to invade Iraq was based in part on a continued American reliance on a strategy of signaling rather than confronting Iran and North Korea. If this hadn't been the case, Iraq probably would have been cast to the side.

Initially, the American strategy met with stunning success. Iran, North Korea, Syria and indeed the Arab world as a whole were terrified by the victorious American assault on Saddam. Unfortunately, rather than build on their momentum, the Americans did everything they could to assure these states that they had no reason to worry that a similar fate would befall them. Rather than maintain the offensive - by sealing Iraq's borders and then going after insurgents' bases in Iran and Syria - the US went on the defensive. And so it allowed Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to support and direct the insurgency. As a result of America's show of weakness, the lesson that its enemies took from its campaign in Iraq was that to deter the Americans, they should intensify their support for terror and their weapons of mass destruction programs.

Once deterrence collapsed, the Americans chose a mix of appeasement and threats that had no expiration date. Last year's North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear tests, the war in Lebanon, the Hamas takeover of Gaza and Iran's intensification of its nuclear program are all the result of the failure of this model of US foreign policy making.

These policies are of a piece with the US's general posture toward its adversaries. And that posture is unfortunately based on a hugely inflated view of America's deterrent capabilities and Washington's failure to craft policies that are suited to its interests and goals.

TODAY, THE most glaring example of this state of affairs is Pakistan. America has two primary goals there. First, it seeks to prevent Pakistan's nuclear weapons and technologies from proliferating or falling under the control of jihadists. Second, it seeks to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban.

After September 11, the Americans gave Pakistan's military dictator a choice: he could help them defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan or he could lose power. That was a good start, but then the Americans began losing track of their priorities. After Gen. Pervez Musharraf agreed to Washington's ultimatum, the Americans put all their eggs in his basket. And they thereby lost their ability to deter him and so influence his behavior.

Certain of unconditional American backing, Musharraf played a double game. He helped the US in Afghanistan and then allowed the Taliban and al-Qaida to escape and re-base in Pakistan.

Musharraf also failed to be forthcoming on nuclear issues. He barred American investigators from interrogating Pakistan's chief nuclear proliferator, A.Q. Khan, and so denied them key intelligence on other countries' Pakistani-supported nuclear programs. Yet having based their Pakistan policy on their assumption that Musharraf was irreplaceable, the Americans pretended nothing was wrong.

And now they are confronted with a disastrous situation. On the one hand, thanks to Musharraf's hospitality, al-Qaida and the Taliban control large swathes of Pakistan and have declared jihad against their host, thus placing Pakistan's nuclear arsenals in greater danger. At the same time, they use their Pakistani bases to intensify their insurgency in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, as has been his consistent policy since seizing power in 1998, Musharraf continues to ignore the seriousness of the Taliban-al Qaida threat. The purpose of his recent declaration of martial law and suspension of the Pakistani constitution was not to enable him to better fight the jihadists. It was to break his liberal political opposition whose members demand democracy and an end to his military rule.

And in the midst of this, the Americans find themselves with no leverage over the still irreplaceable Musharraf.

A similar situation exists in Saudi Arabia. There, too, the US squandered the leverage it gained after the September 11 attacks by giving unconditional support to the Saudi royal family. The Saudis immediately understood that the best way to ensure continued American support was to extend their support for terrorism and funding of radical, pro-jihad mosques while raising the price of oil. As in Pakistan, the worse the situation became, the more the Americans supported them.

AND THEN of course there are the Palestinians. Here American policy has been a double failure. First of all, it has destroyed American deterrence toward the Arab world.

To divert American attention away from their support for jihadist terrorism, the leaders of the Arab world sought to convince the Americans that the only way to end their support for terror and jihad was by resolving the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Rather than stop to question the validity of the Arabs' strange assertion, the Americans believed them. Over time, this belief led them to neglect their actual goals - ending the Arab world's support for terror; preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and maintaining oil prices at around $30 a barrel - in favor of a secondary and unrelated issue.

Aside from that, it bears noting that it is largely because of the strengthening of jihadist forces in the Arab world that there is no possibility of achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Rather than understand this, the Americans have allowed the Arabs to send them on a wild goose chase that will never end.

The very fact that this week US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice thought that it was more important to come to Israel for the ninth time this year than to deal with the crisis in Pakistan shows clearly just how deeply the Americans have internalized this Arab fiction.

Then there are the Palestinians themselves. As Bush announced in 2002, the US's main goal regarding the Palestinians is to force them to stop engaging in terror and jihad. All other American policies regarding the Palestinians were supposed to be conditioned on the accomplishment of this goal. Yet as in Pakistan, over time the Americans neglected this goal in favor of an easier one - supporting Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah. To strengthen Abbas and Fatah, the Americans have cast aside their goal of ending Palestinian terror. As a result, today they have no leverage over Abbas.

As with Musharraf in Pakistan, strengthening Abbas is the only policy the Americans have toward the Palestinians, and increasingly, toward Israel. And as in Pakistan, the threatening reality on the ground is a consequence of the fact that their policy ignores their actual goals.

Two conclusions can be drawn from contrasting America's victory in Iraq with its failures in so many other theaters. First, the only way to successfully fight your enemies is to actually fight them. And second, basing policies on pretending to deter leaders who are not deterred is a recipe for failure. Until the Americans accept these lessons, Iraq aside, the international environment will grow ever more threatening.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

From October 26-30, a mob of Druse villagers in Peki'in in the Galilee launched what has all the markings of a pogrom against the four Jewish families in the village. They burned their cars and surrounded and torched their homes.

The police took a full day to come to the Jews' defense. And when they did, the Druse mob kidnapped a policewoman and only set her free in exchange for their cohorts who had been arrested. The police then set about evacuating the Jews from their encircled homes and did nothing to prevent their homes from being destroyed by the mob.

Now the Knesset's Interior Committee is demanding that a governmental commission of inquiry be set up to investigate what the Druse claim was police brutality in attempting to disperse the violent mob. For its part the Olmert government is distancing itself from Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter's decision to suffice with an internal police investigation of the policemen's behavior at the scene.

The question that arises is whether the leftist-dominated Knesset and the Olmert government act as they do out of fear or conviction. This question is given increased urgency as the Olmert government, under intense pressure from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice moves closer to officially committing Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria and large swathes of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount to the Palestinian Authority. Such a commitment would not merely induce Israel to divest itself of the ability to defend itself while ensuring the establishment of a terror enclave within mortar range of its major cities. Given that the Palestinian state which everyone is so adamant in championing will be an apartheid state which will legally bar all Jews from owning land or acquiring residency or citizenship rights, the Olmert government's acceptance of the demand for Palestinian statehood involves an internalization of the anti-Semitic view which posits that Jews have fewer rights than everybody else.

RELEVANT TO this discussion is last week's decision by a cabinet committee to approve the 2005 election of Theophilos III as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. On the surface, the government's approval of the appointment of a religious leader seems like a simple matter. But it is not. Theophilos's election two years ago to head the Greek Orthodox Church was the consequence of an anti-Jewish campaign of terror by Hamas and Fatah and the Jordanian government against the church and its leaders.

In the summer of 2004, Ma'ariv reported that the previous Greek Patriarch Irineos I had approved a 99-year lease of two hotels inside the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old City built on church-owned lands to a Jewish-owned company. A maelstrom ensued within the church. Irineos was illegally sacked and due to death threats has lived under armed guard even since.

The Greek Orthodox Church is one of the largest landholders in Israel. It owns the land on which both the Knesset and the President's residence are built as well as vast land tracts throughout the capital city and the country as a whole. Since the Patriarch oversees those lands, his identity is anything but trivial.

After sacking Irineos, the church held elections for his successor. According to a World Net Daily report, all the candidates were required to sign a letter to the Palestinian Authority pledging, "We, the candidates of the Greek Orthodox Church, hereby agree that…in the event that we are elected, we shall act for the cancellation of all transactions made during the period of Irineos I, and shall keep the Orthodox religious trust."

In keeping with centuries-old practice, for the Greek Orthodox Patriarch to formally assert his authority, he must first receive the approval of all the relevant governments. Today this means he must receive the approval of Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. After Irineos was ejected from office, Theophilos immediately distinguished himself from his fellow clerics with his enthusiasm for barring Israel and Jews from using church lands. He secured Palestinian and Jordanian backing ahead of the elections by pledging to operate in accordance with Jordanian rather than Israeli law. Jordanian law prohibits all land sales to Jews.

In light of this, it is obvious why, until last week Israel refused to accredit Theophilos. Then too, like the government's response to the anti-Jewish mob violence in Peki'in, the ministerial committee's decision to approve Theophilis's election and so pave the way to formal governmental acceptance of his credentials raises serious questions about the Olmert government's commitment to defending the civil and human rights of Jews and Israel's identity as a Jewish state.

By accepting Theophilos as Patriarch, Israel is siding with its enemies against itself. It is signaling to Israel's antagonists that terror and extortion continue to pay. Just as terror is viewed as the force which compelled Israel to vacate Gaza and south Lebanon, so in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Israel's enemies would be justified in believing that their decision to terrorize the church leadership and force it to embrace anti-Semitism and the jihadist aim of ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Holy Land was the right decision.

OBVIOUSLY, as owner of the lands, the Greek Orthodox Church is entitled to do whatever it wishes with its properties. The issue here is not whether the Church has the right to be anti-Semitic. The issue is the Olmert government's apparent acceptance of anti-Semitic norms of behavior. Israel is under no obligation to accept Theophilos. By approving his appointment, the cabinet committee did not passively tolerate his anti-Semitism. It took an active step to legitimize it.

And herein lays the final aspect of the perfidy of the government's behavior. At the same time that the Olmert government is taking active steps to enable the Greek Orthodox Church to implement its new anti-Jewish land policies, it is leading an all out war against the Jewish National Fund's right to advance its pro-Jewish charter.

Since its founding by Theodor Herzl at the end of the 19th century, the JNF has used donations from world Jewry to purchase land in the land of Israel for Jewish settlement in accordance with its charter. Over the past three years, the government, prodded by the post-Zionist Attorney-General and the post-Zionist Supreme Court, has worked to compel the JNF to lease its lands to Arabs in open breach of its charter and its fiduciary commitment to its donors, the Jewish people, who provided the funds through which those lands were purchased for specifically Jewish settlement.

Here again, there is some question of what is motivating the government to behave as it does. Is it treating Jews as second class citizens and denying the JNF's legal right to use its land as it deems fit while enabling the Greek Orthodox Church and the Islamic Wakf to openly implement anti-Semitic land policies simply because it cannot stand up to outside pressure? Is the government's behavior merely the consequence of its incompetence or meekness?

THE ANSWER to this question was provided last week by Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit in his address before the Jewish Agency's Board of Governors. Standing before the men and women who lead the agency tasked with encouraging and facilitating Jewish immigration to the Jewish state, Sheetrit announced that he believes that "Israel should no longer grant automatic citizenship to Jews." He continued that Jews should be forced to live in Israel for five years and then take a citizenship test before being granted citizenship; that no effort should be made to encourage Jews to move to Israel; and that underprivileged Jewish communities should be barred from immigrating to the country.

Since the dawn of modern Zionism, the Jewish people built and secured our massive majority in Israel through the encouragement of Jewish immigration to Israel. The Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who requests it, is the embodiment of Zionist ideals of Jewish nationalism.

Today, the government defends its desire to surrender Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem to the Palestinians by claiming that doing so is the only way to ensure the continued Jewish majority in Israel. This of course strains belief since establishing a Jew-free state in Israel's heartland will not remove one Arab or add one Jew to Israel's population rolls. It will merely make it impossible for Jews to live securely in their truncated state. Obviously, if the government's chief concern is maintaining Israel's Jewish majority, then its main goal should be to encourage and increase Jewish immigration to the country.

But in his address before the Jewish Agency, Sheetrit renounced Jewish immigration and with it, the central pillar of Zionism. That is, speaking as the representative of the Olmert government, and as the minister empowered to grant citizenship, Sheetrit stated that he wishes to undermine Israel's identity as a Jewish state.

All of this leads inevitably to but one conclusion. While international pressure, cowardice and incompetence no doubt play a role in inducing the Olmert government to side with Israel's enemies against the country, these are not the sole sources of the government's behavior. What Sheetrit made clear is that the Olmert government's favoritism towards anti-Semites and anti-Zionist causes stems also from the ideological convictions of its members.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's opinion of Russian President Vladimir Putin seems directly correlated to his hostility toward America. The more hostility he shows, the more she seems to like him. In this vein, Rice defends her support for Russian inclusion in the G-7, (now G-8), by arguing that it enables the club of industrial democracies to "influence" Putin.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, former world chess champion and current leader of Putin's liberal political opposition Gary Kasparov responded ironically to Rice's notion. "Occasionally you have to look at the results of your brilliant theories," he said.

But as the date of her departure from office approaches, Rice's unwillingness to examine the results of any of her brilliant theories only increases. Take North Korea for example.

On Thursday, a delegation of American nuclear inspectors traveled to North Korea to inspect the "disablement" of the nuclear installation at Yangbyon. Speaking of their mission and of the status of US-North Korean relations to the press on Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who serves as the chief negotiator with North Korea, said that aside from some technical matters, the US has no outstanding issues with the Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang. In his words, "I don't think there is anything to be resolved. There will be technical issues, but I don't think we have any political issues."

This US position on North Korea is disconcerting. From 1994 until the present, the North Koreans have breached every single agreement they have made with the Americans. Indeed, according to the agreement that Hill himself reached with them in February, they were supposed to dismantle their nuclear complex at Yangbyon seven months ago.

Rather than abide by their word, the North Koreans, as is their wont, ignored it and demanded and received further concessions from the Americans after they signed the deal. Among other things, they were supposed to dismantle the Yangbyon installation. Now, due to their post-agreement brinkmanship, they are only supposed to disable it -- whatever that means.

Given the North Koreans' abysmal track record, it is far from clear why Hill thinks they can be trusted now. But beyond that, it isn't even clear that dismantling or disabling Yangbyon today will make much difference. As former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton wrote in August, Yangbyon ceased to be the central component of North Korea's nuclear weapons program several years ago. In recent years Pyongyang scattered its nuclear program to secret sites both inside and outside the country. And those sites are overlooked in Hill's agreement.

This again returns us to his statement on Wednesday. How can the State Department's point man on North Korea claim that the US has no "political issues" with North Korea less than two months after Israel reportedly destroyed a North Korean nuclear installation in Syria modeled after the Yangbyon complex? Given North Korea's apparent nuclear collaboration with Syria and its well-documented nuclear collaboration with Iran, to claim that the US has no political issues to discuss with North Korea is to suspend disbelief.

So Rice's State Department insists on moving forward toward implementing an agreement predicated on a denial of reality. Perhaps worst of all, it is an agreement which leaves Japan, America's most important Asian ally and North Korea's most vulnerable target, high and dry.

AS WITH Japan in Asia so with Israel in the Middle East. Rice's interest in establishing a Palestinian state rises in tandem with Palestinian extremism. US-backed Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas recently asserted that he will only sign a "peace" treaty with Israel that includes an Israeli commitment to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines and accept unlimited numbers of foreign-born Arabs, otherwise known as "Palestinian refugees," as citizens within its truncated borders.

Rather than accept that this position sinks any possibility of reaching any deal, Rice's response to Abbas's extremism was to announce that the US will give an additional $450 million to his Israeli-defended Fatah enclave in Judea and Samaria. More than $100m. is earmarked for Abbas's office.

And rather than condemn Fatah for its terrorist activities (such as its security forces members' plot to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert), the State Department announced plans to hire private security contractors to train Fatah forces. Moreover, rather than demand explanations for statements by Fatah leaders indicating that they will renew negotiations with Hamas after Rice's planned summit at Annapolis, the State Department has increased its pressure on Israel to destroy all the Israeli communities built in Judea and Samaria since 2001 and to prevent Jews from building anything beyond the 1949 cease-fire lines.

All of these machinations inevitably raise the question: Why is Rice acting as she is? What prompts her to harm American security interests and weaken US allies? An answer to these questions begins with a comparison of the contrasting fortunes of former US policy makers who based their policies on delusion to those of policy makers who crafted policies grounded in reality.

Take Joseph Cirincione for instance. Cirincione is a former professional congressional staffer who dealt with arms control issues. He is considered an expert on nuclear proliferation and is widely interviewed by the media and consulted by politicians. Cirincione's status as an expert is a clear indication that to be considered an expert it is not necessary to actually know what you are talking about.

In 2003 he rejected the notion that Syria was interested in nuclear weapons. And on September 19, he called the press reports regarding the North Korean nuclear installation that Israel reportedly destroyed in Syria "nonsense." He further asserted that the reports stemmed from a plot hatched by "a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda." After aerial photographs of the site in Syria were made public, Cirincione allowed that the photographic evidence "tilts toward a nuclear program." But still he insisted that even if this is the case, Syria constitutes no threat.

Cirincione is similarly unconcerned by the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. In both cases he argues that America should conduct negotiations with no preconditions lest the US anger these non-threatening countries and provoke them to support terrorism and build nuclear weapons.

In recognition of Cirincione's wisdom and expertise, he has been ranked as one of the 500 most influential voices shaping American foreign policy.

Then there is former US Middle East mediator Dennis Ross. Throughout his long tenure, Ross conceived and implemented a strategy predicated on the assumption that peace would be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians through an extended process where Israel was forced to make concessions to Yassir Arafat. After the strategy and the assumptions on which it was based collapsed in 2000, Ross was honest enough to acknowledge his basic mistake. And yet, despite this, Ross has stubbornly adhered to that failed policy and the false assumptions on which it was predicated ever since. And for that he is trumpeted as an expert on Middle East affairs and regularly appears on television as an esteemed authority.

Finally there are the esteemed former national security advisers under presidents Carter and Bush Sr., Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. While it is impossible for anyone to always predict or fully grasp world events, while in office, both Brzezinski and Scowcroft distinguished themselves for their repeated inability to do either.

Brzezinski was surprised by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and he failed to come up with a coherent policy for contending with the failure of detente which the invasion signaled. Moreover, he supported Ayatollah Khomeini against the shah of Iran and encouraged the shah to negotiate with Khomeini, and so contributed to the success of the Islamic revolution. He then failed to note the inherent hostility of the Khomeini regime or to craft policies to contend with it, even after the takeover of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979.

Then there is Scowcroft. Scowcroft failed to foresee the breakup of the Soviet Union even as it occurred before his eyes. And after the USSR collapsed, together with former president Bush, he attempted to reconstitute it.

Beyond that, Scowcroft, Bush pere and former secretary of state James Baker are at least partially responsible for the violent internecine struggle that unfolded in Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime. In 1992, after encouraging Iraq's Shi'ite majority to revolt, they turned their backs on the Shi'ites and let them be massacred by Saddam's forces. With that they destroyed US credibility with the Iraqi people.

Rather than be shunned as failures, since they left office at least one of them seems to be a member of every blue ribbon foreign policy panel. Then, too, the media routinely demands that administration officials respond to their "expert" advice and opinions on the issues of the day.

Actually, their opinions are not very different from Cirincione's or Ross's. Indeed, it seems that regardless of the issue at hand, Brzezinski and Scowcroft's advice is always the same: Pressure Israel to give away land or strategic arsenals and appease the tyrant du jour, be it Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jung Il, Bashar Assad, Pervez Musharraf, Saudi King Abdullah or Vladimir Putin. And don't do anything without UN Security Council approval.

CONTRAST THE fortunes of these men with that of men like Bolton or Richard Perle, to give two examples. In Bush's first term, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Bolton oversaw the establishment of the Proliferation Security Initiative. With nearly a 100 member nations, the PSI stands out as the most successful international counter-proliferation program the administration has undertaken.

As for Perle, as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Reagan administration, he crafted many of the policies that fomented the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet Bolton is dismissed by the media as a "hawk" and a "hardliner." For his part, Perle is reviled as the "Prince of Darkness" and the godfather of the so-called "neoconservative conspiracy." And of course, they are not alone in their fate.

In Israel, where opinions among policy makers and the media are even more uniform, the situation is even more problematic. The fact that Shimon Peres, the father of the failed Oslo peace process with Arafat, is now the head of state shows clearly how Israel's elites regard the notion of contending with the results of "brilliant theories."

What all of this means is that in the current environment, former officials' status as experts is directly proportional to their willingness to champion "brilliant theories" after reality rejects them. For Rice to voluntarily alter her course, this environment will first have change.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.