Rice’s positions, like the Foreign Ministry’s decision to hide from Congress evidence of direct Egyptian support for Hamas, expose a disturbing reality. Both the Bush administration and the Olmert government willingly enable Egypt to work with Iran in transforming Gaza into the new hub of global terror in order to maintain the fiction of Egypt’s moderation. The fantasy of a peace process sponsored by the so-called moderate Arab states led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia is more important to both the Olmert government and the Bush administration than defending southern Israel and fighting terrorism.

Orignally published in The Jewish Press.

In a Paris courtroom last month, after seven long years, the myth of Muhammed al-Dura finally unraveled. That myth, propagated in a report by France 2 television network on September 30, 2000, falsely accused Israeli soldiers of killing a Palestinian child named Muhammad al-Dura while he was crouched behind a barrel with his father at Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip.

An IDF probe into the incident, ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, ruled out the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy was fired by IDF soldiers.

Last month, France 2 was ordered to show the 27 minutes of uncut footage its cameraman testified he filmed at the scene that day and from which the 55 second news story of the purported shooting of al-Dura by IDF soldiers emerged. Charles Enderlin, France 2's permanent correspondent in Israel who reported the story, made a grand entrance into the courtroom where Philippe Karsenty is appealing a libel conviction he received last year after Enderlin and France 2 sued him for publishing an article arguing that the al-Dura story was a hoax.

In the courtroom, in seeming defiance of the court order, Enderlin showed an 18-minute film - which eyewitnesses claimed was obviously heavily edited - of the events of the day. Although apparently doctored, the film's finale was all that was necessary to prove his report to have been a massive deception. For in the last three seconds of the film, al-Dura, showing no signs of injury, raised his hand and peeked at the camera after Enderlin proclaimed him dead and gone.

The French court is in recess until February but the session last month incontrovertibly destroyed the myth of al-Dura. Yet the truth which took seven years to come out cannot erase the consequences of the falsehood.

Enderlin published his report two days after the Palestinians launched their jihad against Israel. The false image of the victimized al-Dura served as a moral indictment of Israel which fueled the murderous campaign against Israel and Jews worldwide which followed. Just as al-Dura's name was invoked by Palestinians as justification of their massacres of Israeli civilians, so it was invoked by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's executioners and by Muslim mobs in Europe as they attacked Jews and Jewish institutions.

Enderlin's alleged hoax went beyond journalistic malfeasance. He put blind faith in the reports of a cameraman who was clearly lying to him. And when faced with the facts of the deception, he aggressively dismissed them over the course of seven years. While it is hard to say how events might have unfolded if he hadn't chosen to act as he did, looking forward the murderous consequences of the al-Dura myth speak volumes about the moral imperative for journalists to get their facts straight and to acknowledge mistakes when they are discovered. So too, it underlines the need for policymakers to base their decisions on facts, even when they expose difficult and inconvenient realities.

FACTS OF course, are slippery things. Authoritarian regimes and political movements often engage in the deliberate dissemination of disinformation to advance their interests. The KGB in its day devoted the overwhelming majority of its efforts not to classical espionage activities but to the dissemination of false information to the West in an effort to demoralize Western societies and convince them that there was no moral justification for fighting communism.

Since Israel was established in 1948 the Arabs have devoted the lion's share of their efforts against Israel not to armed attacks against the state but to the dissemination of false information about Israel which is aimed at demonizing it internationally and demoralizing Israelis internally. So too, both the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority indoctrinate their own people to seek Israel's violent destruction through massive internal propaganda efforts.

Even when independent media outlets use their best efforts to report the facts in a credible way, they sometimes get it wrong. For instance, on November 27, the Jerusalem Post reported a quote made by an Arab diplomat to AFP news agency in Riyadh claiming that the Bush Administration had bowed to the Arab demand to force the Israeli delegation at the Annapolis conference to enter the conference hall through a separate entrance from the Arabs. In the diplomat's words, "The Saudis told Washington that they do not want to meet anyone from the Israeli delegation, either by chance or by prior arrangement. Hence it was decided that ... delegations would enter into the meeting room from different doors."

His assertion was made credible by statements from US officials regarding the Saudi demand for segregation between the Arabs and the Israelis at the conference. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "As the Saudi foreign minister put it, nobody's interested in these uncomfortable situations where there are theatrics for the sake of photographs. We'll of course be respectful and mindful of that as we'll put together the various events."

It was these twin reports that informed my own decision to begin my Nov. 30 column "Apartheid not peace" with the story of the separation of Israeli representatives from Arab representatives at Annapolis. Happily, after my column was published, both the State Department and Israeli officials denied that the US had enforced the Arab demand for segregated entrances.

YET WHILE the Bush administration did not bow to the Arab demand for segregation at Annapolis, it is moving to advance the Arabs' bigoted demand for apartheid rather than peace in the Middle East. Since the Annapolis conference, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has repeatedly invoked the false Arab view that the physical presence of Israelis beyond the 1949 armistice lines is the source of the Arab-Israeli conflict rather than the Arab world's expressed refusal to accept Israel's existence and Palestinian society's expressed resolve to destroy Israel.

Rice's open and repeated assaults against Israel's plans to build housing in Jewish neighborhoods in its capital city of Jerusalem and her studied silence on the issue of Arab and Palestinian Authority sponsorship of terrorism against Israel make her internalization of the bigoted and false Arab narrative clear. Indeed, in an interview with the BBC last week, Rice placed the blame for the seven-year suspension of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians not on the Palestinian Authority which directed and sponsored the terror war against Israel which has claimed more than a thousand Israeli victims, but rather on the Israeli government for its support of the presence of Jews in disputed lands.

As she put it, "On the Middle East peace process, I don't think in 2001, with the intifada having just been launched and frankly, Ariel Sharon, the father of the settlement movement, having just been elected prime minister of Israel, that there was much prospect for a final-status negotiation."

IT COULD be argued that in adopting her overtly anti-Israel and bigoted view of the Arab world's conflict with Israel that Rice is the victim of disinformation and general ignorance. This view might have some credibility were it not for the fact that the administration itself is actively ignoring evidence which shows its view of the Palestinians and other Arab states to be false.

For instance, in upholding PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas as a man of peace, the administration ignores an overwhelming body of evidence showing his own security forces' involvement in terrorism and his government's rejection of Israel. Rice ignores the fact that Fatah security forces murdered Ido Zoldan last month while she supports the arming and training of those same forces. So too, while she insists that Israel must not build in its capital city and must plan to expel some 250,000 Israelis from their towns in Judea and Samaria, she has been silent on the fact that Fatah's 43rd anniversary posters depict the map of Israel covered by a Palestinian keffiyeh, a rifle, and a portrait of Yasser Arafat.

Regionally, as the US legitimizes Bashar Assad's murderous regime in Syria, the administration is making concerted efforts to prevent Congress from understanding the depth of Syria's involvement in terror and nuclear proliferation. According to a publication by the Federation of American Scientists, President George W. Bush is threatening to veto the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill because the bill requires that the While House fully brief the House and Senate intelligence committees about the nature and target of Israel's September 6 attack on what was reportedly a North Korean-built nuclear installation in Syria.

According to Congressional sources, the administration is withholding information about the Israeli attack for it believes that a revelation of the nature of the attack will cause an outcry in Congress. Such an outcry will force the US to back away from its current engagement of Syria and North Korea and instigate the tightening of sanctions against both countries - and perhaps against Iran.

TYRANNIES require disinformation to maintain and justify their grip on power to their own people and to the outside world. But democracies can only flourish through the open flow of information.

When the media of free nations publish lies and distorted accounts of fact, and the governments of free nations base their policies on falsities, their national interests are necessarily harmed.

Mistakes happen. Falsehoods inevitably find their way into discourse. But with good will and a basic, underlying commitment to facts, these mistakes can be easily corrected.

Unfortunately, between the Western and Arab media's often deliberate dissemination of
disinformation and the studied refusal of Western policymakers to acknowledge inconvenient facts in favor of easy lies and deliberate deceits which enable them to avoid contending with harsh realities, it is no surprise that our public discourse today is increasingly based on equal doses of mendacity and wishful thinking. And tragically, as the al-Dura affair showed so well, the murderous results won't be long in coming.
 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week the IDF distributed ribbons to its soldiers and officers for their service in the war with Hizbullah in 2006. The ribbons were a source of embarrassment. Soldiers and officers, who like the general public view the war as Israel's greatest military defeat, are loath to pin them on their uniforms.

While the soldiers and general public view the war as a failure, one sector of Israeli society sees the war as a great triumph. For Israel's legal establishment, the war was a great victory. It was a war in which its members asserted their dominance over Israel's political and military leadership.

The legal establishment's ardor for the Second Lebanon War was exposed on Tuesday with the publication of the testimonies of Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit before the Winograd Committee which the Olmert government established to research the war's failures. In their testimonies both men shared their perception of the war as a great victory of lawyers in their campaign to "lawyerize" - or assert their control - over Israeli society.

In his opening statement, Mazuz extolled the war as "the most 'lawyerly' in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever." He explained, "The process didn't begin in Lebanon 2006. It… is a gradual process of 'lawyerizing' life in Israel."

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was "the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can't identify any confrontation… or … demands to 'Let the IDF win.'"

Mandelblit and Mazuz testified that legal advisers were present at all levels of command in all the relevant service arms and in the security cabinet. At each level the lawyers were asked to judge the legality of all the proposed targets and planned operations before they were carried out. And as the two explained, in their decisions, these lawyers were informed not by the goal of winning the war, but by their interpretation of international law.

From both men's perspectives, international law takes precedence over the national interests in wartime war. Mazuz argued, "Today international law controls our lives, no less … than domestic law. In all spheres - not just in the sphere of the laws of war… the sovereignty of states is diminishing and international law is becoming the tip of the pyramid of norms. It is becoming a substitute for the constitutions of states."

Mazuz's enthusiasm for the rule of international law troubled committee member Prof. Ruth Gavison. In response to his statement, she argued, "I find this analysis harsh. I think that you have ignored the fact that international law is plagued with problems of selective enforcement and that the application and use of international law in the context of international conflicts is very biased and very political… Therefore, [reliance on international law] seems to me to be a position that is possible to argue on a rhetorical level, but to internalize it as a real position, that looks to me like a strategic danger."

Given the contrast between Mandelblit's and Mazuz's view of the war as a triumph and the public's view of the war as a failure, it is worth considering whether there is a connection between the unprecedented "lawyerization" of the war in Lebanon and the fact that Israel lost the war.

Mazuz effectively asserted that international law prevents victory in war when he argued, "The laws of war, or international humanitarian law doesn't concern itself with relations between two states, but with the relationship between civilians and states. That is, it places the two warring states on one side of the divide and the citizens of the two states on the other side, and the goal of international law is to protect the citizens of the two states and to say: You're big kids. You want to fight, go fight, you have rules… and the rules aim to minimize as much as possible the consequences of the war."

By so arguing, Mazuz demonstrated that he views the goals of legal advisers as different from and indeed in conflict with the goals of political and military leaders. The goal of the latter is to defend the country from its enemies and to win wars. As Mazuz and Mandelblit see things, lawyers are tasked with protecting enemy populations from the IDF.

The distinctive way that legal advisers define their responsibilities has had an enormous impact on the military and the political leadership of the country. It is not that the internalization of the lawyers' approach has made the IDF or the Israeli government any more moral or law abiding than they have always been. Israel has never targeted civilians and has always sought to protect innocent civilians from harm even when they shelter enemy forces.

What has changed is the focus of military and political leaders in conducting war. Before the advent of legal dominance, commanders and political leaders devoted themselves to winning wars. Today they concentrate their efforts on avoiding criminal indictments.

THE SAME day Mazuz's and Mandelblit's testimonies were released a debate took place at the Hebrew University where the legal establishment's embrace of the role of protector of enemy populations came under assault. The debate, sponsored by the Shasha Center for Strategic Studies, was titled "Can Democracy Overcome Terror?"

There, retired Supreme Court president Justice Aharon Barak, who founded this view, was pitted against Judge Richard Posner, from the US Court of Appeals in Chicago. It was a fair match. For the American legal community, Posner's intellectual standing is equal to Barak's in Israel.

Quoting extensively from his own judgments, Barak explained his view that the duty of a judge is to protect democracy. Barak defined this role as protecting human rights, justice and fairness.

In his view, there is a constant tension between human rights and a state's security considerations. The fact that judges in Israel are not elected insulates them from public sentiment, which Barak noted is nearly unanimous in times of terror and war. Barak asserted that no distinction should be made between human rights in wartime and human rights in peacetime. If restrictions are placed on human rights in wartime, he warned, they will serve as dangerous precedents in peacetime.

Moreover, Barak explained that judges must intervene in real time in executive and military decisions even when those decisions are reasonable. As defenders of human rights, judges, he claimed, are better situated than politicians and military commanders to distinguish right from wrong.

Posner disputed all of Barak's positions. He argued that judges have no special expertise to determine norms and values. In his words, "I try to avoid using words like justice, fairness and human rights. I don't like these words because they are empty and used as substitutes for grappling with hard realities." Given their ignorance of military affairs, judges should be modest in their judgments.

Posner also objected to Barak's description of democracy. Democracy, he explained, is simply the rule of the majority. And judges limit democracy by checking the actions of the elected legislative and executive branches in government. They, in turn, protect democracy by checking the actions and limiting the scope of judicial oversight. Unlimited judicial independence, Posner argued, is tantamount to the overthrow of democracy in favor of judicial tyranny.

Then too, Posner rejected Barak's distinction between security considerations and human rights. The most basic human right, he argued, is the right to security - which is a collective right. And since security is a human right, it cannot be weighed against other human rights.

Finally, Posner strongly disputed Barak's assertion that limitations of rights during wartime impact those rights in peacetime. Citing example after example from American history, Posner demonstrated that limitations placed on rights in times of war were abrogated when the wars ended and never served as peacetime precedents.

THE BARAK-POSNER debate is relevant to the consequences of the 2006 war with Hizbullah because both Mandelblit and Mazuz claimed that their legal views stem from the judicial activism of the Supreme Court under Barak's leadership.

Mandelblit explained that the supremacy of international law over concern for victory was "the result of the vast involvement of the Supreme Court… in many judgments."

Similarly, Mazuz claimed that the "lawyerization" of the war was a consequence of judicial interference in military affairs. Since the government and military understood that "there will be a petition to the Supreme Court on every issue," ministers and generals felt it necessary to preemptively bow to Barak's world view rather than defend their actions in court.

For years there have been calls for legislative action to curb the power of the Supreme Court. Yet today the Olmert government is moving in the opposite direction.

Justice Minister Daniel Friedman's bill to reform the court system will institutionalize the Supreme Court's control of the state by anchoring in law the power the justices seized to cancel laws. Unfortunately, the only opposition Friedman's proposals have elicited has been from the Court itself. The justices argue that his proposed law doesn't empower them enough.

Fear and indifference no doubt stand at the root of the public silence on the issue. In his testimony, Mazuz openly acknowledged that the government's and IDF's subservience to their legal advisers was fueled by their fear of criminal prosecution. As he put it, both the government and the IDF asked the lawyers to tell them what they could do because "they weren't prepared to take responsibility to translate norms into decisions."

What Posner demonstrated on Tuesday, however, is that there is no reason to fear casting doubt on the legal establishment's positions. Mazuz and his colleagues do not have a monopoly on understanding the law. They certainly have no professional capacity to determine how wars should be waged.

The public's indifference to Friedman's proposals also stems from the view that such abstract principles have no impact on regular people. But as the war in Lebanon showed, the "lawyerization" of Israeli society affects the lives of all of us. Again, this process has not made us more sensitive to human rights. Israelis have always been respectful of human rights.

But before Barak established the supremacy of lawyers, we respected human rights and won wars. Today, we respect human rights and lose wars.

The fact that our soldiers were not tried for their actions in combat is no consolation for the weakness and dangers inherent in this current state of affairs.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Sunday the British military in Iraq transferred security authority over Basra to the Iraqi Army. Although the transfer took place in an orderly fashion, the British leave behind one of the worst security nightmares in that troubled land.

As one senior Iraqi military officer told ABC News, "The British legacy in Basra is criminal gangs, a corrupt and infiltrated police force, and borders open to all." During a visit to Basra on December 9, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hailed the British training of Iraqi police and security services as one of the greatest accomplishments of the British mission in the province. Iraqi military commanders who are now charged with asserting control over these British trained forces are less sanguine. As one senior commander told ABC, "Out of 17,000 policemen in Basra, some 14,000 are beholden to militias and some to the Iranian secret service." The commander added that the British training of an estimated 10,000 policemen in southern Iraq has done little to alter their loyalties.

Post-British Basra is a frightening place. Some 40 women have been brutally murdered over the past year for failing to wear burkas. The city's Christian minority is being targeted for annihilation. Last week, terrorists in police uniform stormed the house of a Christian family, and abducted and brutally murdered a brother and sister. In response to the attack, the Christian community cancelled all Christmas festivities.

During their disastrous stewardship of the city, the British ignored the primary lesson of al-Qaida's development in post-Soviet withdrawal Afghanistan. The main lesson of al-Qaida's rise from the remnants of the US-supported mujahadeen who fought the Soviets in that country throughout the 1980s is that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. By training and arming the mujahadeen in the 1980s, the US may have fomented the defeat of the Red Army, but it also enabled the mujahadeen to gain a victory over a superpower which they used as a basis for building an international terrorist movement that defines the US and the rest of the West as their new targets for destruction.

ACTUALLY, in their mishandling of Basra, the British did not merely ignore the lessons of Afghanistan's al-Qaida blowback, they took that American strategic failure to understand that the mujahadeen were their enemies a step further.

While the Americans and the Afghan jihadists did have a common foe in the Soviet Union, the British actually had no enemy in common with the Iranian-backed jihadists they trained in Basra.

The only thing the Iraqi jihadists they trained had to recommend them was the fact that they are Iraqis. By training them, the British pretended that they were advancing the cause of Iraqi independence when in fact they were working to ensure that Iraq will have a difficult time emerging from their stewardship as a coherent, peaceful multiethnic state.

BRITAIN'S foolish and dangerous actions in Basra are strikingly similar to the international community's policies regarding the Palestinian Authority generally and the PA's security services specifically. And whereas in Iraq there is some chance that the wreck the British have made of Basra can be fixed by the Iraqi military and the US forces in the country, there is no countervailing force to curb the adverse impacts of the international community's treatment of the corrupt, terror supporting, jihadist Palestinian security forces. This is the case because the Israeli government, which is the only countervailing force that could repair the damage, is exacerbating the problem.

Since the PA and its security forces were formed in 1994, they have never once taken serious action against the terror infrastructure in either Judea and Samaria or Gaza. Indeed, the PA and its security services played a central role in building those infrastructures of terror. Beyond that, since 1996, every single time that the PA's security services have been forced to choose between Israel and the terrorists, they have joined ranks with the terrorists to attack Israel.

In spite of this fact, yesterday representatives of 90 states and organizations convened in Paris and pledged to give the PA $7.4 billion over the next three years. The PA will receive some $1.7 billion next year - $1.2 billion of which will go to funding the PA budget. Most of that money will be spent paying the salaries, arming and training the PA security forces.

As the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh reported last Friday, the commanders of those forces openly acknowledge that in spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars they have already received from the US and the Europeans since the Hamas electoral victory two years ago, and notwithstanding the training and arms they have received from the US, the Europeans and the Russians, the PA's security forces have yet to take the first step towards reforming themselves or combating Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's own Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

They continue to be run by corrupt and criminal commanders. They have failed to abide by their pledge to cut the size of their forces from 70,000 to 35,000. Indeed, despite US prodding and Israel's willingness to allow these forces to deploy in the Palestinian cities and villages of Judea and Samaria, PA forces have taken no action against any terror cells anywhere. As one Palestinian official summed up their operations, "We arrested citizens who stole olive oil three years ago or fired into the air during weddings two years ago."

Of course, PA forces have done more than arrest olive oil thieves. They have also attacked Israeli targets. For instance, last month Palestinian policemen murdered Ido Zoldan. Last summer other US-trained policemen plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

A WEEK before Zoldan was murdered by US-funded PA security forces, Olmert approved the shipment of two million bullets for AK-47 assault rifles and 50 advanced Russian armored personnel carriers to those forces in Judea and Samaria. The delivery of the APCs has been delayed because the Palestinians insist that they be deployed with roof mounted machine guns and Israel has refused to accept that demand so far. In the meantime however, the bullets have apparently arrived safe and sound.

In spite of the Olmert government's insistent support for the PA forces, neither the general public nor IDF forces accept their delusions. Immediately after the government decided to approve the shipments, a battalion of reservists from the Alexandroni infantry brigade sent a letter of protest to Olmert. In their letter, signed by the battalion's commanders and 50 soldiers the reservists wrote, "We turn to you at the last minute and call on you to stop the convoy of APCs and the shipments of ammunition to the Palestinians. We have no doubt that the ammunition and the APCs will be used against us, against our comrades and against Israeli civilians just as the arms transferred to the Palestinians in the Oslo process were. It isn't enough that in recent days the government approved the release of hundreds of terrorists from prison. Today you are arming them."

Discussing the letter with Ma'ariv, the battalion commander noted, "The only one making the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is Israel. They don't make the distinction and so it is obvious that these weapons will fall into the wrong hands. It is clear to me that one day I will fight against the weapons that my country gave them."

IT IS impossible to believe that the Olmert government and indeed to the US and the rest of the international community are unaware of the terrorist nature of the PA security forces they support so generously. So why are all concerned parties maintaining the fiction that these forces are credible? The US and European impetus for bucking up terrorists is clear enough: they want to pretend they are advancing peace and Palestinian statehood. But what explains the Olmert government's behavior? Why did Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni tell the audience at Monday's donors' conference that Israel will enable the Europeans to provide advanced military training to the PA militias?

A strong indication of the logic that stands behind the Olmert government's support for the PA security services is found in the policy it is simultaneously enacting towards the self-defense units which provide security for the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

Over the past two months, while arming the PA security forces, the government has been instructing the IDF to place new draconian limitations on the ability of the Israeli communities to protect themselves from attack. In two weeks, the Defense Ministry will disband the civilian units comprised of residents of the most threatened Israeli communities. Since they were established two years ago, these units have borne the brunt of responsibility for defending their communities. Next month too, new regulations will make it more difficult for Israelis to receive weapons permits to participate in guard duty in their communities.

In taking these steps, Olmert and his colleagues demonstrate the perverse lessons they learned from the withdrawal from Gaza. During the period leading up to the withdrawal, the Sharon government scaled back IDF counter-terror operations. They also curtailed the ability of the Israeli residents of Gaza to defend themselves. In so doing, the Sharon government both enabled an increase in terror and successfully portrayed the Israeli residents - shorn of their defensive capabilities - as a security burden. These twin policies secured the support of Israel's governing leftist elites in the media for Sharon and his colleagues.

In repeating the Sharon government's policies towards the Palestinians and the Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria, the Olmert government is similarly receiving the backing of the media.

As the current situation in Gaza shows, although the Olmert government's policies may strengthen it politically, its consequences for Israel's national security will be devastating. If Basra's current security morass is Afghanistan squared, the consequences of Israel's irresponsible actions in Judea and Samaria will make Gaza - and Basra - look like a walk in the park.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

LIFE IN southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack.

Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it can do. It can conquer Gaza.

In a speech at Tel Aviv University, Ashkenazi explained, "It is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization without eventually controlling the territory. The good situation in Judea and Samaria is the result of our control over the area and we will not be able to achieve victory in the conflict [in Gaza] simply with indirect fires and attacks from the air."

Presumably Ashkenazi made this point Wednesday morning at the security cabinet meeting. But apparently, he was no match for his competition.

Squared off against Ashkenazi was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni warned her colleagues that securing southern Israel will destroy the peace process. If Israel secures the south, the Arabs and the Bush administration will get really mad. And "moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will turn his back on the peace process and reunite his US-trained Fatah forces with the Iranian-trained Hamas forces. Livni's message was clear: The government must choose between security and the peace process.

Livni won the argument. The peace process won out against the security of southern Israel.

The Olmert government's preference for process over substance is not unique. Indeed, it is malady shared by governments throughout the free world. The philosophical foundations of this malady are similarly common ones.

THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks on the US intensified a dispute that had been brewing since the end of the Cold War about the definition of rationality. The two warring factions in the debate, which has raged throughout the free world, can be referred to as the rationalizers and the rationalists. Each side has given its own definition of rationality and those competing definitions have formed the basis of the camps' competing policy prescriptions for contending with the threat of Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors ever since.

The rationalizers include politicians like Olmert and Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and security and policy apparatuses like the CIA, the State Department, the Foreign Ministry and their counterparts in Europe.

The rationalizers define rationality as susceptibility to foreign pressure and willingness to be appeased. According to this view, if your antagonist is willing to negotiate with you, then he is rational. And since he is rational, he is capable of being appeased. And since he is willing to be appeased, he isn't really your enemy.

The US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions is a textbook example of the rationalizers' view. The NIE, which asserts that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the result of the program's exposure and the international scrutiny that followed, concludes that "Teheran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs." And since Iran is rational, the NIE recommends that the US and its allies make Iran an offer which entails "some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways."

The rationalizers' view of rationality is alluring for two main reasons. First, its essential argument is that the West is solely responsible for determining whether the world will enjoy peace or suffer the ravages of war. If Western states cough up a proper package of concessions, then the terrorists and their state sponsors will negotiate with them. If Western nations refuse to make the necessary concessions then the terrorists and their state sponsors will attack them and the nations of the West will have only themselves, and their obstinacy to blame.

Beyond that, since the Arab and Islamic world's rationality is solely a function of Western will, the ideology of jihad which informs terrorists and their state sponsors is immaterial. As far as rationalizers are concerned, there is no reason to close down jihadist Web sites or indoctrination centers. Indeed, there is no reason to challenge the validity of jihadist doctrines and values as all.

This view too, resonates in the NIE. The report makes no mention of the fact that Iran's regime was founded on the values of jihad. It ignores the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters believe that by fomenting Armageddon they can hasten the coming of the Shi'ite messiah and bring forth an era of Islamic global domination in a world in which the US and Israel are but bitter memories. Had the NIE taken these ideological views into account, its authors might have noted that it makes perfect sense for the ayatollahs to be pursuing nuclear weapons.

But taking the Iranian regime's ideology, values and aspirations into account would involve crossing the lines into the opposing rationalists' camp. For rationalists, it is rational for a state's policies and actions to reflect and advance its values, aspirations and beliefs. As a consequence, it is essential to understand and confront those beliefs, values and aspirations.

Just as the rationalizers' views are attractive because they place all the power to determine issues of war and peace in the hands of Western nations, so the views of the rationalists are unattractive because they assume that the free world cannot alone determine the course of events. It cannot influence a society's adherence to jihadist beliefs and aspirations. The most it can do is take actions to prevent jihadist societies from acting on their beliefs.

When Ashkenazi explained that the conquest of Gaza is the only way to secure southern Israel, he was representing the rationalist camp's view of rationality. Since the Palestinians overwhelmingly support the jihadist aim of destroying Israel, it is rational for them to attack Israel for as long as they can. Since Israel cannot change the way the Palestinians understand the world and the meaning of life, the only way it can protect its citizens from murder is by taking away the Palestinians' ability to attack.

PERHAPS THE strangest aspect of the rationalizers' disparagement of the importance of ideology is the lengths they go to in order to ignore jihadist ideology on the one hand and appease it on the other. Agents in counter-terror units of the FBI, for instance, are discouraged from studying the Koran. Their chiefs argue that only a tiny minority of Muslims in the US and worldwide ascribe to a religious-supremacist interpretation of the Koran which upholds and encourages terrorism, slaughter and war to the death against non-Muslims and therefore what the Koran says is irrelevant.

Yet if it is true that only a tiny minority of Muslims think that Islam is a supremacist political as well as religious creed, then the rationalizers should treat the actual jihadists with contempt similar to that which they exhibit towards white supremacists. After all, doing so shouldn't bother the rest of their co-religionists who reject their views. But the opposite is the case.

FBI agents undergo Islamic "sensitivity training" by people who are themselves the subjects of their counter-terror investigations. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay are forced to wear gloves when they touch copies of the Koran belonging to their jihadist prisoners.

More disturbingly, in their rush to placate this irrelevant tiny minority of jihadists, Israeli, US and European officials willingly trounce their core values of the rule of law and freedom of expression. In Israel, Israeli Jews who build homes without permits are prosecuted to the full limit of the law and ejected from their homes. Israeli Arabs who have built entire towns illegally are ignored by authorities in the interest of avoiding diplomatic consequences or stirring up passions.

In the US, one can stand outside the White House and burn the American flag without fear of criminal charge. But if a person draws a pig on a copy of the Koran in a public library, he is liable to find himself under arrest for committing a hate crime. And in Europe, you can participate in a demonstration invoking Islam as you call for the destruction of Britain or Holland or Demark without fear of legal action, but if you publish a caricature of Muhammad in your newspaper, you may find yourself the subject of a criminal probe and forced into hiding for promoting racism.

In Israel, it is difficult to convince people that the ideology of jihad is unimportant. But the rationalizers have two other ways to convince the general public and their political base that they are right to ignore the enemy's actions and intentions and concentrate on efforts to appease. First there is the fear factor. Given the overwhelming nature of the Arab and Islamic world's hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, Israel's rationalizers defend their preference for imaginary peace processes over security by arguing that Israel cannot afford to fight a war. Far better than facing that hatred on the battlefield is the option of preemptive surrender. As the rationalizers argue, if Israel shrinks into the 1949 armistice lines, builds a big wall and hides behind it, then maybe the Arabs will forget that we're still here and leave us alone.

Politically there is the fact that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party was founded on the view that territory has no defensive value and that preemptive surrender is a reasonable national strategy. To acknowledge that territory is important or that surrendering territory to your enemy strengthens your enemy and weakens you would involve admitting that Kadima's founding principles are all wrong. So Olmert and Livni and their associates maintain the fiction, do nothing to secure southern Israel and seek to transfer Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Fatah terrorists.

Since September 11, the rationalizers have won most of their policy battles with the rationalists and the results of their victories have been both ironic and tragic. As a result of the rationalizers' control of policy, the only ones who consistently engage in the rational pursuit of their interests, values and aspirations are the jihadists and their state sponsors. For their part, the leaders of the free world seem intent on living out George Orwell's observation that "the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced a new venue for her superficial and destructive stewardship of US foreign policy during her lightning visit to the Horn of Africa last Wednesday.

The Horn of Africa is a dangerous and strategically vital place. Small wars, which rage continuously, can easily escalate into big wars. Local conflicts have regional and global aspects. All of the conflicts in this tinderbox, which controls shipping lanes from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, can potentially give rise to regional, and indeed global conflagrations between competing regional actors and global powers.

Located in and around the Horn of Africa are the states of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Kenya. Eritrea, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year civil war, is a major source of regional conflict. Eritrea has a  nagging border dispute with Ethiopia which could easily ignite. The two countries fought a bloody border war from 1998-2000 over control of the town of Badme. Although a UN mandated body determined in 2002 that the disputed town belonged to Eritrea, Ethiopia has rejected the finding and so the conflict festers.

Eritrea also fights a proxy war against Ethiopia in Somalia and in Ethiopia's rebellious Ogaden region. In Somalia, Eritrea is the primary sponsor of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Courts Union which took control of Somalia in June, 2006. In November 2006, the ICU government declared jihad against Ethiopia and Kenya. Backed by the US, Ethiopia invaded Somalia last December to restore the recognized Transitional Federal Government to power which the ICU had deposed.

Although the Ethiopian army successfully ousted the ICU from power in less than a week, backed by massive military and financial assistance from Eritrea, as well as Egypt and Libya, the ICU has waged a brutal insurgency against the TFG and the Ethiopian military for the past year.

THE SENIOR ICU leadership, including Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and Sheikh Sharif Ahmed have received safe haven in Eritrea. In September, the exiled ICU leadership held a nine-day conference in the Eritrean capital of Asmara where they formed the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia headed by Ahmed.

Eritrean President-for-life Isaias Afwerki declared his country's support for the insurgents stating, "The Eritrean people's support to the Somali people is consistent and historical, as well as a legal and moral obligation."

Although touted in the West as a moderate, Ahmed has openly supported jihad and terrorism against Ethiopia, Kenya and the West. Aweys, for his part, is wanted by the FBI in connection with his role in the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Then there is Eritrea's support for the Ogaden separatists in Ethiopia. The Ogaden rebels are Somali ethnics who live in the region bordering Somalia and Kenya. The rebellion is run by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) which uses terror and sabotage as its preferred methods of warfare. It targets not only Ethiopian forces and military installations, but locals who wish to maintain their allegiance to Ethiopia or reach a negotiated resolution of the conflict. In their most sensationalist attack to date, in April ONLF terror forces attacked a Chinese-run oil installation in April killing nine Chinese and 65 Ethiopians.

Ethiopia, for its part has fought a brutal counter-insurgency to restore its control over the region. Human rights organizations have accused Ethiopia of massive human rights abuses of civilians in Ogaden.

THEN THERE is Sudan. As Eric Reeves wrote in the Boston Globe on Saturday, "The brutal regime in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, has orchestrated genocidal counter-insurgency war in Darfur for five years, and is now poised for victory in its ghastly assault on the region's African populations."

The Islamist government of Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir is refusing to accept non-African states as members of the hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur that is due to replace the undermanned and demoralized African Union peacekeeping force whose mandate ends on December 31. Without its UN component of non-African states, the UN Security Council mandated force will be unable to operate effectively. Khartoum's veto led Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN undersecretary for peacekeeping to warn last month that the entire peacekeeping mission may have to be aborted.

And the Darfur region is not the only one at risk. Due to Khartoum's refusal to carry out the terms of its 2005 peace treaty with the Southern Sudanese that ended Khartoum's 20-year war and genocide against the region's Christian and animist population, the unsteady peace may be undone. Given Khartoum's apparent sprint to victory over the international community regarding Darfur, there is little reason to doubt that once victory is secured, it will renew its attacks in the south.

THE CONFLICTS in the Horn of Africa have regional and global dimensions. Regionally, Egypt has played a central role in sponsoring and fomenting conflicts. Egypt's meddling advances its interest of preventing the African nations from mounting a unified challenge to Egypt's colonial legacy of extraordinary rights to the waters of the Nile River which flows through all countries of the region.

Globally, the region is a hotbed of Wahabist activity. Osama bin Laden was based in Khartoum until 1995. The ICU receives support not only from Eritrea, but from the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. So too, international attempts to end the genocide in Darfur have been stymied by the Arab League and the OIC. One of the main reasons for the recent US decision to establish a military command in Africa is its strategic importance to the forces of global jihad. The US's largest force in Africa is located in Djibouti.

International efforts to resolve the manifold conflicts in the region have failed to address the roots of the conflicts and so, even when successful are generally short lived. As the situation in Southern Sudan and the Eritrean-Ethiopian border show, these agreements only last as long as neither side believes it can defeat the other.

Beyond that, while US and European leaders have spoken eloquently of the need to end the slaughter in Darfur and help the Somalis establish order, Washington and Brussels have made clear that they will not take effective action to back up their declarations. Indeed, even if Khartoum weren't actively working to undermine the peacekeeping mission in Darfur, it is hard to see the mission actually succeeding. No NATO member will agree to donate helicopters to the peacekeeping force. Without the helicopters, the peacekeepers will be unable to perform their mission.

THIS REGIONAL morass of wars and rivalries formed the backdrop last week to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's one-day visit to African Union headquarters in Ethiopia. It is far from clear what Rice hoped to accomplish by traveling to Africa. She didn't bring any plans to solve any of the region's problems or even suggest new ways of looking at them. Even more troubling, Rice devoted the majority of her attention not to pointing a finger at Eritrea and Sudan for their bad behavior, but to attacking Ethiopia and pressuring the southern Sudanese to cut a deal with Khartoum.

It seems fairly clear that Ethiopia's hands are not clean in its handling of the separatist war in Ogaden. But at the same time, it is equally clear that Ethiopia is the only state among the warring factions that has tried to bring a semblance of law and order and openness to its war torn, fractured society.

Beyond that, Ethiopia is without a doubt the US's most loyal, stable, militarily capable and strategically valuable ally in the region. And yet, in her public statements, Rice singled Ethiopia out for censure demanding that it curtail its operations along its border with Eritrea. She also called for an Ethiopian withdrawal from Somalia despite the fact that she knows that the African Union has not been successful in raising a peacekeeping force to deploy to the country that could secure a peace. Rice refused to accept Ethiopia's position that the ONLF is a terrorist organization and took a step back from US threats in September to label Eritrea a state supporter of terrorism despite its open support for the al-Qaida linked ICU.

Then too, aside from declaring that the peace agreement between the southern Sudanese and the Khartoum government must not be permitted to unravel, she offered no helpful advice on how to prevent that from occurring. Rice refrained from attacking Khartoum for boycotting her visit, and apparently sufficed with pleasantries in her meeting with south Sudanese leader Pagan Amum.

RICE'S FORAY into the Horn of Africa left an acrid aftertaste. Her superficial treatment of deep and dangerous conflicts indicates her lack of interest in the strategically vital region. Most troubling though, was her abusive treatment of Ethiopia. By attacking the US's strongest ally while making light of the actual conflicts plaguing the area, Rice showed that in the Horn of Africa her view of her role as chief US diplomat is no different from her perception of her role in the Middle East and Asia. Apparently, as Rice sees it, her remaining time in office is best spent weakening America's allies and giving a free ride to its foes.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi should be thankful that her main focus lies elsewhere.
 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.

The NIE begins with the sensationalist opening line: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program." But the rest of the report contradicts the lead sentence. For instance, the second line says, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

Indeed, contrary to that earth-shattering opening, the NIE acknowledges that the Iranians have an active nuclear program and that they are between two and five years away from nuclear capabilities.

The NIE's final sentence: "We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so," only emphasizes that US intelligence agencies view Iran's nuclear program as a continuous and increasing threat rather than a suspended and diminishing one.

But the content of the NIE is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the opening line - as the report's authors no doubt knew full well when they wrote it. With that opening line, the NIE effectively takes the option of American use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons off the table.

There are two possible explanations for why President George W. Bush permitted this strange report to be published. Either he doesn't wish to attack Iran, or he was compelled by the intelligence bureaucracy to accept that he can't attack Iran.

Arguing the former in Time magazine, former CIA agent Robert Baer explained, "While the 16 agencies that make up the 'intelligence community' contribute to each National Intelligence Estimate, you can bet that an explosive 180-degree turn on Iran like this one was greenlighted by the president."

The alternative view - that Bush was forced to accept the report against his will - is also possible. The report's primary authors, Thomas Fingar, Vann Van Diepen and Kenneth Brill are all State Department officials on loan to the office of the Director of National Intelligence. According to the Wall Street Journal, all three are reputed to be deeply partisan and hostile to Bush's foreign policy goals. Furthermore, for the past four years the three have reportedly worked studiously to downplay the danger of Iran's nuclear weapons program and to discredit their opponents within the administration.

Thursday The New York Times ran a story detailing the process in which the NIE was collated that lends credence to the view that Bush was compelled to accept it. According to the Times, in the months preceding the NIE's publication, Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, purposely prevented the White House from seeing any of the raw intelligence data on which the NIE's radical conclusion on Iran was drawn. This alone indicates that  the intelligence community may well have presented Bush with a fait accompli.

But it really doesn't make a difference one way or another. Whether the president agrees or disagrees with the NIE, he is boxed in just the same. The NIE denies him the option of taking military action against Iran's nuclear program for the duration of his tenure in office. So for at least 14 months, Iran has nothing to worry about from Washington.

And the NIE's political repercussions extend well beyond the current administration. Today, no Democratic presidential candidate will dare to question the opening line of the report. The Democratic Congressional leaders are demanding that the administration immediately open bilateral talks with Iran. And Senator Hillary Clinton is being pilloried by her party rivals for her Senate vote in favor of classifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization.

The situation among Republicans is not much more encouraging. Although Republicans have greeted the NIE with grumbling rather than glee, it is hard to imagine any of the Republican presidential candidates taking issue with its opening line. Doing so entails the risk of being accused of alarmism and warmongering.

Although Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue to speak of imposing further sanctions on Iran, the fact is that after the report was published, any chance of getting an agreement on further sanctions evaporated. French President Nicholas Sarkozy stands humiliated for having dared to speak of the possibility of attacking Iran. The Germans will immediately reinvigorate their commercial ties with the mullahs as will the British and the French. The Russians and Chinese will drop even the veneer of opposing Iran's nuclear program.

The NIE makes light of Iran's acknowledged nuclear capabilities by intimating that Iran's intentions are not necessarily hostile. Yet, it gives no evidence that this is the case. Rather, the NIE projects the aspirations of its American authors on the Iranians. But since one's actions rather than the hopes of one's adversaries are the best indication of one's intentions, the only conclusion that can be reasonably be drawn about Iran is that its intentions are anything but benign.

For instance, Agence France-Presse reported that in 2005 Iran bought 18 Russian SS-N-6 ballistic missiles from North Korea. The North Koreans had modified the missiles, which were originally submarine-launched, to enable them to be launched from land-based mobile launchers and renamed them BM-25s. What is notable about these missiles is that the Soviets designed them specifically to carry one megaton nuclear warheads.

As the on-line intelligence newsletter NightWatch noted this week, "Curious minds want to know why would Iran buy such a system from North Korea in 2005, if it had abandoned its nuclear warhead program in 2003?"

Beyond that, the NIE makes a strange distinction between Iran's "civilian" nuclear program which has not stopped for a moment and its "military" program which supposedly ended in 2003. Since both programs are controlled and run by the Revolutionary Guards, it is obvious that no such distinction exists for the Iranians. And as former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton wrote Thursday in The Washington Post, "It has always been Iran's 'civilian' program that posed the main risk of nuclear 'breakout.'"

Finally the US intelligence community's pathetic track record must be taken into account. American intelligence agencies failed to take note of the al-Qaida threat to US security before September 11. It misjudged Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities and intentions. And most recently, it failed to take notice of Syria's nuclear program even though the North Korean nuclear facility which Israel reportedly destroyed on September 6 was built above ground.

As for that, the Israeli strike showed clearly that there is no reason to assume that Iran's nuclear program is located only in Iran. It is reasonable to assume that some of its components are located in Syria, North Korea and Pakistan and perhaps in China and Russia as well.

The Israeli strike in Syria also demonstrated the superiority of Israel's intelligence on weapons of mass destruction programs over America's. And the NIE takes revenge on Israel for its comparative advantage.

Given the NIE's assertion that Iran is not a threat, the report is a direct assault on the credibility of Israel's intelligence services. Moreover, since Israel's intelligence services insist that Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to global security, the NIE serves to paint Israel's intelligence community not merely as unreliable, but as hostile to American interests.

So not only does the NIE make it impossible for the US to take action against Iran, it also sets a dangerous trap for Israel. If Israel doesn't take action against Iran's nuclear installations it risks annihilation. And if it does take action, it can expect to be subject to international and American condemnation far worse than what it suffered after bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

The US has not limited its entrapment of Israel to the political realm. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Tuesday, due to massive US pressure, Israel and India were compelled to cancel the planned launch of an Israeli satellite on an Indian missile. The launch was scheduled to take place in September. It has yet to be rescheduled. Apparently, the US response to Israel's discovery of Syria's nuclear program was to undercut Israel's ability to enhance its intelligence capabilities.

The Israeli response so far to the NIE creates the impression that Israel's leaders are in a state of denial over what has just happened. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reacted with empty bromides about his close relationship with Bush.

By mindlessly agreeing that Iran did in fact halt its nuclear weapons program in 2003, Defense Minister Ehud Barak accepted the most ridiculous aspect of the report - namely that there is a distinction between Iran's "civilian" and "military" nuclear programs. In so doing, Barak effectively prevented Israel from attacking the report for its basic mendacity.

As for Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, well, she doesn't seem to understand that anything has happened. In a message to Israeli ambassadors, Livni urged Israel's emissaries to continue their efforts to promote sanctions claiming that, "All are in agreement that the world cannot accept a nuclear Iran."

And this is the final aspect of the NIE that bears mention. Both in its content and in the timing of its release the week after the Annapolis conference, the NIE shows clearly that in sharp contrast to optimistic statements by Olmert, Barak and Livni about Israel's wonderful relations with the Bush administration, the fact is that Israel's relations with the US are in a state of crisis.

Many commentators applauded the Annapolis conference, claiming that its real aim was to cement a US-led coalition including Israel and the Arabs against Iran. These voices argued that it made sense for Israel to agree to negotiate on bad terms in exchange for such a coalition. But the NIE shows that the US double-crossed Israel. By placing the bait of a hypothetical coalition against Iran, the US extracted massive Israeli concessions to the Palestinians and then turned around and abandoned Israel on Iran as well. What this means is that not only has the US cut Israel off as an ally, it is actively working against the Jewish state.

For their part, the Iranians are celebrating the NIE's publication as a major victory. And they are right to do so. With the stroke of a pen the US this week has let it be known that it doesn't have a problem with Iran acquiring the means to carry out the second genocide of the Jewish people in 70 years.

The NIE's message to Israel and world Jewry is clear. Again we are alone in our moment of peril. It is high time that our political and military leaders acknowledge this fact, stop hoping that someone else will save us, and get to work on defending us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.

Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.

Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.

IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.

According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.

Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.

According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.

RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.

Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.

Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.

There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.

Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.

Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.

IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.

The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.

Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."

Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.

Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."

As Lee Smith reported in the Weekly Standard, Lebanon's anti-Syrian forces interpreted the US decision to invite the Syrians to Annapolis as an American abandonment of Lebanese democracy. In October, the leader of the anti-Syrian coalition Saad Hariri visited Washington. As Smith notes, after meeting with President George W. Bush and Congressional leaders, Hariri told reporters, "There is a killing machine in Syria. We came to Washington to say, 'If you are going to do something about it, let us know. If you are not going to do anything about it, let us know. But no matter what, we're not going to give in.'"

By inviting Syria to Annapolis, the Americans told the anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon all they needed to know. Bowing to the reality of America's abandonment, they gave in and announced their support for Suleiman.

Suleiman's ascension to the Lebanese presidency is disastrous to the US for two reasons. First, it destroys US credibility as an ally. Between Rice's decision to put the squeeze on Israel for massive concessions to the terror-supporting Palestinians, to her lackadaisical attitude to Russia's abuse of US allies in Ukraine and Poland, to her abandonment of Japan in favor of appeasing North Korea, to her neglect of pro-US political forces in Iraq, Rice's preference for Syria over Lebanese democrats makes it clear that there is no advantage to be gained from being pro-American.

FURTHERMORE, as the September 11 attacks showed, when states are brought under terrorist control they constitute clear and present dangers not just to their region, but to the world. Under the Taliban regime, forces in the land-locked Afghan backwater successfully planned attacks on America.

The lethal force of a terror-ruled Lebanon, situated strategically on the Mediterranean coast presents an even greater threat to US national security. This is all the more apparent given that recently indicted Hizbullah agent Nada Nadim Prouty successfully infiltrated both the FBI and the CIA, and the well-known fact that Hizbullah fields agents throughout the US and Canada.

As far as Olmert and Rice are concerned, perhaps their embrace of Syria really is a no-cost move. Olmert insulates himself still further from his critics by strengthening his position with the leftist, appeasement-crazed Israeli media. Rice got her picture taken with Arab potentates at Annapolis.

But while their embraces of Syria may put them ahead politically, there is no doubt that their gains come at the expense of the security of the Israeli, the Lebanese and the American people.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.