You know that you are in trouble when the best understanding of government action is that they are imitating somebody else. Circumstances are always different and one has to take the new times into account, but imitators have difficulty here.
1. The government started as an imitator of Sharon`s disengagement. There were a few Qassams from Gaza, but this did not get the imitators to worry about Qassams from the West Bank, every one of which would have hit and killed with near certainty, until the great barrage from Lebanon. The imitators had to finally notice the difference.
2. Olmert jumped into war with Lebanon. Yes, Sharon did it once, but what about the new Katyusha situation?
3. Rushing to bomb some facility in Syria. Begin did it to the Iraqi nuclear reactor, which turned out to be an irreplaceable facility. The Syrian facility will be in operation next year, and if CNN is right then the next shipment to Hizballah will show up next month, and with better protection. But now, why expect the Arabs to support peace when Israel acts as a bully?
4. We hear that the government wants to give citizenship to some Darfur refugees, and they cite US generosity with the Vietnamese refugees. The slight difference is that the Darfurians can go home when the situation there stabilizes, while the Vietnamese would not go back to a country turned communist. |
|
