It is easier to apply accountability in a parliamentary system, when an election can be called anytime.

Speaking of accountability, why shouldn't we consider a president that acts in bad faith by not "faithfully execut[ing] the office" of president as having commited a high crime? Dereliction of Duty is a serious charge in the armed forces, Mr. Commander-in-Chief.

As yet another example of bad faith, the Interior Dept official that just resigned was actively countering the law of the land, per instructions from the WH. Another example is highly partial justice, with local Democratic officials being investigated for corruption at 8 times the rate for Republicans. Then there's AttorneyGate. Signing statements, anyone?

Accountability, thy name is impeachment, but we need to line up the ducks to convince of hanging majority in the Senate. More subpoenas, please!

Israel is a much smaller country, and the Israeli media is far less beholden to the government and to corporate power than the depleted, or dead, American media. And I think the people are less afraid to "think against" their government, for many complex cultural reasons.

For example, a sub-10% approval rating would be unthinkable here unless Boosh got videotaped killing his dog for crapping on his cowboy boots.

Israel is an activist nation. There are few who don't get that life and death is the order of business. (They don't get "go shopping" orders when a war is on, for example.) These citizens participate with no illusions about the blood and guts stuff. They don't have the luxury of pretending that the way to deal with the "unpleasant" matters at hand is to turn off the TV.
Americans have been playing "let's pretend" for a long, long time. A few more terrorist attacks will change things here.

Don't put "UK" in the headline if you're not going to address the UK in the body of the post.

Perhaps you're right & there will be accountability in Israel when Olmert resigns. But then a larger question looms: what then? What use is accountability if the country turns to an even more disastrous leader like Benyamin Netanyahu to lead it? ANd even if it choose a relatively benign, & much more popular, leader like Tzipi Livni, won't she be weakened as the leader of a totally discredited Kadima party?

Israel's problems go far beyond accountability I'm sorry to say. You have a fundamentally deaf, dumb & blind government & populace. Regardless of who leads the country, I don't see potential leaders taking the bold steps that are needed to grasp the olive branch of peace. I'd like to be wrong, I really would.

Richard Silverstein
Tikun Olam>

Given the specific context here, I'd refine your headline to say: On accountability regarding wars, Israel is way ahead of the USA.

I'd suggest an important reason why: pretty much every Israeli has served, and indeed many of these will have had close experience of the last, bloody Lebanon War. As a nation, Israel won't tolerate military screw ups. The problem with us is less that we won't tolerate military screw ups, it's that a substantial minority, including the President, evidently can't/won't recognize the military screw up that is Iraq.

I put to you that this is in part because many of these goons have never served.

Also, I posted this on a reader-blog, but Glenn Greenwald is worth a read in respect of this particular contrast. I thought of notable relevance to our current debate was this comment:

"...Israel issued this report even knowing that -- to invoke the Cheney-ite cliche -- it would "embolden the enemy." Predictably, Hezbollah immediately cited the Commission's report as "proof" that it won, that Israel lost, and that in light of the report, "no one will take us lightly from now on, especially since we have only gained strength of late." Israel obviously knew that the report would be exploited by Hezbollah this way, but it issued it anyway.

....Israel recognized it did not have the luxury of concealing its errors or continuing to fight a misguided war, notwithstanding what Hezbollah might say about that. "

Oh yeah, in case anyone has forgotten, we also had a Winograd report of sorts... Baker-Hamilton wasn't as thorough and wide-ranging as Winograd, but it did reach the inevitable conclusion that Iraq was a catastrophic failure.

Whilst Olmert will probably resign on seeing the F on his report card, of course Bush saw his F and so ignored his report. And his grotesquely moronic and morally bankrupt Congressional GOP allies gave him the cover he needed to do this.

Which goes back to my initial point about the minority in this country who can not, or will not, recognize the military screw-up in Iraq. These people are the road-block, and Reid and Pelosi should not give an inch in legislating for withdrawal.

Canadian troops are currently fighting and dying in Afghanistan.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Your eagerness to waive the white flag in Iraq is the type of thinking that has cost Israel countless lives. You see the defense of one's country as "misguided" and seize upon any setback as a reason to quit.

Olmert's failures are the product of Israel's political correctness (like your surender in Iraq approach) in dealing with their Arab neighbors.

Note that his own country has turned on him and emboldened Hezbollah and you see this as a good thing!

You guys are going to get us killed!

Size is also a good point. People I know in the EU want to limit the Federal authority for exactly that purpose, to preserve the responsiveness of local government.

It's funny that the EU benefits in some ways by smaller nations with different languages and more restrictions on movement between states. If a region wants to go down the toilet culturally, it's more free to do so, and bears the consequences. Alternatively, if a region is prospering, it's prosperity accrues directly to it's own region, which tends to inspire others.

I think it's ironic that small nations such as those in the EU seem to be getting all the benefits of competition in a regional evolutionary sense, and yet they're still able to maintain a high degree of egalitarianism and social security within each nation.

Makes me wish CA was a separate nation.

"Olmert's failures are the product of Israel's political correctness (like your surender in Iraq approach) in dealing with their Arab neighbors."

 Kiwi - Exactly what do you recommend Israel should have done in Lebanon that it did not do? What do you recommend Israel do in it's conflict with the Palestinians?  

Kiwi von Huber,

Your eagerness to waive the white flag in Iraq is the type of thinking that has cost Israel countless lives. You see the defense of one's country as "misguided" and seize upon any setback as a reason to quit.

What exactly was the US defending by invading Iraq?  By now we know that the Iraqi weapons programs and al-Qaida conspiracies were fictions that responsible scrutiny would have exposed before this misguided adventure was launched.

The problem wasn't in going to war, which was the right decision to make, the problem lies in how it was conducted.

I suspect one reason the Israelis are ahead of us on accountability is that everybody in Israel serves in the Armed Forces, while here we have a volunteer Army which mainly consists of people with relatively little political power.

That having been said, let me say that the Winograd Report was much too easy on the IDF. The IDF has absolutely no excuse for not having been prepared for a war with Hezbollah. And I don't see how Halutz could be responsible for more than a small fraction of this lack of preparedness.

The Oslo Accords became necessary because, not in spite, of the lunatic policy of constructing exclusive cities in disputed territories that the state had not even bothered to annex.

Really?? Then why were the settlements not addressed in the Oslo Accords?

" I don't see the Israelis empaneling a commission to investigate the settlements policy or the missed opportunities to achieve peace." MJ Rosenberg

It would be a good thing if they did because the debate is not so much about foundational principles and ideologies (i.e. Zionism, anti-nativism, partition, separatism), but about levels of competency and decisiveness in extending and protecting the dispossession. The debate is about degrees of conflict, managing the conflict, and robustly not dealing with the causes of conflict. The world where Israel is able to expropriate Palestinians in their homeland is not the world in which Jews should wish to live. That's Israel's real accountability problem.

The Other Alan,

The world where Israel is able to expropriate Palestinians in their homeland is not the world in which Jews should wish to live. That's Israel's real accountability problem.

That's an accountability problem epidemic across the entire spectrum of the conflict.  Jews only have so much power in this world, and the statelessness of the Palestinians is arguably a product of the inability of the Palestinians themselves to establish a viable civil infrastructure (and the ease with which to blame it entirely on Israel) as it is the real or contrived insecurities of Israeli society.

I would say the settlements are an excuse not a cause for the grievances. How do you explain the issues prior to 1967 when there were no settlements?

There is no doubt that the Israelis gave much thought to not giving back the West Bank. The victory in 1967 led the Israelis to be over confident. However, the 1973 War and the Intifada cured the Israelis of the overconfidence.

As the removal of the settlements from Gaza demonstrated the Israelis will do the hard job of taking on the settlers. Where is the comparable acts on the otherside?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I was not speaking just of electronic media. Are you saying that the content of electronic media in Israel is closely regulated by the Government (other than the occasional UK-style temporary restraints)? If yes, is that consistent with Israel's aspirations to remain, or become, a democracy?

In Israel, the electronic media is much more controlled than in the US. No one can
open a radio station (or TV station) without getting a tender and the content is controlled by the gov't to a larger degree than in the US. Virtually all the radio and television commentators are Leftist (there are only a very small number of well-known right-wingers that receive air time on the major stations) There was one nation-wide station that had its transmitter at sea, Arutz 7, a "right-wing religious pro-settlement" station. It was shut down after several years of operating, and the operators were convicted of the felony crime of operating an "illegal" radio station, and IIRC they were sentenced to several years imprisonment, although the sentences were reduced to "community service". Abie Nathan's Voice of Peace station, which pushed a Leftist , anti-Settlement political line broadcast illegally for something like 25 years and he is considered a great hero to the Israeli establishment. When asked why the State Prosecutors office allowed Nathan to operate for 25 years without interference and only Arutz 7 was prosecuted the answer was "well, we had to start somewhere".
All three major newspapers, Ha'aretz, Yediot Aharonot and Ma'ariv are Leftist, support the Labor/Meretz/Hadash line, are anti-settler and largely anti-religious.
It is important to distinguish between "the government" and "the Establishment". The second determines national policy regardless of which party is in power. In the event there is a "right-wing government" in power (the last time there was one was in 1999), the Establisment, which is largely anti-religious, anti-settler and post-Zionist will attempt to hamstring its decisions by means of its almost total control of the coercive arms of the state (e.g. the Supreme Court and the State Prosecutors Office) and the almost totally sympathetic media.
When I say the Establishment is "post-Zionist", I must clarify and say that it is still "officially" and "nominally" Zionist.
Amos Shocken of Ha'aretz newspaper a couple of weeks ago called for the gradual elimination of Jewish symbols of the state since the Arabs object to them , but this is still officially a minority opinion, although there is no doubt in my mind that many of the powerful individuals who do determine policy are not far in the personal beliefs from rejecting Zionism as an ideology (e.g. Yossi Beilin saying it was a mistake to build a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, it should have been in Uganda, and Peres and Rabin giving their Nobel Prize Acceptance Speeches in English when the custom is to deliver it in one's "native language". This, to me, indicates that they didn't identify themselves as Jews or Israelis but rather as "cosmopolitan citizens of the world").

It's a major mistake to assume that the 3 major Israeli dailies are leftist. A better read is to recognize the fact that the Israeli media sees its job as opposing the government no matter who is in power. They gave hell to Ben Gorion, Golda and Rabin. After all, every one knows the good news; you have to be told the bad news.

Government control of radio and TV is a legacy of the past. At the same time, the vast majority of the population knows that government is in the business of lying to the people, therefore one needs harsh commissions on inquiry and swift resignations.

In the US politics is like the NFL; people support one team/side no matter what. Therefore, Bush who did nothing right has popularity rating of 37% while Olmert who did one thing terribly wrong has a rating of 7%.

John,

First, the Arab states generally as well as the stateless Palestinian people should indeed accept their share of the blame, so long as supporters of Israel accept theirs as well.... Second, there certainly did exist something prior to the settlements: a demand for a state on that very land.

The 1967 war precedes the establishment of the first settlements.  Prior to that, from the 1948 armistice, Palestinian territory had been annexed by Jordan and militarily occupied by Egypt.  The Palestinians were just as stateless when Israeli forces entered the territories as they are now.  If the Arab establishment were as committed to nurturing Palestinian national self-determination as they were to dispatching that of the Jews, it is conceivable that there would have been no war at all in 1967.  Jewish and Arab national rights are not mutually exclusive in the former British Mandate.  Not now, not then.

Listen you goddamn Jew-hater, AIPAC members-- of whom I am proud to be one-- exercise democracy in this country every single day. We have great respect for democracy, and Madison, Jay and their friends who wrote Federalist 10 would be damn happy to see us in action as one of the "factions" they thought were the best bulwark against tyranny.

You Jew-haters who want Israel destroyed have as much right to exercise democracy as we do by contributing campaign money, lobbying , publicizing your cause and voting for candidates who think like you. Get your Arab friends to contribute more to CAIR and come lobby in the House and Senate Office Buildings. Your problem is nobody in Washington D.C. takes you seriously--not even most liberal Democrats-- because your point of view is held by a tiny percentage of American voters.

It was the right political decision to make, right because the War President Mojo got George Dubya re-elected!

That's why Bush, Rove and Co. didn't care about the 'conduct' of the war. The war was pure politics and war profiteering. Details about casualties, cost or ultimate failure were politically unimportant-politics, PR, and winning in 2004 trumped all.

Your Democrat talking points are in order, but your facts are not.

Bush has had the courage to go on offense and defend the country.

He wasn't furthering some conspiracy to make money, how silly.

If he was worried about his popularity, legacy and future profits, he would have done what President Clinton did, that is, treat the terrorists as criminals, read them their rights and stay high in the polls.

Bush's courage to kill terrorists aggressively and preemptively, yes, even in Iraq, has not served to benefit him at all.

Set aside your hate for a moment and see that President Bush is the unselfish one who ingnored his popularity to do the right thing for America.

The Democrats all agreed until the war became difficult. Now they see political advantage from retreat so they eagerly betray the country for their immediate political gains.

Shameful, but obvious.

In general, there are commissions of inquiry when there is an unambiguous failure or disaster.  9/11, the Challenger shuttle disaster, the Warren Commission and the Lebanon War are all examples of disasters that people of all ideological stripes can agree need to be understood.  The question of whether settlements in the West Bank are a failure or not is intensely political and controversial.  It depends wholly on one's ideology.  So there could never be a commission of inquiry into something like that because there isn't a consensus that it's a disaster.

As for the issue of accountability, the American system assumes that accountability lies in the hands of the people, not in a commission.

I believe MJ considers himself a Zionist, but that he would rather do without the warmongering, the two-class society in Israel, and the oppression and theft of land in the Occupied West Bank. I certainly don't agree that you get to decide who is one and who isn't.

OK, so now you say the Israeli media isn't regulated after all, it just tends to reflect the dominant political ethic, of the so-called Establishment. You mean, like in almost every country on earth, free and otherwise. Gotcha. BTW, I visit Ha'aretz at least weekly. And also the rightish J-Post from time to time, which is or was very recently owned by a right-wing international media baron, wasn't it?

This exchange started with my suggestion that the Israeli media is "far less beholden to the government and to corporate power than the depleted, or dead, American media."

Evidently you no longer disagree.

"I would say the settlements are an excuse not a cause for the grievances."

You know, I really believe you would say that.

Kiwi von Huber,

By now we know that the Iraqi weapons programs and al-Qaida conspiracies were fictions that responsible scrutiny would have exposed before this misguided adventure was launched.  So, once again, what exactly was it that the US was defending with the offensive in Iraq?

I appreciate that your GOP talking points could get in the way of a straight answer to that question.

We disagree on the factual premise so it makes rational argument difficult.

There were thousands of Sadaam's poison gas containers found, along with tons of nuclear materials.

We also disagree that we are at war and Iraq is the front. Al quaeda agrees we me, however.

They know they have to win in Iraq and are betting on the Democrats to beat the U. S. military for them, because they can't do it alone.

Finally, you mock patriotism and love of America so we are too far apart on elementary beliefs to make much progress.

Correct?

bar_kochba132,

However, a Zionist is someone who acknowledges Jewish rights to Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) and realizes that Jewish settlement in Judea/Samaria is no different than Jewish/Zionist settlement that went on for 100 years before then. As I pointed out in the other thread, Tel Aviv was a settlement just like the Judea/Samaria settlements.

No.  Zionism achieved recognition of Jewish national rights, within the only rightful homeland Jews have ever known, within the context of contemporary international laws.  The Zionist Congress legally acquired lands for Jewish settlement like Tel Aviv within that framework, which is significantly different than establishing exclusive cities beyond internationally recognized armistice lines, and in territories that the state had never shown the slightest committment to annex.

A couple postings below in a reply to Wigmar1, I point out that one can be a Zionist and say "yes, Judea/Samaria is ours, we have the right to live there but because there aren't enough Jews to populate it densely, or it is too difficult to defend" or whatever, this person is a Zionist. However, someone who says it is "immoral" or "it is not ours" or some such thing, then they are not Zionists and are being hypocritical.

Regarding the newspapers, what you ask is an interesting question. I only buy "Makor Rishon" which is a weekly right-wing newspaper which is of medium quality, but I ask right-wingers why they continue to buy Yediot and Ma'ariv. (Yediot was originally right-wing and Maariv center/right). The answers are mostly inertia (they bought them years ago when they liked their political line and got used to them), or there are far more advertisements in them, or they have a better sports page or a better financial section. Thus, the conclusion is that the political alignment is not important to these readers. As I pointed out, most Israelis are center/right in orientation which means they don't vote the way the media establishment tells them to vote.
The Jews are still a stiff-necked people.

I love these guys who wrap themselves in heroic names ("Bar-Kochba," "Son of a star", who is said among other things to have been viewed by some contemporaries as the Messiah) or names resonant with allusion to theology or legend ("Emet18," aka "God's Truth," or possibly referring to the letters appearing on the forehead of the Golem).

It seems almost a predictor of purblind arrogance.

May I suggest instead "Ignorance is strength?"

Listen, virtually all elected Democrats favored, and voted for, our removal of Sadaam by force.

Now everyone is tired of the war, expecially the troops. Nonetheless, they don't want to wave the white flag.

Quit using the difficulty of war for political advantage!

Now let's stop fighting our own President and win this damn war! OK?

Patriotism isn't a sign of intellectual weakness.

So, you are in fact a right wing troll?

That bar_kochba132 leans right is obvious. But while I fundamentally disagree with many of bar_kochba132's opinions on issues raised here, I like to think that we can meet his arguments head on without the troll accusations.  If mentioning antisemitism is generally approached as attempting to "stifle debate," is that not exactly what we do by throwing the troll thing around?

This excerpt from the executive summary of a policy analysis project is the work of Sheldon Richman, senior editor at the Cato Institute. The summary includes a brief history of American policy in the Middle East from WWII to date. In the footnotes Richman acknowledges an intellectual debt owed to Dr Noam Chomsky, Leonard P. Liggio, Rabbi Elmer Berger, and his grandfather, Samuel Richman. I recommend it be read in full.

By any standard, the relationship between the United States and Israel has been extraordinary. Criticism of any other American ally does not cost a person an elective or appointed position in government. Criticism of any other American ally does not bring accusations of being a hater of the dominant religious group in the allied nation. Both of those things happen, almost routinely, to anyone who criticizes Israel. Elected U.S. officials who have cast a single vote against an Israeli position have seen major opposition mounted by Israel's American supporters. The rare journalist who points out unattractive facts about Israeli conduct is likely to be smeared as an anti-Semite. The chilling effect that has had on public debate is too obvious to need elaboration.(230)

As for the standard rejoinder that Israel has been the staunchest U.S. ally in the Middle East, one is reminded of the one-liner about lawyers: if we didn't have them, we wouldn't need them. The U.S. relationship with Israel produces the very adversaries that are pointed to as justifying the close relationship.
We have allowed our leaders to violate George Washington's sage advice, and it has cost us dearly. For Washington, "the Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible."(231) We must rediscover the wisdom of our first president.

After the first full-blown U.S. imperialist adventure, the Spanish-American War, classical liberal William Graham Sumner, surveying the results, concluded that, despite its military victory, the United States in fact had been conquered by Spain. By that he meant that the traditions of the American republic were being undermined by the imperial values of the Spanish Empire.

The question of imperialism is the question of whether we are going to give the lie to the origin of our own national existence by establishing a colonial system of the old Spanish type, even if we have to sacrifice our existing civil and political system to do it. I submit that it is a strange incongruity to utter grand platitudes about the blessings of liberty, etc., . . . and to begin by . . . throwing the Constitution into the gutter here at home. If you take away the Constitution, what is American liberty and all the rest? Nothing but a lot of phrases.(232)

Sumner feared for the future, as we all must.
Now what will hasten the day when our present advantages will wear out and when we shall come down to the conditions of the older and densely populated nations? The answer is: war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditure, political jobbery--in a word, imperialism. In the old days the democratic masses of this country, who knew little about our modern doctrines of social philosophy, had a sound instinct on these matters, and it is no small ground of political disquietude to see it decline. They resisted every appeal to their vanity in the way of pomp and glory which they knew must be paid for. They dreaded a public debt and a standing army.(233)

As we witness the jingoistic celebrations of the U.S. military's victory over Iraq, it is clear that great energy must now be directed to the revival of that "sound instinct." It is a matter of life and death--literally.

My opinion concerning attorneys/lawyers is that they are very much a mixed blessing, indispensable to a decent democratic system and a damned nuance in the wrong hands or if possessed of bad character.

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.

William James