Olmert under fire

Israeli PM Olmert takes it on the chin from Charles Krauthammer in today's WaPo. The charge? By relying heavily on airpower, he's blowing the chance to defang Hezbollah. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Israeli PM Olmert takes it on the chin from Charles Krauthammer in today's WaPo. The charge? By relying heavily on airpower, he's blowing the chance to defang Hezbollah.

Israeli PM Olmert takes it on the chin from Charles Krauthammer in today's WaPo. The charge? By relying heavily on airpower, he's blowing the chance to defang Hezbollah.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later. He has allowed his war cabinet meetings to become fully public through the kind of leaks no serious wartime leadership would ever countenance. 

As interesting as the military analysis is Krauthammer's certainty that Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia privately lobbied for Israel to slap down Hezbollah and thus restrain Iran's regional ambitions. It's a helpful reminder that the simplistic public displays of righteous anger at Israel mask a far more complicated reality.    

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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