Credit also Due

Submitted by David (United States), Sep 16, 2022 at 21:43

Credit is also due to Dr. Yuval Steinitz, a member of the Likud party who recently retired from politics, and who, in his capacity in the relevant defense committees in the Knesset, pointed out that satellite photographs from Syria that had been given to him from the relevant authorities, were displaying evidence of the construction of a nuclear reactor. Said authorities refused to believe him, and he repeatedly insisted they were wrong, ultimately causing them to reassess and realize he was correct.

Yes, I agree with the author that the one and only credit to Olmert is the strike on the Syrian reactor. He deserves tremendous infamy for helping to conduct a campaign in 2011, however, to turn public opinion in the USA against the efforts of then PM Netanyahu to conduct a similar strike against the Iranian nuclear program, when it would have been much more feasible than today. Olmert's close friend, the late Mossad Director Meir Dagan, had the chutpah and frankly, was sufficiently traitorious, to leak government intentions to strike the Iranian program, to Langley.

And following Mr. Dagan's retirement, he joined the disgraced former PM Olmert, in a media campaign suggesting that Israel needed to trust Obama, that Obama surely was going to act against Iran. I remember that it was just a month or two ago that the ignominious Mr. Olmert, for whom no ignominy is apparently too low, gave a perfunctory interview to Newsmax proclaiming that Biden would do the same. But not even Olmert could sustain this clown act with much enthuasiasm this time. A week ago he returned to his longstanding act of, it seems to me, waging a psychological war on the Israeli public, (in keeping with his infamous adage during his premiership that "we're tired of winning"), this time to the effect that "we can no longer stop Iran from going nuclear." Huh. So Biden isn't going to act after all? And the infamous words of Meir Dagan, "we must not act until the knife is at our throat" didn't turn out to be so wise?

Any credit Olmert deserves for the strike on the Syrian reactor is more than outweighed by his perfidious efforts to stop his successor from doing what was necessary against Iran, early on, when the American public was overwhelmingly supportive and the mission was much more within the capacities of the IDF than today.

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