What do they want from the army?
By Gideon Samet
Haaretz, March 10, 2004
The heads of the army and Shin Bet can be blamed for behaving recently like generals in a banana republic. They spoke privately and publicly, practically in the city square, against their elected boss's intentions of quitting Gaza. The chief of staff and head of the Shin Bet made mincemeat of the plan while Sharon sweated trying to sell it to the Americans. Avi Dichter even spoke out about it in the American capital, where he was invited to what appeared to be an interrogation about the mysteries of the plan. Indeed, both he and Moshe Ya'alon could have been accused of being banana republic generals, if not for the fact that Sharon was the biggest of them all - he was the one who dealt with the most sensitive issues on the agenda as if it was a part-time job.
As of now, it is impossible to know what he means exactly. As is his wont, he has surrounded himself with the thick steam of leaks, declarations and their contradictions, feints and other moves meant to confuse the enemy. The enemy is the right wing, which threatens to upset the coalition if he evacuates the 17 settlements in Gaza (how? when?) or all of the Strip and more settlements - nobody knows how many - in the West Bank. His bureau chief has gone, like a yo-yo, to Washington and back nearly 20 times, but the confusion there has only intensified. Meanwhile, the army is conducting an aggressive, violent policy in the territories. There are good reasons to criticize it for being too quick on the trigger and for the way it conducts its pursuits and assassinations. Often the army's tail appears to wag the government. Sometimes its behavior appears to be a silent putsch.
But now, after Sharon continues to add the crime of confusion to the sin of deliberate vagueness, even the most vehement critics of the security establishment's management of the campaign against terror need to divert their complaints about the army and Shin Bet to the commander in chief. Sharon, of course, was not privy to the general staff's considerations in its failed attempts to restrain the ferment in the territories. He encouraged them. But without political movement, in the framework of an arrangement, he prepared the groundwork for the ugly struggle between him and the security establishment's leadership. Gaza and the West Bank are sprayed with IDF fire, strangled by a fence that the hasty prime minister was forced to destroy parts of and rebuild. The territories did not calm down because of assassinations and raids. It only turned stormier, among other reasons because of a crude policy of repression. With uncertainty like that, it is the chief of staff's right to ask where Sharon is leading the army and the country. That's what chief of staff Barak did about the Oslo plan to Rabin, when he called Oslo "Swiss cheese, full of holes." Lipkin-Shahak did the same to Netanyahu, as did Mofaz to Barak.
The blurry face of the virtual Sharon plan does not enable the general staff to keep their criticism locked up in their stomachs. Even a fly on the wall in his office wouldn't understand it. The plan appears to be wandering in the fog of time. Sharon, who knows how to act very quickly when he wants, speaks of executing the plan after the elections in the United States. Thus, he is forcing the army to prepare as best as it can for a vacuum in time, without letting it know when the time period will end, or if it will end with the actual execution of the plan or nonplan. Sharon the general was one of the pioneers of the challenge to the elected leadership. He now corrupts the decision-making process in a way that drags the security echelon, practically with no recourse, to behave in a similar manner toward him.
Summoning Ya'alon for a clarification meeting is somewhere between ridiculous and chilling. The real clarification that has long been needed is the prime minister's clarification to the army brass of what the hell the leader wants exactly. As happens quite often in political careers, just as Sharon sinks into his political nadir, his behavior has become more dictatorial. He is afraid of what he has created and is losing his ability to decide, confusing the entire world. But, at the same time, he appears to be an aggressive, isolated man who demands full obedience without explaining himself.
His relationship with the general staff is just more destruction that he has wreaked. The army can obey orders only when it understands them. The biggest problem is that the prime minister is cooking up this stew not only for the IDF. He is seriously harming the interests of the country, whose leadership he was twice given for safe keeping.
