More Israeli mediocrity at the top

If you want to see yet another facet of the face of Israel’s pathetic weakness, catch Charlie Rose’s interview tonight with Tsipi Livni, the 48 year old (though she looks like a callow 40) female foreign minister and vice prime minister. She drones on and on, immersed, or, rather, it seems, lost, in a world of endless negotiation-speak: if this aspect of the cease-fire works out, then maybe such-and-such might happen, and then maybe this may work out, and then maybe that might happen. It’s all bureaucratic process, no vision, no overall concept of the ominous shape of current events and of the place of her country in the world. Livni, like Ehud Olmert, comes from an Likud background, yet seems indistinguishable from, say, the eternally droning Laborite Shimon Peres, who shares a similar belief in endless process. And, embarrassingly, she keeps sniffling audibly while she speaks, as though she had never heard of the use of kleenex. Can someone who doesn’t even know to blow her nose lead the foreign relations of a country, let alone a country at war? For Israel to have at this fateful moment in her history such an unimpressive person as her foreign minister seems almost as bad an omen as her having as prime minister a morally exhausted man who said only a year ago: “We’re tired of fighting; tired of being courageous; tired of being victorious…” Which seems like an appropriate point at which to quote Dylan:

You’re an idiot, babe,
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

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Reader N. writes:

Viewing as much of Charlie “Mush” Rose as could be tolerated, I got to behold the foreign minister of Israel. She looked like, oh, a librarian or perhaps a grammar-school teacher of adequate intellect. The interview thus is another datapoint in a philosophical point that I’ve made here and there in the last 15 or so years:

“The decline of standards has many implications”

In this case, a “split the difference and make a deal” attorney somehow winds up in charge of a war, and botches the job. His foreign minister looks better suited to running a playground than foreign policy, and the results show this. Israel has a much smaller margin for error than Western countries, yes, but their situation is ours small…. I hope we do not see Rice interviewed by Charlie Rose any time soon.

Here is a follow-up on the gynocracy and the new style of Western leadership.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 16, 2006 11:07 PM | Send