Pen Ultimate / Hail to the (mis)chief

I have to admit I was pretty miffed. Another job was up for grabs, and they didn't even think about approaching me with an offer. After all, I did finish my basic training with distinction and even got my first stripes as an NCO. Admittedly, that was over 30 years ago, but that just means I cannot be implicated for what happened in the last war and in the years preceding it.

True, I don't have much experience in matters military, but come on, a chief of staff doesn't do any fighting, does he? I too would not have grasped during the first hours of combat that this would be a full-scale war. I too would have thought the Israel Air Force alone could do the trick. So I'm not much worse than Dan Halutz, am I?

Had the job been offered to me, I would have said no, so there would have been no harm in asking me just to make me feel good. I would have said no for two reasons. Even I am smart enough to decline a job that anyone would have thought that I can do. Also, I don't go for jobs with such a slim chance of success.

Anyway, I don't approve of how they go about appointing the new chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces, with endless meetings and deliberations. I realize you can't exactly publish an ad that reads: "Wanted: CEO for a huge company in dire straits, in a very competitive market. Budget unlimited, board of directors unbearable, terms of contract extremely flexible, no golden or other parachute." But why not do it TV-style and produce a show called "Israeli Army Idol," with retired generals as the jury awarding points to hopefuls and the viewers voting by text messages? Do you think the winner of such a program would fare any worse - or better - than any other high-ranking officer?

Even without offering me the job they still could have asked for my advice. As they did not, I offer here, for free, a reflection, an anecdote and a quote that can serve as food for thought for the chief-of-staff-to-be, until he is relived of his duties, whether ignominiously or not.

There was much talk about Halutz's resignation setting off a domino effect that would eventually result in toppling the defense minister and the prime minister. Evidently the speakers did not know much about dominoes. One domino bringing down two more is a pretty poor show. You get a real domino effect when one of them precipitates the fall of hundreds of dominoes. That is what head Hezbollah honcho Hassan Nasrallah probably meant when he said on Al-Manar that in the IDF, "soldiers don't trust officers, officers don't trust the command, the command doesn't trust the political leadership and the people do not trust the government." Nasrallah should have been summoned to testify before the Winograd Commission that is investigating the war's failures, or even be appointed as one of its members.

When Winston Churchill appointed Lt.-Gen. Bernard Montgomery commander of the Eighth Army, in October 1942, Montgomery was traveling to the Western Desert by train in order to confront the "desert fox," German General Erwin Rommel. The story is that Montgomery was musing about the hardships of a military career to his aide-de-camp, saying: "You enlist and train, and sweat and earn your stripes and spend years in the trenches, and you become a colonel, and then a lieutenant general, and then you are finally appointed a commander of an army, and then one day, one battle and you lose it all."

"Why be so bleak?" wondered the aide-de-camp.

"Oh, I was not talking about myself," Montgomery said. "I meant Rommel."

Who could have judged Dan Halutz's worth as chief of staff without one superfluous - for him more than for anyone else - war?

In the seventh scene of Act II of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," Pompey hosts the three joint rulers of Rome (and of the whole world) on his boat, moored in the harbor. One of his lieutenants, Menas, tells him: "I am the man / Will give thee all the world." When pressed by his master for details, he says: "These three world-sharers, these competitors, / Are in thy vessel: let me cut the cable; / And, when we are put off, fall to their throats: / All there is thine."

Pompey answers: "Ah, this thou shouldst have done, / And not have spoke on't! In me 'tis villany; / In thee't had been good service. Thou must know, / 'Tis not my profit that does lead mine honor; / Mine honor, it. Repent that e'er thy tongue / Hath so betray'd thine act: Being done unknown / I should have found it afterwards well done; / But must condemn it now."

There is no comparison, of course, between our democratic Israel and ancient Rome. Our military leaders do not propose policies (they just pursue them, here and there) and our politicians would not dream of prodding them to act on their own without acknowledgment, if only because the political leaders do not really know where their - and our - profit lies. But they do guard their honor jealously. The newly appointed chief of staff should remember that.