Ever get the feeling that the fix is in, or that people in power stick together no matter what, or that everything is rigged?


Do you get the sense that you've seen this movie before, or that for the first time, a man, Ehud Olmert, was given just enough rope not to hang himself?


How about the sensation that the Olmerts will always be among us as prime ministers of Israel?

The country isn't big enough to contain both Olmert and the rest of Israel. So the rest of Israel has to go.



Really, don't go by me, so proceed with caution. I still don't believe the Warren Commission; that Oswald acted alone.


I've been reading highlights of these Winograd findings as one writer to another, always in admiration. How is it possible to spend so many words to say nothing? Not everyone can do this. This is textbook for diplomacy, the art of insulting everyone while insulting no one, the skill of making no one happy and everyone happy.


The winner in this extravaganza is Olmert, who escaped with a rebuke so broad that even the milkman is as much to blame for the Lebanon fiasco. The gist of it all, from my reading, is that the country isn't big enough to contain both Olmert and the rest of Israel. So the rest of Israel has to go. Olmert stays.


The Winograd Report (breathlessly awaited and issued days ago by a team of commissioners headed by retired Judge Eliyahu Winograd) was supposed to be the final word on what went wrong in Israel's Lebanon-Hizbullah War of 2006; and it turns out, after 500 pages, that everything went wrong, but nobody is to blame.


Or rather - in a doozey of jabberwocky - everybody is to blame. Conclusion: "Mistakes were made." What a marvelous use of the passive voice. Kafka would admire the eloquent absurdity. Orwell would praise the parsing double-speak. But they were writing fiction!


The passive voice is language's safety valve. Nobody gets hurt - certainly not Olmert. Nothing sticks to this guy.


The commissioners immediately disqualified themselves when they wrote this: Judgments "should not be made with hindsight."


Okay, so, everybody goes home, right? Isn't "hindsight" the very task of an inquiry? Why bother, then, to proceed if you've talked yourself out of a job?


But proceed they did. Passive voice? Try this: "We found grave faults and failings both in the political and military echelons in the lack of thinking and strategic planning."


We needed a commission to tell us this? We knew it going in.


"Political echelons." Who might that be? No name given. That would be too much like the game of tag, and no one is "it" in this report, which was authorized by Olmert - and it would be so rude and impolite to go pointing fingers at the same man who did the hiring. This would be bad business and certainly bad politics.


(After a preliminary finding of shoddy leadership, which led to the resignation of Minister of Defense Amir Peretz and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz, Olmert saw the writing on the wall, if not in the actual report, and finagled his friends among the High Court to fix it so that he could be blamed only by inference and guesswork.)


Olmert himself pleasures us with the evasiveness of passive-speak. To coincide with the report, Olmert said: "Were mistakes made? Yes. Were there failures? Certainly." I do admire this "mistakes were made" prose, even when presented as a question. This lets everyone off the hook. Terrific writing - too bad about the casualties.


We know that too many Israeli soldiers died gallantly, but in confusion, especially in the final days of the war.


Yes, sir, there were failures. Did the butler do it?


Israel-bashers, even here in America, who are glad and gloating about Israel's misfortune in Lebanon - think again. Israel is the frontier for our war on Islamic terror.


A tie is as good as a win, especially if you're the incumbent.



Their wins are our wins. Their losses are our losses.


Olmert will not resign. In fact, his fans insist that he's owed an apology. After all, the ruling did not absolve him, but it did not blame him, either, by name.


That's good enough, right? In Israeli politics, a tie is as good as a win, especially if you're the incumbent.


Olmert does take "full responsibility" for what went wrong, but he will not resign, which means he does not take full responsibility. Now, after this report, there's no one around to fire him. People who mess up in their 9-to-5 jobs get fired, even for tardiness. Losing a war, losing the lives of heroic Jewish soldiers in one botched operation after another - that counts as messing up pretty bad.


Maybe the next commission will use the active voice; like, "Olmert must go!"


Jack Engelhard's latest novel, the newsroom thriller The Bathsheba Deadline, is now ready in paperback and available from Amazon.com and other outlets. Engelhard wrote the international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal, which was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore.