The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has a blow by blow account of Israel’s diplomatic moves. But all you really need to know comes from the first line…

The political goals of Operation Cast Lead were not formulated until a few days after the fighting in Gaza began.

If the word “war crime” had any real meaning, the above would be grounds for prosecution. It reveals a criminal level of incompetence that would be punished by death if Israel was not so much stronger than Hamas. War is always a horrible thing, but to engage in it without even knowing what you want to accomplish is no better then random killing.

It would be one thing if the operation had been a fast reaction to a sudden attack. But Israel endured the increased rocket attacks for weeks without doing anything. For the political leadership to have no idea of what they wanted to accomplish after waiting all that time is inexcusable.

Edit: A different article from Haaretz has the military perspective….

An officer who was in contact with the political echelon during the Gaza operation says he now understands what went so horribly wrong in Lebanon: “It was weird, to put it mildly.” Another senior figure adds: “It is difficult to conduct a war when an election campaign is under way. Two of the ‘kitchen cabinet’ members were interested in the operation’s implications for the elections. The third [Olmert] was busy with the question of what it would all mean for his legacy.”

From Spiegel…..

Roughly 150 politicians, ex-military officials, journalists and powerful demimonde characters stand accused. State prosecutors suspect the group of being behind plans to overthrow the government. As members of a secret network, called Ergenekon, named after a mythical valley celebrated by ancient Turks, the group allegedly planned to assassinate members of the country’s political and cultural elite.

The idea, as prosecutors see it, was for Turkey to sink into fear and chaos before being rescued by an army coup that would reinstate peace and order. The armed forces, after all, see themselves as protectors of the nation they inherited from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern-day Turkey. The Turkish military has staged coups three times in the country’s recent past: in 1969, 1971 and 1980.

That is your thriller from Turkey. If tearjerkers are more to your taste, The Belmont Club has a story about a 1600 old Christian monastery in Turkey that is under threat from rising Islamic fervor in Turkey.

Holland’s national suicide note by Ezra Levant is this week’s rant of the week.

From Maureen Dowd…..

Instead they have Gillibrand, who voted against the Wall Street — as in New York — bailout bill. And who introduced a bill to balance the federal budget annually, which suggests she would oppose the $825 billion in deficit spending that President Obama proposes to rescue the country, not least New York.

Actually, this is all meant to be insults and not praise. And sadly, it is not true. I doubt that Gillibrand will have the guts to oppose anything Obama does, regardless of what she has said she believes in the past. Still if this is the best dirt that Maureen Dowd can throw at Gillibrand, it speaks pretty well of her.

From the Times…

Western powers believe that Iran is running short of the raw material required to manufacture nuclear weapons, triggering an international race to prevent it from importing more, The Times has learnt.

Diplomatic sources believe that Iran’s stockpile of yellow cake uranium, produced from uranium ore, is close to running out and could be exhausted within months. Countries including Britain, the US, France and Germany have started intensive diplomatic efforts to dissuade major uranium producers from selling to Iran.

Before Christmas, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent out a confidential request for its diplomats in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Brazil, all major uranium producers, to lobby governments not to sell uranium products, specifically yellow cake, to Iran.

Iran’s stock of yellow cake, acquired from South Africa in the 1970s under the Shah’s original civil nuclear power programme, has almost run out. Iran is developing its own uranium mines, but does not have enough ore to support a sustained nuclear programme.

Perhaps the western nations will be able to keep yellow cake out of Iran long enough for the nation to collapse. But otherwise trying to enforce a blockade is doomed to failure.

One of the biggest problems in this case is that acquiring atomic weapons is in Iran’s national interests even apart from religious/ideological questions. Given their strategic location, the nation would be transformed into one of the big cheeses of the world the instant they got the bomb. And most nations feel that becoming big cheeses is in their national interests. Thus, temporary setbacks are unlikely to stop Iran from marching toward the bomb even if there is a change in political leadership.

By contrast, the bomb was relatively unimportant to South Africa because nobody in the world really cares if anything in Africa gets blown up. Thus, having the bomb did not increase South Africa’s power or prestige by any appreciable amount.

From the Washington Times….

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday.

The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria.

He said authorities in the first week of January intercepted an urgent communication between the leadership of al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. The communication suggested that an area sealed to prevent leakage of a biological or chemical substance had been breached, according to the official.