Jew Lawyers Scheme Against Their Country!

A primary inadequacy of Bush's war leadership is his failure to articulate the nature of the struggle. (That failure may well be rooted in a failure to conceptualize the nature of the struggle, which in turn may well be rooted in his mental laziness. But I digress.)

The Israelis would never be that naive, right? Wrong, according to the JPost Pasionara (caveat lector! although her current column is plausible, she often gets carried away):

While the soldiers and general public view the (Hizbullah) war as a failure, one sector of Israeli society sees the war as a great triumph. For Israel's legal establishment, the war was a great victory. It was a war in which its members asserted their dominance over Israel's political and military leadership.
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Mazuz effectively asserted that international law prevents victory in war when he argued, "The laws of war, or international humanitarian law doesn't concern itself with relations between two states, but with the relationship between civilians and states. That is, it places the two warring states on one side of the divide and the citizens of the two states on the other side, and the goal of international law is to protect the citizens of the two states and to say: You're big kids. You want to fight, go fight, you have rules… and the rules aim to minimize as much as possible the consequences of the war."

By so arguing, Mazuz demonstrated that he views the goals of legal advisers as different from and indeed in conflict with the goals of political and military leaders. The goal of the latter is to defend the country from its enemies and to win wars. As Mazuz and Mandelblit see things, lawyers are tasked with protecting enemy populations from the IDF.

The distinctive way that legal advisers define their responsibilities has had an enormous impact on the military and the political leadership of the country. It is not that the internalization of the lawyers' approach has made the IDF or the Israeli government any more moral or law abiding than they have always been...

What has changed is the focus of military and political leaders in conducting war. Before the advent of legal dominance, commanders and political leaders devoted themselves to winning wars. Today they concentrate their efforts on avoiding criminal indictments.

(HT: Instapundit and National Review) This brings to mind the Internet rumor that during the overthrow of the Taliban, a Predator-drone operator had Mullah Omar targeted, but the commander (Franks?) insisted on checking with a military lawyer before giving permission to fire. By the time the lawyer okayed the attack, Omar was gone.