Syria, as the US pressure for regime change eases

The Syrian analyst, professor, publisher, and general man-about-town Sami Moubayed had a very informative article in Asia Times Online two days ago, assessing the generally very positive recent developments in the US-Syrian relationship.
After detailing several positive steps that each side has taken since January 20, he concludes thus:

    Syrians want to be seen as problem-solvers rather than problem-seekers. They want to show the world – mainly the US – that just as they can deliver on Palestine, they can deliver in Iraq and Lebanon. Syria has said these words in every possible language, and it will continue to show the West that it can deliver in the Middle East. For years the Syrians have been saying that reforms cannot be made unless there are no regional and international threats threatening Damascus.
    When regime-change was on the table in Washington back in 2005, reforms were slowed down on more than one level, politics included. The Syrians always said that reforms cannot be made only because they are a requirement of Europe or the US; they cannot be parachuted on the Syrians. If Syria feels comfortable, as it does now, then the reform process might be given a facelift.
    Last week, speaking at the Arab Writers Union Congress in Damascus, Haitham Satayhi, member of the Regional Command of the ruling Ba’ath Party, announced that there were instructions to improve relations between the security services and Syrian citizens. There was a determination to combat corruption and “achieve more democracy in the political domain”.
    Satayhi added that a special committee has been set up to study and prepare a political party law in Syria to allow for more political pluralism, as promised by the Ba’ath Party Congress of 2005. If anything, this shows that Syria feels very confident, and is not worried, as many in the Western press had speculated, about the international tribunal that will begin on March 1 for the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafiq al-Harriri.
    Back in 2005, the United Nations prosecutor Detlev Melhis had authored a fascinating report, highly dramatized as the Syrians saw it, to implicate senior Syrian officials in the murder of Syria’s former number one ally in Beirut. Back then the Syrians were worried that the probe was being politicized by the US and Europe, to break Syria. That fear has now become history.
    When asked about the issue during his Guardian interview, Assad said that he was unconcerned with the tribunal, fully certain of Syria’s innocence. More reforms and a new relationship with the US mean that 2009 will finally be a year in Syria’s favor in the Middle East.

Well, I’m not sure a “facelift” is exactly what Syria’s reform process needs. Maybe something a bit more substantial and deep-rooted is needed and is, in fact, now tentatively getting underway?
But regardless of that possibly infelicitous choice of words, the argument Moubayed makes is an interesting and significant one. Namely, that when a powerful foreign government like the US is openly or covertly threatening regime change, that not surprisingly stimulates a circling of the wagons in the country targeted along with a rise in practices that are actually anti-democratic. And conversely, when those pressures for regime change are taken “off the table”, then normal political processes can start to resume.

The rule of what?

I had an interesting morning. First, it being a normal workday here in Ramallah, I went to conduct a 90-minute interview with two members of the Palestinian Legislative Council which was, you will recall, elected in a free and fair election here in January 2006.
One of these men had recently been released from an Israeli prison where he’s spent nearly the whole of the last 32 months. The only accusation against him was that he’s a member of a parliamentary bloc, ‘Change and Reform’, that, though it ran in the election quite legitimately– and indeed, with the express authorization of both Israel and the US– was suddenly deemed by Israel, five months later, to have an affiliation with “terrorists.”
Back in June-July 2006 a large number of PLC members were rounded up by the Israeli occupation forces. That was shortly after militants in Gaza captured the young, on-active-duty Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit as a POW; and just about everyone said at the time that the PLC members had been captured as additional “bargaining chips” against Shalit’s release. (That, though the taking of hostages for the any purpose, including that of using them as bargaining chips, is quite prohibited by international law.)
41 of those PLC hostages still remain in prison, including PLC speaker Aziz al-Dweik. The PLC, which has 132 members, has been unable to muster a quorum since June 2006 and thus has done no business for this entire time. (George Bush, quite shamefully, uttered not a word of protest against Israel’s cruel and expressly anti-democratic move. Will President Obama change that position? I hope so.)
Both PA president Mahmoud Abbas, whose own elected term ran out on January 9, and the man elected by parliament to be PM back in March 2006, Ismail Haniyeh, took upon themselves the right to name an “emergency government.” The Abbas-designated government, which is based here in Ramallah, has been given very generous financial support (and weapons and many forms of training) by the US-led west, which has meantime worked consistently– ever since January 2006– to support Israel’s extremely harsh, and in many cases actually lethal, siege of Gaza.
Those policies were just two prongs of a wide US-Israeli campaign to oust the duly elected Haniyeh government completely.
So in my meeting with the two parliamentarians here this morning, Mahmoud Musleh, MP, who was the one recently released from jail told me about some of the forms of mistreatment and humiliation to which he and his fellow parliamentarians were subjected while there. He, like several of the others, is a man in his late sixties. On thing he noted was that each time any of the detainees is taken to an Israeli court for a hearing, they are subjected to two days of demeaning and sometimes painful treatment on their way there and back.
More from that interview, later.
… A couple of hours later I had a chance meeting with an American woman who’s here on a two-year contract with USAID to work on “rule of law” issues with the Abbas/Fayyad government’s “Ministry of Justice.”
I was interested to find out what it is, exactly, that she does. The old rubric “capacity building” doesn’t tell you very much, does it? She talked a bit about what she had done on previous contracts, in Bosnia and Afghanistan. One of the things she mentioned specifically was the establishment of regulations for judgment enforcement. This is especially important, she explained, for foreign investors– otherwise, what are their contracts worth, at all?
She said she doesn’t really “do” human rights. But even in what she does do, she said she had run into considerable problems, because any governmental regulations that are drafted in a “rule of aw” situation need to be drafted in line with the enabling legislation— and the legislature hasn’t been able to conduct any business since June 2006…
This professional dilemma of hers is a great illustration of the “cart before the horse” or “Alice Through the Looking Glass” nature of many of the “aid” interventions that western governments have been running in occupied Palestine ever since Oslo. (And that is 16 years now… )
The basic issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty have not even come close to being resolved here yet! Israel’s occupation forces surround this city–and they send snatch-squads in to capture or sometimes kill suspects here with impunity, several times a month. Meantime, all around the extensive fence-and-wall system that surrounds Ramallah, the Israeli settlements expand, expand, expand, gobbling up yet more Palestinian land.
And yet, though the occupation continues– here, as in Gaza– western governments are building “Palestinian” court-houses and prisons and giving numerous “trainings” and other interventions to “teach” these obviously somewhat backward Palestinians (irony alert) all about the “rule of law.”
As if the Palestinians didn’t actually in an earlier era establish nearly all the state administrations for all the little emirates/statelets/former “Trucial states” down in the Gulf– including their judicial systems, penal systems, etc.
And these presumably comfortably compensated US contract workers continue to do this, while day-in-day-out strong US ally Israel gives the Palestinians the exactly opposite lesson about the ascendancy of raw might over any concept of domestic or international law.
Talk about Looking Glass Land.
The rule of law, here in the West Bank and Gaza. Now wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

Black is Black, I Want My Barry Back

NOTE: Helena and I have been thinking quite independently along similar lines, which is not an isolated occurrence.
Approximately half of the CIA budget is reportedly devoted not to intelligence but to operations, such as targeted assassinations. New technology allows the US to use un-manned aircraft to kill people whever and wherever the President directs.
On February 13, 2009 Senator Diane Feinstein reported that the CIA has been flying Predator aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles from a Pakistan base.

    Reporting from Washington — A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States.

    Continue reading “Black is Black, I Want My Barry Back”

US and Israel: End ‘Manhunting’ now!

Pres. Obama has apparently ‘seen the light’ regarding one of the anti-humane and illegal practices instituted by the Bush administration in its “Global war on terror”: the use of Guantanamo Bay as an extra-legal grey zone in which the US can carry out major human rights infractions at will. But he has shown no readiness yet to end the US’s indefinite detentions of alleged ‘enemy combatants’ in Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. And elsewhere in Afghanistan and even Pakistan, the US military has even under Obama, stepped up its recourse to extra-judicial executions of alleged “bad guys.”
Meantime, Israel continues to threaten the lives of numerous leaders and activists in movements that oppose it.
All these manhunting operations– that is, lethal operations conducted against people who are not currently engaged in armed hostilities— are quite illegal under international law. For this reason alone, they need to be ended, just as surely as the Guantanamo detention camp needs to be closed.
In addition, these manhunting operations, a.k.a. extra-judicial executions, or just plain assassinations, have a number of practical effects that are extremely detrimental to international peace and security:

    1. They rain down death and injury on large numbers of people who are in the vicinity of the identified targets.
    2. Because they rely on secret information that is never exposed to the light of day or tested in a fair courtroom, they run the real risk of misidentification of targets and of malicious false accusations being acted upon.
    3. Because of the breadth of the casualties, damage, and human displacement that ensue from these operations they frequently serve to strengthen the determination of targeted constituencies– and other constituencies that may be far afield– to become even harder-line and more violent.
    4. Plus, because these operations frequently target political leaders, they can considerably complicate and delay the politics and logistics of conflict termination.

The NYT reports today that

    With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

The “attacking” in these cases and in many others in Pakistan and Afghanistan is carried out by “killer” drone aircraft whose weapons are controlled, I assume, from places very far away, using recon imaging provided by the drones and matching it against “information” or “accusations” that have been gathered from human sources.
The NYT writers report that these new CIA targets are “training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud”, who has been accused of having organized the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007. They note that Pres. G.W. Bush, “included Mr. Mehsud’s name in a classified list of militant leaders whom the C.I.A. and American commandos were authorized to capture or kill.”
There are many tangled legal, jurisdictional, and diplomatic issues involved here. The Pakistani government denies any foreknowledge of or involvement in the US killer-drone strikes– though Sen. Dianne Feinstein [corrected from ‘Pelosi’. HT Mick] recently let slip that at least some of the US’s lethal “manhunting” ops inside Pakistan have been run out of Pakistani military bases and not, as people had previously thought was always the case, from US bases in Afghanistan.
The idea of the US waging this clandestine war inside Pakistan is very worrying, at all levels, regardless of whether Washington has the complicity of some portions of the Pakistani government or not. (This is the case even though Pakistan’s people face many extremely complex issues of internal conflict and atrocious governance… And even though accusations have come from credible sources that some parts of the country provide safe havens for Al-Qaeda or other terror networks with violent global ambitions. But why should the US arrogate to itself any “right” to act in response to these challenges unilaterally and using lethal violence? What if all the world’s nations felt they had a similar “right” to act like this wherever and whenever they pleased?)
But in this post, I want to focus on that deadly concept of my government having a “classified list of militant leaders whom the C.I.A. and American commandos [are] authorized to capture or kill.”
Not, you’ll note, people whom US security forces might be particularly interested in “capturing or killing” if they should discover them taking part in hostilities against the US… But people whom US operatives are authorized– or let’s say, even more actively encouraged– to hunt down and go out and “capture or kill” even if they’re sitting down for a bowl of cornflakes on a sunny day with their family all around.
Of course, the use of killer drones completely gives the lie to the “capture or– ” part of the authorization.
Were the drones programed to swoop down from the skies, grab Baitullah Mehsud by the scruff of his neck, and haul him back to Bagram air base for interrogation? I think not.
This “capture or ill” slogan is in 99% of the cases only a euphemism for flat-out, lethal manhunting, and should be recognized as such. The intention in the vast majority of these still ongoing US and Israeli operations is not to capture. It is to kill. This is what makes it completely unacceptable under any concept of international law.
(By the way, that Wikipedia page linked to there gives an interesting survey of the use of manhunting by various western militaries over the decades, and has some very informative source notes.)
Another aspect of this that should be a cause for huge concern is the completely secret nature of all the alleged “evidence” on the basis of which these assassination classifications/decisions are made.
As in so many of the extra-legal practices the US military developed– under Pres. Bush and before him under Pres. Clinton– the practice of lethal manhunting was pioneered in recent times by the Israelis. They have assassinated literally scores of Palestinians since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000– and many scores over the decades before that, too.
Recall the incredibly sympathetic piece of writing about the Israeli commanders who make these decisions that the WaPo published back in 2006. Writer Laura Blumenfeld never once asked the really tough questions about the nature of the “evidence” against the targeted men, and why Israel, with all its many huge capabilities on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank didn’t simply arrest these men and bring them to trial through legal means instead of hunting them down from the air like fish in a barrel… You’d think she’d never read a book or seen a movie about the way the Nazis behaved in the Warsaw Ghetto…
If you look down the right sidebar of this page on Btselem’s website you can learn that in each of the years 2001-2004, the number of targeted killings the IOF carried out in the occupied Palestinian territories was between 37 and 44. In each of 2005 and 2006 it was 22.
This is obscene.
Israel is the power that has been in military occupation of these lands since 1967 and is responsible for the welfare of all their residents. Systematically targeting some of these residents for assassination– on the basis of always secret “information”– is completely illegal.
During the most recent Gaza war, the policy of assassinations, which had fallen into disuse when the 6-month ceasefire started last June, was resumed again.
Both countries should end this vile practice.

US war effort in Afghanistan becoming dependent on Russia– and Iran!

The position of the US/NATO troops in Afghanistan has become far worse in recent months. The root cause (as with the woes of most distantly deployed militaries) is logistics. As I have chronicled here numerous times in recent months.
The latest logistical nightmare is the decision Kyrgyzstan has made not to renew the arrangement under which the US has been able to use the massive Manas air-base to backstop the air war and a good portion of the resupply effort in Afghanistan.
Bernhard of Moon of Alabama has a great new post up today detailing some of the effects of the Kyrgyz decision.
And Gareth Porter, who has been cultivating some excellent sources within the US military and the new administration, tells us that Obama,

    decided to approve only 17,000 of the 30,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, after McKiernan was unable to tell him how they would be used, according to a White House source.

In fact, as Gareth tells it, McKiernan and Petraes were unable to tell Obama even how the first tranche of 17,000 troops would be used. He attributes to Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress the explanation for their deployment that,

    Obama’s decision not to wait until the key strategic questions were clarified before sending any more troops was based on the belief that he had to signal both Afghans and Pakistanis that the United States was not getting out of Afghanistan… “There are a lot of people in both countries hedging their bets,” said Korb.

This strikes me as a militarily meaningless and politically almost circular argument for sending these troops– very expensively and quite possibly also provocatively and/or dangerously– into harm’s way in distant Afghanistan.
Obama deploys them simply “as a signal to the Afghanis and Pakistanis that the US is not quitting Afghanistan”? Excuse me? But what is their military mission? Or are they supposed to stand around in peacock feathers to make an even more eye-catching “signal”?
For his part, Bernhard notes this about the cost of resupplying the US/NATO troops in Afghanistan:

    To keep a brigade in Afghanistan costs twice as much than to keep one in Iraq. On wonders how much of this luxury is sustainable. To bring in supply by air costs $14,000 per ton. For the new railway supply line the costs per ton are expected to be $300 to $500.

He then suggests that in fact, the cost of the rail-supply effort may end up being very much higher than that.
He tells us that the new Russian route for (“non-military”) US/NATO supplies was inaugurated today, with the departure towards Afghanistan of a train from Riga hauling 100 containers of goods via the Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan route. He writes, “If the route is working as planed there will be some 20 to 30 trains per week.”
That is a heck of a lot of trains. And hefty transit and customs fees for all the countries being shipped through…
B notes, too, that once in Afghanistan, most of the goods will have to be on-shipped by road to the war-zones in the middle and south of the country. To do that, they’ll most likely be taken through the Salang Tunnel— built by the Soviets and used by them as a major route for the resupply of the troops in their ill-fated military adventure in the country 20 years ago.
B writes:

    When the Soviet supply ran through there, the Salang route was under constant attack by the Mujaheddin.
    I expect the same to happen when the majority of goods will pass through the new supply route.

But here’s another intriguing detail that he adds:

    The ‘western’ forces in Afghanistan also need some 3,000 tons of fuel and 250 tons of drinking water per day. With additional U.S. troops arriving those numbers will increase. Most of the diesel fuel comes from Pakistan but curiously some 10,000 tons of jet fuel per month is now said to come from Iran! (link in his original.)

I’ve seen quite a few references in recent days to the NATO allies’ desire to increase the amount of materiel they can ship into Afghanistan through Iran. For example, in this Feb. 17 article in Der Spiegel, three writers reported thus:

    The best road networks among all neighboring countries are to be found in Iran, a country neighboring Afghanistan that has recently had significant issues with the West, though for other reasons. These problems with Iran have made this alternative taboo. But NATO is desperate to find a solution and, according to diplomatic sources in Pakistan, it is also negotiating with Tehran “at a lower level.”

In a comment on his own blog post, Bernhard writes this:

    So some realignment between Iran and the U.S. with Afghanistan as the catalyst is clearly coming and that makes the jet fuel supply [story] linked above believable. Afghanistan does not need the 10,000 tons per month. Those are likely used by U.S. planes.
    The Zionists will scream over this and with a Netanyahu government in Israel this may well lead to a split of Israeli and U.S. interests with lots of (positive) consequences…

I’m pretty sure he’s right in his the broad outline of his analysis– though I don’t rule out some combination of NATO members finding that they are able to buy a bit more time from Kyrgyzstan, after all…
But it’s important to remember too that the entire “American” campaign to topple the Taliban government in 2001 succeeded so rapidly only because of the great support the US received from the broad anti-Taliban networks already assembled in the country by Russia, Iran, and India.
But even with the new trans-shipment help from Russia, a number of ‘Stans, and even Iran, there is still no way that NATO can ever “win” this very distant and very expensive war. If Obama’s as smart as he seems to be, he is probably starting to realize this. But the next big step of going cap-in-hand to the other members of the Security Council and saying, “Uh, guys, I’m sorry to bother you but NATO can’t do this alone and we really need your help here” won’t be an easy one. It’s a step that really requires a whole new way of looking at the relationship between the US and the rest of the world…

IPS news analysis on intra-Palestinian, prisoner exchange, and ceasefire issues

My weekly piece on major developments in the peace (or no-peace) diplomacy on Arab-Israeli issues is here.
Also here.
Title: Peace Talks on Hold Amid Dual Power Struggles. Tragic.
News analysis is an interesting hybrid of, um, news reporting and analysis. I think I’m getting the hang of it. Qadoura Fares was really interesting to talk to. was that only yesterday? Seems an age ago, because I’ve been doing so many other interesting things.
(By the way, Twittering the Bil’in activities didn’t work. Maybe I’ll try a third time to link my Jawwal phone to my twitter account…. Anyway, you can find a few after-action reports at my Twitter account.)

Chas Freeman to NIC; Mitchell Twittered

My IPS colleague Jim Lobe seems to have it pretty firm that Chas Freeman, the very distinguished former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and before that Nixon-era DCM in China will be the the first Obama-era Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
As Lobe writes, this is huge– and it is very welcome indeed.
The NIC was created to try to re-professionalize the key part of intelligence analysis after the intelligence fiascos around 9/11 and the whole dreadful story of the politicization of analysis around the WMD issue in Iraq. As Ive blogged here before, the former head of the NIC, Tom Fingar, did a pretty good job putting the task of top-level “estimating” (i.e. analysis) back onto a professional basis.
Lobe gives us this great quote from a speech Freeman gave last October:

    In retrospect, Al Qaeda has played us with the finesse of a matador exhausting a great bull by guiding it into unproductive lunges at the void behind his cape. By invading Iraq, we transformed an intervention in Afghanistan most Muslims had supported into what looks to them like a wider war against Islam. We destroyed the Iraqi state and catalyzed anarchy, sectarian violence, terrorism, and civil war in that country.
    Meanwhile, we embraced Israel’s enemies as our own; they responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies. We abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel’s efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations. We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists. This has convinced most Palestinians that Israel cannot be appeased and is persuading increasing numbers of them that a two-state solution is infeasible. It threatens Israelis with an unwelcome choice between a democratic society and a Jewish identity for their state. Now the United States has brought the Palestinian experience – of humiliation, dislocation, and death – to millions more in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel and the United States each have our reasons for what we are doing, but no amount of public diplomacy can persuade the victims of our policies that their suffering is justified, or spin away their anger, or assuage their desire for reprisal and revenge.

For the past few years, Freeman has been President of the Middle East Policy Council, a body on whose advisory board I sit. I had heard, in late January, that Chas was leaving to go work in some capacity for Dennis Blair, the overall Director of National intelligence. I guess I thought it would be in some senior advisory capacity. I am delighted to learn that no, he’ll be doing a real and very important hands-on job there.
His long experience of both China (and its region) and the Middle East will be an invaluable asset to the Obama administration.
… Meantime, in other intriguing news from Washington, George Mitchell yesterday held a conference-call discussion with (only partially identified) Jewish community leaders. (HT: Laura Rozen.)
The Jerusalem Post reports that,

    about half the questions asked by progressive organizations, including Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and the New Israel Fund, that have not always been included in previous administrations’ outreach.
    “It’s a breath of fresh air to have a briefing with a broad spectrum of pro-Israel organizations that is on the record,” said Ori Nir, spokesman for the dovish Americans for Peace Now.

The JP also wrote that, regarding the prospect of a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation:

    Mitchell said that should Egypt bring the sides together it would be “a step forward,” and that until now divisions among the Palestinians have been a major obstacle to bringing peace to the region.

One participant in the 45-minute call, William Daroff of the Washington office of United Jewish Communities, even Twittered the call as it proceeded. Look on his Twitter site for the long series of posts (“Tweets?”) from around 3 .m. Thursday EST. Maybe to understand the call best, start with the oldest (lowest on his successive pages) Tweets and then read forward (up) from there…
Here are some of them:

    Sen. Mitchell: the Administration is fully committed to Israel’s security, including it’s qualitative military edge
    Mitchell: very limited lessons learned from N. Ireland experience: circumstances in mideast are unique & in some respects more complicated
    Mitchell: divisions in the Palistinian community make dialogue much more difficult
    Mitchell: US govt is uniquely positioned to bring about 2 states living side by side in peace & with stability, & eventually reconciliation
    … Mitchell: reviewing all aspects of the situation, incl settlements,
    … Mitchell: will not pre-judge settlements; P’s & Arab leaders bring it up in every conversation; important issue – but not only issue

Fascinating window into the experience there. (I’m going to try to Twitter from the fourth anniversary anti-Wall activities Bil’in when I go down there later today. Pretty sure it won’t be as full as daroff’s Tweeting– my phone here doesn’t have an easy keyboard and I’ll have to do the whole thing over an international phone line to London.)
But my next question: When will Mitchell be holding a similar call with leaders of the Arab-American community?

And the winner is… Bibi!

So Israel’s far-right political kingmaker Avigdor Lieberman has now informed Pres. Shimon Peres that his preference is for Likud’s Netanyahu. No real surprise there.
Probably no surprise in the fact that Lieberman, who formerly worked as a night-club bouncer and espouses rough-hewn racist political views, acted more like the king than the kingmaker in his conversation with Peres, laying down his own preferences for how Netanyahu should assemble his governing coalition.
The Haaretz account tells us that Lieberman told Peres,

    “[There are] three possibilities from our point of view: A broad government, which is what we want. A narrow government, that will be a government of paralysis, but we don’t rule out sitting in it. And the third option is going to elections, which will achieve nothing.”

Meanwhile, Labour and Meretz decided not to recommend anyone for the PM slot. That put paid, I suppose, to any hopes Livni might have had that she could assemble a strong team going into the negotiations.
But really, does anyone in Israel think it makes any difference what Labour and Meretz prefer, at this point?
I hope these latest elections will put an end to Ehud Barak’s career as head of Labour, once and for all. He doubtless hoped that by launching the war on Gaza he could catapult himself (and maybe also, I suppose, his party; but don’t count on that) back into a more powerful position in Israeli politics. Instead, the war merely energized the most retrograde and belligerent emotions of the Israeli public; and the fact that he and his partners in the outgoing government didn’t “finish the job off”, in the parlance of the right wing, sent voters flocking to the rightist parties.
But, wheels within wheels, Haaretz also tells us that,

    A Likud statement following [Lieberman’s] announcement said that Netanyahu would now attempt to convince Labor to join a coalition headed by him, and that a Netanyahu-Livni meeting would likely take place soon.
    Kadima MK Yisrael Katz said party chairwoman Tzipi Livni would have to decide whether or not to join a government under Netanyahu.
    “It is now up to [Livni] to make up her mind. Netanyahu has already made the magnanimous decision to ask her to join him in a broad coalition,” Katz said.

Magnanimous?? He probably hopes that a tamed Livni, serving in a subservient position under his premiership, can help ease his relations with Washington…
Livni responded by announcing that “Kadima won’t provide cover for a government of paralysis.” I suppose that includes paralysis in the so-called peace “process”, whose advancement she defined as a continuing concern for Kadima.
(Oh really? But I thought Kadima was at the head of the government over the past couple of years… and I haven’t seen them advance the peace “process” at all during that time… )
Bottom line: Expect a government of paralysis.