Israel's troubles are over! Just kidding. I'll say this: she can't do much worse than Olmert. I once heard a joke about the erstwhile Israeli PM to the effect that it's usually not possible to measure his political support because it's within the margin of error.
Seriously, though, I think Olmert's failures have some lessons to teach us. He took over for Ariel Sharon, a man for whom I have some very ambivalent feelings but who was assuredly competent. He then proceeded to allow Hizbollah to bait him into fighting a disastrous and unnecessary war with Lebanon. The beginning of Olmert's end occurred right off the bat. And I think this is a real danger of John McCain's ultra-hawkish foreign policy. One of Osama bin Laden's primary goals, post 9/11, was to bait us into fighting a big foreign war to get us to overextend ourselves. The GOP was only to happy to oblige--after all, tools don't mind being used, right?--and then we have Iraq.
Luckily--luckily--it appears that we might be able to extricate ourselves from Iraq with minimal embarrassment in two years. But overestimating one's enemies and adopting a paranoid worldview that sees a threat around every corner has very real costs, despite the conventional wisdom that such a course of action is the most prudent. What we need is prudence--the ability to assess and prioritize threats. McCain clearly hasn't got that. Barack Obama does.
