State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’s report on the Mavi Marmara portrays a leadership moving from one crisis to another, constantly busy with putting out fires, and relying on the ‘trust me’ way of doing business that has long plagued this country. While there are very few people who would dispute the fact that the IDF screwed up royally when it failed to properly assess the opposition it would face on the Mavi Marmara, Lindenstrauss lays the overall blame for the fiasco on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The picture emerging from the report is of a leadership which, in 2008, was not coordinated and arrogant. It portrays a leadership full of confidence in its own ability to see above the waves in stormy waters and set the best course without relying on the professional services available to it, services and organizations mandated by law to provide the country’s captains with the information they need to make informed choices. Furthermore, it portrays these services themselves as being uncoordinated, under-prepared, under-staffed, overburdened, and above all, arrogant. Many of the agencies are also portrayed as being totally confused about what exactly their roles and powers are in relation to other agencies.

In short, the report paints a bleak picture of chaos and waste, of fear and loathing in the corridors of power in Jerusalem. It’s not surprising then that with prep work like this, we ended up with results like these. But no use crying over spilled Turkish delights, what are we going to do about Iran? What about Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, and Hezbollah’s Scuds? What if Sinai explodes in our faces?

This from the report:

“Since July 2008 when the National Security Council Law was passed and June 2011, the period under examination, there has been significant improvements in the NSC functioning and advising of the government, but there are still significant gaps between what the law says should be the NSC’s role and the current reality. The NSC is still not fulfilling the role it was meant to fill under the law and under the Lipkin-Shahak committee. It is still not functioning as the central body organizing the staff work on issues of diplomacy and security which can bring extra value to the decision-making process on the issues of the highest importance to the state of Israel. The Prime Minister is responsible for implementing this law.”

The above quotation from Lindenstrauss is astounding. It was Netanyahu himself who initiated and pushed through the National Security Council law. It was Netanyahu himself who established the NSC during his first term of office in 1996. Lindenstrauss now reports that Netanyahu began taking away responsibility from the head of the NSC, Uzi Arad, and giving them instead to his military secretary Yochanan Locker. Arad, as you may recall, left the NSC in a firestorm of controversy over sensitive intelligence leaks to the media. After his departure, Arad blasted the way Netanyahu’s bureau is run.

On the issue of the Mavi Marmara, Lindenstrauss found “serious errors” in the decision-making processes of the Prime Minister. “The decision-making process was done without any organized staff work, and no minutes of meetings were kept, despite the fact that the IDF brass, intelligence agencies, and the National Security Council were all aware of the uniqueness of the Turkish flotilla.”

Instead of instructing the relevant bodies to conduct an orderly process of decision making and preparedness, the Prime Minister held a series of private meetings separately with the Minister of Defense and the Foreign Minister. “These meetings were not recorded, nor were the contents of the meeting summarized and distributed,” so there is no way of knowing what decisions were taken and how they were reached. The only meeting that the PM held with a group of senior ministers was with the informal Forum of Seven ministers five days before the arrival of the Flotilla [26.5.10], a meeting which the Comptroller calls “last-minute” and to which none of the relevant officials were invited, and to which no staff work was prepared or presented.

It’s upsetting to think that as word spread of a massive Flotilla gathering to break the blockade on Gaza, in Israel there was very little pre-planning, and no organized staff work. Some contacts were held indirectly with the Turkish government to try to head off the flotilla, but these efforts did not bear fruit. Netanyahu and Barak, instead of mobilizing the country’s intelligence, defense, diplomatic, and PR resources to come up with a comprehensive, offensive campaign, pretty much just wrapped it up between themselves. They relied on the army, who said it would handle it, and left it at that. They didn’t “get the wider picture” because you can’t get the wider picture if you’re doing everything yourself, relying only on yourself, thinking that you’ve got everything under control, when in fact you only have a partial picture. Netanyahu and Barak didn’t see the armada from the flotilla, the forest from the trees. Netanyahu and Barak didn’t see how big this Flotilla story could get, and just how badly it could embroil Israel diplomatically and legally, because they didn’t bother to get a wide range of steady information from a wide range of organizations who were keeping an eye on the issue. Our leaders got partial information and they made partial decisions, and because of this 9 Turks were killed, Turkey has become a sworn enemy, our senior officers are going to be placed on ‘trial’ in absentia in Istanbul, and who knows where that could lead.

Netanyahu and Barak behaved the way they did because that’s the way they’re used to doing things. The duo, who served together in the elite Sayeret Matkal Special Forces unit, were locked into the conception that the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a purely military affair, and that the Naval Commandos would have everything under control.

Instead of going for the dry and thorough staff work of intelligence, diplomacy and preparedness, they opted instead for the flare, chutzpah, and daring of a Special Operations interception mission at sea. That’s great for pinpoint surgical military strikes, great for daring missions behind enemy lines, but it’s a disastrous policy for complex, multi-dimensional crises which have simultaneous and far-reaching ramifications on the military, political, diplomatic, economic, and public diplomacy situation of the state of Israel. For these kinds of issues, you need a National Security Council to get all the players playing their best game, playing together, playing nice, so that the leaders have all the information they need to make critical decisions with time to spare.

We’re going to need this kind of work attitude what with that Iran thing rushing towards us…