The folly of pretending that wars can be fought and won despite the imposition of ever-expanding legal protocols is the theme of my article this morning on the CIA tapes controversy.

At the Jerusalem Post, the irrepressible Caroline Glick is on the same theme, with more concrete and alarming comments from Israel’s Attorney General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit, who are essentially crowing that — as shown by the summer 2006 war with Hezbollah — the lawyers have taken over responsibility for Israeli national security:

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.
As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was “the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can’t identify any confrontation… or … demands to ‘Let the IDF win.’”
Mandelblit and Mazuz testified that legal advisers were present at all levels of command in all the relevant service arms and in the security cabinet. At each level the lawyers were asked to judge the legality of all the proposed targets and planned operations before they were carried out. And as the two explained, in their decisions, these lawyers were informed not by the goal of winning the war, but by their interpretation of international law.

Ah yes, the new “rules of the game” — which, you might notice, don’t include winning. Read all of Caroline’s piece, here. Somehow I don’t think each level of Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is consulting with the lawyers before firing its rockets at Israeli civilians.