Improvidently Egotistical

How else could it be characterized than a conflicted, flawed personality's past improvident behaviours consistent with a large ego, coming home to roost?

Of course, when people are convinced - high-powered people who have the public trust and are discovered to have been rather less than trust-worthy - that they represent the single candidacy to resolve a nation's problems, the necessity to present as a resolutely honest broker is somewhat beyond them, when their character is fragmented to the extent that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's appears to be.

So he is stepping down, finally. Took long enough. He was unabashedly certain of himself even when the Winograd Commission's finding, although not pointing a finger directly at the prime minister, appeared to convince the Israeli public that he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. His determined approach toward solving the Israeli-Palestinian low-grade battle, to find a diplomatic solution that would leave both, the country and the would-be nation, agreeable to accepting the distance of sovereignty hasn't endeared him to Israelis, either.

They feel he's prepared to give somewhat too much away in the difficult negotiations. He's convinced he's the only hope to salvage the current stand-off, with the "personal" touch he's established with Mahmoud Abbas. And the ongoing on-again, off-again, currently Turkey-sponsored talks with Syria where that country insists it will only come to the bargaining table one-on-one when Israel submits to their pre-requisite of surrendering the Golan Heights doesn't bode well for Israel's future security in the minds of many.

What's left, admittedly, without some measure of success in those overtures, is the status quo. Continued embitterment, ongoing attacks by proxy terror militias, as well as by Fatah/PA recruits whose lifelong indoctrination in the martyrdom-distinctive honour of the struggle against the imperialistic aggressor/occupier, will simply filter through into the country via other channels, now that a physical barrier is all but completed.

So it can certainly be said, in spades, that if any head of any nation had a difficult task in steering his country toward a future without the ongoing threat of annihilation hanging over it - either through the auspices of a neighbouring government's stated determination to succeed in nuclear "sufficiency", or a combined and synchronized invasion by land and by sea when Palestinian militias, supported and armed and encouraged from without, finally see their way clear to yet another, perhaps more successful attack- it was his.

He could have been a contender, Ehud Olmert. He will not go down in the annals of Israel's history as a resounding success. Instead, infamy will redound in his name. According to the investigating authorities: "The investigation (Friday) is expected to be difficult and uncomfortable for Olmert. "He will be confronted with evidence and documents that have accumulated against him, and it is a fair assumption that he already understands that this involves substantive evidence."

Yet he will not take ownership of his malfeasance and the dreadful damage he has done to his country, let alone the position of the prime minister as a consequence. "I have made mistakes and I regret it", he says, mournfully, now that he has accepted the reality that he must resign. But he spreads blame in a wide arc, in his own defence: "From my first day in office, I was forced to ward off malicious attacks, even while dealing with far-reaching decisions affecting Israel's defence and existence", he complained bitterly.

A not too-subtle reference to his failures as head of the country. For implicit in that statement is his belief that had he not been so beleaguered with personal woes, so tied up with having to defend his reputation, the potential for his having reacted differently at critical times during his tenure - say, for example, during the Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon war - might have meant an entirely different and far more palatable outcome to the conflict. So that too, wasn't his fault, but rather the fault of his tormentors.

A sad end to a career that might have been far different had the person so committed to his country, so devoted to his office, so determined to succeed, been capable of restraining his egotistically entitled frame of reference as a person of influence who parlayed that influence into a mechanism that profited him in the most inexcusably illicit and unethical way.