Then there are the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. Speaking to Kadima party members Wednesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged that the security situation in northern Israel and southern Lebanon has never been better. Olmert added, "The commanders of the international forces say so, too."

In this statement, and in countless similar statements he has made over the past year, Olmert has presented UNIFIL as a friendly force which shares Israel's goal of neutralizing Hizbullah. But here, too, reality tells a different tale.

During last summer's war, UNIFIL directly assisted Hizbullah by reporting IDF troop movements in real time on its Web site. Since the war ended, UNIFIL forces have done nothing to prevent Hizbullah's massive rearmament.

Under the protective cover of UNIFIL forces, Hizbullah has reasserted its control over the villages in the South and prevented their Christian residents who fled during the war from returning home. Hizbullah's unqualified control over south Lebanon is attested to by foreign visitors who report that they must receive Hizbullah travel permits in order to enter south Lebanon. Then too, this week Lebanon's An Nahar newspaper reported that Hizbullah was moving to extend its independent telephone network to the south. Needless to say, UNIFIL has taken no action to prevent any of this.

UNIFIL's treatment of Hizbullah demonstrates that like Fatah and Egypt, UNIFIL does not construe its interests or goals in a manner that adheres to any Israeli interests or goals. Indeed, UNIFIL's assessment of its goals and interests are antithetical and hostile to Israel's national security interests.

Yet Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and their cabinet colleagues consistently represent UNIFIL as an ally and have worked fastidiously to strengthen it. During the ceasefire negotiations last summer, the government insisted on enlarging the UNIFIL force and extending its mandate. After the war ended, in the interest of strengthening UNIFIL, the government made no effective protest against UNIFIL's inclusion of forces from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, whose governments are allied with Iran.

UNIFIL's mandate expires on August 31. Next week the UN Security Council is scheduled to convene to extend its mandate for another year. Rather than acknowledge UNIFIL's institutional hostility towards Israel, the Olmert government supports the extension of its mandate. As The Jerusalem Post reported this week, the government even hopes that UNIFIL's renewed mandate will empower it to increase its presence in Lebanese villages - as if there is any chance that UNIFIL would use its widened role to fight Hizbullah.

DUE TO the rampantly anti-American atmosphere in Britain and to Britain's refusal to view the threat that Middle Eastern rogue regimes pose to its national security in the same way as the US perceives the threat, there have always been tensions in the countries' alliance that have led to their starkly different strategies in Iraq. The main reason that these divergent strategies receive attention today is because the US military's recent successes in Iraq make Britain's failures impossible to ignore.

The administration changed course in Iraq because domestic pressure forced it to acknowledge that its previous course was failing. So indirectly, it was public pressure on the administration that exposed the operational disparity between the British and the American militaries. The exposure of this disparity is now forcing the administration to contend with the fact that the coalition with Britain is not as useful as it had hoped. No doubt, as a result, the US military will soon be forced to operate in Basra regardless of whether the British remain in Iraq or withdraw.

Sadly, in Israel, the Olmert government refuses to acknowledge, let alone respond to domestic criticisms of its mishandling of the situation with the Palestinians and its mismanagement of Lebanon. Rather than acknowledge that Fatah, Egypt and UNIFIL share none of Israel's national interests, the government continues to embrace them and hopes that no one will notice that its imaginary coalition partners endanger, rather than advance Israel's national security.