And now, with his announcement that he will leave office not for his substantive incompetence but for his suspected criminal activities, Olmert has removed the substantive causes of his failure in office from the national agenda. In so doing, he has immunized his cohorts, and particularly Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, from the need to account for their continued strategic imbecility.

IT IS the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's serial incompetence that ironically serves as the second reason that there has been no accounting for the failure of the Gaza withdrawal plan. Quite simply, the government has moved from failure to failure so quickly that there has been no opportunity to confront the results of the last failure before the next one is spun out of the government's policy chop-shop.

The most recent example of this high-speed bungling is the government's penchant for releasing terrorists from prison. The public has scarcely had a chance to digest the colossal stupidity and inherent danger of the government's terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap with Hizbullah last month. No serious review of that policy - which enhanced Hizbullah's popularity sufficiently to compel the Lebanese government to formally accept its right to attack Israel at will - has been conducted. And already on Wednesday, fresh from that failure, Olmert announced his intention to expand it by releasing another 150 terrorists from prison by the end of the month.

THE FINAL reason that the failed Gaza withdrawal has not led to any change in either the public discourse or in the general tenor and direction of government policy is because of the debilitating impact the withdrawal had on Israeli democracy. In order to build the public's support for his inhumane and strategically irredeemable decision to expel 10,000 Jews from their homes and destroy their communities in Gaza and northern Samaria in exchange for nothing, Sharon and his colleagues worked systematically to demoralize, disenfranchise and criminalize his political opponents.

He demoralized them by castigating them as criminals, extremists and enemies of the people in general. He disenfranchised them by ignoring the results of the Likud's referendum on his plan that he himself initiated.

In all his activities, Sharon received crucial assistance from the law enforcement system and the media which were themselves corrupted by his plan. As Ha'aretz's left-wing military commentator Amir Oren noted five months after the plan was carried out, Sharon was given a free ride by Israel's elites due to their common "hatred of the settlers."

To enable Sharon to carry out the expulsions they so desired, the state prosecution, backed by the Supreme Court, was willing to close corruption probes of Sharon. As retired Supreme Court justice Michel Cheshin explained, "If Sharon had stood trial, there would have been no disengagement."

More egregiously, as public protests against the withdrawal gained force, Israel's law enforcement system became a tool of political repression, and the media became apologists for that repression. The police conducted mass arrests of law-abiding demonstrators, used brutal force against them and suspended the civil rights of opponents of the plan. The state prosecution and the courts sent thousands of protesters - including children - to jail for weeks and months without filing charges against them.

Then too, Sharon's personalization of the withdrawal distorted the country's public discourse by moving it from substantive discussions of government policies to superficial discussions of personalities. And this transformation has remained in effect until today. It was most recently in evidence in the media's rendering of the debate over the terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap as the personal struggle of the Goldwasser and Regev families against the government.

Sharon's successful repression and castigation of his opponents, and Olmert's successful repetition of Sharon's behavior both in the brutal repression of demonstrators at Amona in February 2006 and in his dismissive attitude towards the protest movement in the wake of the Second Lebanon War, have imbued the public as a whole with a sense of powerlessness. This sense manifested itself with the historically low voter turnout in the 2006 elections.

Israel's prolonged failure to reckon with the disastrous outcome of the Gaza withdrawal bodes ill for the country's prospects. Until the country reckons with the mistakes that led to that withdrawal, and forces those responsible to account for their failings, we will be doomed to repeat those mistakes with those same incompetents leading us over and over and over.