Tzipi Trips

A reporter from an Israeli magazine interviewed me today about the inclusion of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the TIME 100, this magazine's list of the world's most influential people. Apparently, she was quite surprised that Livni made the cut. "Do many Americans even know who Livni is?" she asked. After making sure that the Israeli magazine is neither published in English or on the Internet, I agreed that Livni was indeed an unusual -- and telling -- choice.

Now I wasn't involved in putting together the TIME 100 list -- I'm just a field hand here on the TIME farm -- but that didn't stop me from speculating about how Livni got there. I can imagine TIME editors casting about for an Israeli to include as a rising world leader to balance out Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, both of whom are in the TIME 100 and both of whose countries are vying for supremacy in the Middle East.

But Israeli leaders are hard to find right now. Not only is Israel's power in the Middle East on the wane, but its leadership class has been roundly discredited by corruption scandals and its disastrous management of the Second Lebanon War last summer. Livni was one of the few Israeli leaders who came off looking like a grown-up in that conflict after diplomacy, rather than military force, got Israel out of the quagmire in southern Lebanon. And on Monday in Jerusalem, a government commission that blamed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for bungling the war, recommended that the foreign ministry be given more influence in any future decisions about war and peace.

Ironically, just as Livni looked like the last woman standing in Israeli politics, and just as the TIME 100 issue was heading to press, she shot herself in the foot on Tuesday by calling for Olmert to resign without doing so herself, which might have helped force him out. The Israeli press slammed her putting her ambitions ahead of the public good. So no matter what the TIME 100 says, the truth is that Israel is essentially leaderless.

Not that I think my betters at the TIME big house in New York are off their game: notice how they didn't put George Bush on the list. Like Olmert and Tony Blair, politicians who led their countries on wars to remake the Middle East have been self-destructing along with the failures of these adventures. It's just that there's no one to clean up they messes they've made. Sorry, Tzipi.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Jerusalem