ANGRY and embittered by their government’s botched military confrontation with Hezbollah, Israelis are focused on settling accounts with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his hapless defense minister, Amir Peretz.
Great – but civic rage also should target the deep-rooted flaws that compel commissions of inquiry every time Israel goes to war.
There is no excuse for the blunders of Olmert and his team, laid bare by retired Supreme Court Justice Eliyahu Winograd and others in their interim report on the latest Lebanon War. They use variations on the word “failure” 167 times to characterize the 33-day war with Hezbollah.
Olmert & Co. started off with all the advantages of moral high ground, military superiority and an intimate knowledge of the Lebanese theater. But they rushed into war with a half-baked military plan and strategic goals that the report calls “overly ambitious and not feasible.”
Olmert and Peretz bought the assurances of Chief of Staff Dan Halutz that airpower would deliver the goods. But Lt. Gen. Halutz’s prescribed “two- to three-day” retaliatory operation ultimately evolved into the longest and most indecisive war in Israel’s history.
By day six of the war, it was clear (according to many who later testified before the Winograd Commision) that the Air Force had run out of meaningful targets. But Olmert and Peretz either didn’t know this or chose to ignore the growing clamor within the Cabinet and the general staff for a call-up of the reserves.
By the time these strategic neophytes got around to approving a widescale ground war, it was too late. They barely squeezed in two days of real, maneuvering warfare before they were forced to swallow a United Nations cease-fire that didn’t even come close to meeting initial aims.
According to latest intel estimates, Hezbollah is rearming to its prewar levels, courtesy of Iran and Syria, with better, even more lethal weaponry. There’s still no word on the two kidnapped soldiers, whose safe return was the pretext for embarking on the war in the first place.
Last summer’s misadventure seriously damaged a keystone of Israeli national-security strategy, deterrence: The Israel Defense Forces no longer seem unbeatable, especially to terrorist groups and so-called rogue states that have copied each page of the Hezbollah playbook.
The first installment of Winograd’s probe only covers the first six days of the war – enough to damn Halutz (who eventually did the right thing and resigned), Peretz and Olmert. A second round of reckoning comes later this summer, when Winograd’s full post-war probe is published.
But Israel’s problems won’t be fixed simply by putting in new faces. The true fathers of the Lebanon fiasco include every leader of the past generation.
Ironically, two of Israel’s most respected warriors, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, are most to blame for creating the conditions that culminated in last summer’s war. It’s not for nothing that the Winograd panel began its probe from May 2000, with then-Prime Minister Barak’s unilateral, overnight withdrawal from Lebanon and Hezbollah’s provocative repositioning along Israel’s northern border.
Yes, Barak vowed to respond immediately and with force to all attempts to compromise Israeli sovereignty beyond that border. But when Hezbollah crossed that line to kidnap/murder three soldiers in October 2000, he fired off a few tank rounds and put up some choppers.
As the Winograd report notes, Hezbollah grew stronger under Barak’s policy of restraint and even more so under Prime Minister Sharon. After a March 2002 attack that killed six Israelis, Sharon gave strict orders not to respond in ways that could escalate into combat. Ditto for at least two other kidnapping attempts and dozens of cross-border shelling events under his watch. Sharon was too busy combating Palestinian terror to deal with another front in the north.
Sharon confidants later said he couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming re-embroiled in Lebanon, Israel’s version of Vietnam. (As the defense minister in 1982, of course, he had initiated what would become Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon and the subsequent rise of Hezbollah.)
And Sharon went on to preside over Israel’s summer 2005 unilateral retreat from the Gaza Strip. Now it’s only a short matter of time, says lawmaker Arieh Eldad, one of Israel’s more cerebral hard-liners, before the Israeli military is forced back into Gaza to quell the same threats that forced Israel back into Lebanon.
“And when we go back in,” he warns, “our soldiers will face a much more organized and better-equipped enemy. Iran and Syria exploited the vacuum we left by arming Hezbollah to the teeth, and the same is happening in Gaza right under our noses.”
Fortunately, the Winograd report offers some recipes for reforming the improvisational, expedient and often arbitrary manner in which strategic decisions are made and managed. For starters, Israel needs an empowered National Security Council to offset the government’s undue reliance on the IDF. The Foreign Ministry must be more involved in assessing strategic scenarios. And clearly defined procedures must be in place for evaluating, determining and updating critical security issues.
Incredibly, the Winograd Commision could not determine – despite reams of documents and testimony from 74 key witnesses – when the decision to go to war this summer was taken.
Giora Eiland, who headed Israel’s National Security Council under Sharon, sums up the true problem: “The process is unbelievably broken; if I wasn’t a direct participant and witness to the way our nation’s strategic destiny is determined, I wouldn’t believe it myself.”
If the anger of the Israeli public turns onto the larger policy and procedural reasons for the Lebanon debacle, the grassroots groundswell could lead to meaningful change. But if the rage vents only on those sitting in the hot seat in the last war, it could easily usher in even worse alternatives.
Barbara Opall-Rome is senior correspondent in Israel for Defense News.