ACTING TOUGH ISN'T ENOUGH:

Why go to war if you don't intend to fight? (Evelyn Gordon, 8/16/06, THE JERUSALEM POST)

[I]t turns out that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert never had any military aims - or, more accurately, he never had any intention of doing what was necessary to achieve them.

NO SANE person, for instance, would say that stopping deadly rocket fire on civilian population centers is an illegitimate military goal. And early on, it became clear that aerial bombardment alone could not achieve this, as Olmert and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz had foolishly hoped. From that point, military planners were unanimous about what was needed: a major ground operation to push Hizbullah's short-range rockets out of range of Israel (according to the army, long-range rockets actually can be dealt with largely from the air). Scarcely a day passed without some senior officer explaining this to the press; not one ever proposed an alternative solution.

YET OLMERT refused to order such an operation. Instead, he approved only small-scale operations near the border - which, incidentally, increased Israel's casualties by effectively negating the IDF's numerical advantage over Hizbullah. Thus we witnessed the incredible sight of Defense Minister Amir Peretz telling the Knesset on August 7 - 26 days after the war began - that "if, within the coming days, the diplomatic process does not reach a conclusion, Israeli forces will carry out the operations necessary to take control of Katyusha rocket launching sites in every location."

In other words, Peretz openly admitted that until then, Israel had not been doing what was needed to achieve this. So what exactly were its military operations meant to achieve?

Similarly, no sane person would argue that hitting Hizbullah hard enough to ensure that it can no longer threaten Israel is an illegitimate military aim - particularly as there was virtually unanimous recognition, both in Israel and abroad, that neither the Lebanese Army nor any international force would be willing to undertake this task. And here, too, once the initial fighting had amply disproved Halutz's fantasy that this was doable by air power alone, military planners were unanimous: Israeli troops had to advance to the Litani River, seal off south Lebanon and begin a slow search-and-destroy mission of the area in order to eliminate Hizbullah's bunkers, arms caches, communications centers and fighting force.

However, Olmert refused to order such an operation - until, bizarrely, this past Friday, when the UN Security Council was already finalizing the cease-fire that took effect Monday morning. By that time, the move had no chance of success: Military planners said it would take at least three days to reach the Litani and two weeks to conduct the search-and-destroy mission, and the course of the fighting until then indicated that both figures were likely to prove underestimates. And indeed, few units managed to reach the Litani before the cease-fire, while the army had no time at all for search-and-destroy missions.

SO WHAT exactly were the military goals that justified all the death and destruction on both sides?

Had they done any strategic planning before the war they'd never have undertaken it. Even Israeli intelligence said Hezbollah posed no serious threat.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 18, 2006 8:58 AM