[WCUSP] Fisk: Israeli PM Olmert Undone by the Militia He Promised to Destroy

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

Israeli PM Olmert Undone by the Militia He Promised to  Destroy

By Robert Fisk, Independent UK. Posted May 4, 2007.

Ehud  Olmert is under intense pressure to step down after a blistering 
report on  his leadership during the "Second Lebanon War."


So it has come  to this. All those bodies, all those photographs of 
dead children -- more  than 1,400 cadavers (we are not including the 230 
or so Hizbollah fighters  and the Israeli soldiers who died) -- are to 
be commemorated with the  possible resignation of an Israeli prime 
minister who knew, and who cared,  many Israelis suspect, little about 
war. Yes, Hizbollah provoked last  summer's folly by capturing two 
Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese-Israel  border, but Israel's response 
-- so totally out of proportion to the sin --  produced another debacle 
for the Israeli army and, presumably now, for its  prime minister, Ehud 
Olmert.

Looking back at this terrifying, futile  war, with its grotesque 
ambitions to "destroy" the Iranian-supported  Hizbollah militia, it is 
incredible Olmert did not realize within days that  his grandiose 
demands would founder. Insisting the two captured Israeli  soldiers 
should be released and the militarily powerless Lebanese government  
should be held responsible for their capture was never going to produce  
political or military results favorable to Israel. One would have to 
add  that Tzipi Livni's demand for the prime minister's resignation sits 
oddly  with her support for this preposterous war.

A close reading of the  interim report of Judge Eliahou Winograd's 
report on the summer war -- to  which Olmert himself only granted the 
title the "Second Lebanon War" a month  after it had happened -- shows 
clearly that it was the Israeli army which  ran the military, strategic 
and political campaign. Again and again in  Winograd's report it is 
clear that Olmert and his defense minister failed to  challenge "in a 
competent way" (in the commission's devastating phrase) the  plans of 
the Israeli army.

Day after day, for 34 days after 12 July,  the Israeli air force 
systematically destroyed the major infrastructure of  Lebanon, 
repeatedly claiming it was trying to avoid civilian casualties,  while 
the world's press watched its aircraft blasting men, women and  children 
to pieces in Lebanon. Israelis, too, were savagely killed in this  war 
by Hizbollah's Iranian-provided missiles. But it only proved the  
Israeli army, famous in legend and song but not in reality, could not  
protect its own people. Hizbollah fighters were told by their own  
leadership that if they would just withstand the air attacks, they 
could  bite the Israeli land forces when they invaded.

And bite they did. In the  final 24 hours of the war, 30 Israeli 
soldiers were killed by Hizbollah  fighters and their land offensive, so 
loudly trumpeted by Olmert, came to an  end. During the conflict, a 
Hizbollah missile almost sank an Israeli  corvette -- it burnt for 24 
hours and was towed back to Haifa before it was  able to sink -- and 
struck Israel's top secret military air traffic control  center at 
Miron. The soldiers captured on the border were never returned --  
pictures of them, still alive, are flaunted across the border at 
Israeli  troops to this day -- and Hizbollah, far from being destroyed, 
remains as  powerful as ever;

And so one of Washington's last "pro-American" cabinets  in the Middle 
East is now threatened by the very militia which Olmert  claimed he 
could destroy.








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