MIDDLE EAST:An imminent Israeli commission of inquiry report on last year's Lebanon war will censure the prime minister Ehud Olmert but stop short of recommending he resign, Israeli television reported yesterday.
The Winograd Commission's interim findings, due out on Monday, are widely expected to shape the fate of Mr Olmert and the defence minister Amir Peretz, whose popularity plummeted after the inconclusive July-August assault on Lebanese Hizbullah.
Channel Ten television quoted a leaked copy of the 160-page report as criticising Mr Olmert for "misguided and rash judgment" in launching the air, sea and land campaign after Hizbullah guerrillas abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.
The panel further accused Mr Olmert, who unlike many of his predecessors lacks a military pedigree, of too easily approving operations proposed by his top brass and of lacking foresight on how the war could play out, Channel Ten said.
It said that Mr Peretz, a former trade union boss who took the defence portfolio as part of a coalition deal with Mr Olmert, was faulted by the Winograd Commission for his inadequate knowledge in matters of national security. However, Channel Ten's political correspondent, Chico Menashe, added: "It has to be pointed out that there is no bottom line telling prime minister Olmert or Peretz what to do. They are not telling them to go home."
Many critics of Mr Olmert suspect the Winograd Committee will pull its punches, noting that it was appointed by the government despite public calls for a more independent panel.
The interim report will limit its critique to the first five days of the war.
An Israeli general has described this stage as orderly, in terms of the military planning, but that increasing disarray followed as Israel failed to achieve its original aims.
"In fact, it unfolded otherwise, into a long and controversial war, as is now known, whose outcomes are also in dispute," Maj-Gen Gadi Eizenkot, who was chief of operations at the time, said on Wednesday.
Mr Olmert has argued that the conflict improved Israel's security by banishing Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbullah from its frontier strongholds and boosting a UN peacekeeper force.
But Hizbullah managed to fire 4,000 missiles into northern Israel, driving a million residents to shelters and shaking the Jewish state's belief in its military superiority in the region.
Mr Olmert has vowed to survive the war's fallout and serve out his term in office. - ( Reuters)