A lethal combination of inexperience and incompetence drove Israel's destructive 34-day war against Lebanon last summer, according to the independent Winograd commission report released yesterday.
In an unsparing critique of the prime minister Mr Ehud Olmert, the defence minister Mr Amir Peretz and the armed forces chief-of-staff Lt-Gen Dan Halutz it says they showed a severe lack of judgment, responsibility and caution in launching the war on July 12th after the Hizbullah movement captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid and killed three others. They were given too few military options and failed to question those provided.
We should be grateful for the honesty and democratic openness of this critique, even as its lessons are absorbed. It stops short of demanding Mr Olmert's resignation, a fact he is determined to exploit by refusing to go. He hopes to see out the crisis by accepting the criticisms, in full awareness that his Kadima party's coalition with Labour would be swept aside in any election arising from his departure. He has little or no personal support in opinion polls.
Mr Olmert's political survival strategy is as brazen as his original war objectives and methods were incoherent and ill-defined. He relied substantially on Israeli air power to achieve victory, holding back on the use of ground forces. But despite the huge destruction which drove millions to flee southern Lebanon, Hizbullah guerrillas fired 4,000 missiles on northern Israeli towns and settlements during the war, forcing mass evacuations of civilians. They therefore claimed victory through sheer military survival. This was sufficiently plausible to unnerve Israeli public opinion after the war.
Popular dissatisfaction with the government's strategy has more to do with its military ineffectiveness than its political unacceptability. By exposing the limits of Israel's overwhelming military superiority against such adversaries, Mr Olmert's strategy diminished its overall deterrent impact in the Middle East region. There were political, diplomatic and military alternatives to the maximalist approach taken by Mr Olmert's cabinet, but they were not explored.
The report is short on international aspects of the war, which means it under-estimates the extent to which it proceeded as it did because of tacit support from the Bush administration. Hizbullah was defined as a simple Iranian proxy rather than an indigenous Lebanese force. Future Israeli and US policy will need to see Hizbullah in both of these perspectives if it is to deal properly with the real balance of forces in the region.