Today's Situation

First skirmishes Thursday, August 17, 2006

But Peretz's maneuver, a feint to head off a state investigative commission, possibly to be headed by Supreme Court President Justice Aharon Barak, was too transparent, and immediately came under attack from the Right and Left, including inside his own party, though meanwhile only openly from ex-general MK Danny Yatom, the former Mossad chief and stalking horse for Ehud Barak.

The Shahak committee was derided, not because of its composition -- everyone agreed that all its members are outstanding -- but because its mandate lacks two critical elements: the authority to subpoena and the authority to go above the military echelon, to the political echelon. Plus the fact that Shahak has been given only three weeks to come up with preliminary findings, makes the entire panel seem, well, cheap and not credible.

The Shahak committee comes on the heels of the 'Halutz affair,' meaning his less-than-a-minute phone call with his bank to order the sale of a stock portfolio he held at the branch about three hours after the July 12 kidnapping of the two soldiers, which prompted the entire war. Maariv, which broke the story, is still hot on Halutz's tail, and he has been an easy target, clearly not understanding why it might appear unseemly for the chief of staff to be busy with his stock broker when it appears a war is breaking out. There are sources who say that the Halutz call to his broker was routine for him at that time of the month. His version is that he asked his secretary to contact his broker a couple of hours before the kidnapping and she succeeded in reaching him only at noon, and Halutz took the call, speaking only the few words necessary to sell his shares.

Whatever. The 'affair,' which Maariv insists was the result of a person being 'in the right place at the right time' and not a political vendetta by anyone (with the assumption by those who charge it was political being that Peretz and Olmert were behind it to divert blame to Halutz away from them), is not the main battlefield, but rather, like the Peretz committee and the attacks on it, a skirmish in an internal political war building up inside Israel.

The first real battle will be over a state commission of inquiry. Aharon Barak is retiring from the Supreme Court in September, making him available to head the commission, which could either open a Pandora's box for a host of politicians (and ex-generals) from both Likud and Labor or turn into what almost all such commissions become -- a forum for a few beheadings and recommendations that never get implemented.

Typical of Israel in the last six years in particular, nobody is proposing a commission to ask why a war was necessary -- why were there no efforts made by Israel to engage the Lebanese government, or the Syrian government, or both, in an effort to neutralize Hizbollah. It's typical because in the last six years, Israel's lone policy has been unilateralism. It began with Ehud Barak, who unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon -- and declared there was no partner on the Palestinian side, thereby foreclosing any option for diplomacy instead of force in relations with them, and continued with Ariel Sharon, who never put any faith in diplomacy (except to make sure the U.S. was on his side, an easy task with President George W. Bush in the White House) and refused to ever try dialogue with Yasser Arafat, never spent more than a couple of hours in Mahmoud Abbas' company, and then conducted a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza 'to punish the Palestinians.'

Instead, everyone proposing a state commission of inquiry -- with a justice at its head, it would be a judicial commission, with powers of subpoena, and the authority to issue contempt citations as well as force the resignation of politicians, generals and anyone else it thinks should not be in office -- is basically asking it to find out why the army did not 'win the war' against Hizbollah.

The definition of winning, depending on who is doing the talking, is either the beheading of Hassan Nasrallah or the total annihilation of any Hizbollah in Lebanon, plus the return of the two kidnapped soldiers, unconditionally. For that, Olmert and Peretz have only themselves to blame, since from the moment they talked themselves into going to war within hours of the kidnapping (Halutz, by the way, says that at noon, it was still not clear full-scale war was coming), they made those goals out to be the purpose of the war. Over the following month, of course, as reality imposed its limits, they tried to change those goals, but by then millions of Israelis saw on TV how hundreds of thousands huddled in poorly maintained shelters in the north, and all the sentimentalism of 'Israel united in war' had kicked in. It was, after all, the first 'just war' Israelis have experienced since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and they expected a victory no less easy than the Six Day War.

But that was unlikely from day one, and not only because a 'shock and awe' air campaign against Hizbollah offices and Lebanese infrastructure could not stop the rockets -- ultimately, at least 3,500 were fired into the country, with an estimated 2,000 others falling into the sea or empty areas where they went unnoticed. The IDF has spent the last six years devoted almost entirely to using repression against the Palestinians, and everyone who served in Gaza or the West Bank, from the generals down to the lowliest privates, were used to either subservient Arabs who trembled in fear of what the soldier might decide about their fate, or lone suicide bombers and occasionally, squads of two or three gunmen. The third-year conscripts in the elite combat units -- Paratroopers, Givati, Golani, Egoz and others -- who were sent on foot or in tanks into south Lebanon, had no real-life experience fighting well-organized units of highly trained soldiers that had all the advantages of guerilla formations in territory unfamiliar to the Israelis and intimately known by the Hizbollah.

True, the generals and colonels and majors and captains had all served in the south Lebanon 'security zone' where Hizbollah harassed Israel at the cost of 20-30 soldiers' lives every year for 18 years. But the 20 and 21-year-old foot soldiers, were those who faced the enemy up close. It seemed that only late in the war did the infantry learn to 'do a Hizbollah' on the Hizbollah, moving only at night, lying in ambush in the day, able to snipe at any Hizbollah fighter who appeared in their sights. But by then, the UN had reached a ceasefire agreement, and the war was over -- though not before the army seemed to conduct a coup d'etat, forcing Peretz and Olmert to okay one last ground operation that cost another 33 lives in less than 36 hours, after it was obvious Israel would be accepting the ceasefire. Olmert argues -- in private -- that the operation was meant to make a last minute improvement in UNSCR 1701. But there are some who say close readings of what Lebanese Prime Minister Fu'ad Siniora offered on the third or fourth day of the war is essentially what was achieved in UNSCR 1701, which the government now acclaims as a great achievement.

In any case, the investigative commission(s), if they fit the mold so far, won't be asking why the war was so ill-conceived, but rather who is to blame for the failure to win; on the way, heads will roll for not providing enough food and proper equipment for the reservists and for cutting budgets for improving the Merkava tank. In short, much might be learned technically about what went wrong and what should be fixed before the next war -- since Israel did not 'win,' the conventional wisdom from the man in the street to the 'high ranking sources in the army' is that another round of fighting is coming. But as usual, if that is so, the IDF will prepare for the war that was, and not the one that will be.

Meanwhile, the ceasefire is holding (though a faulty alarm in the eastern Galilee shocked several towns for a few minutes when sirens went off, to the chagrin of the Home Front, which had to explain it was a mistake), and despite all the Israeli skepticism, Lebanese troops are moving into south Lebanon for the first time since 1976, when Yitzhak Rabin, premier his first time, drew a 'red line' in south Lebanon, trying to keep the civil war as far as possible from the Israeli border. And this afternoon in New York, envoys from the countries offering troops to the 'new UNIFIL' are to meet at UN headquarters for a briefing on what the troops can expect. Hizbollah, in any case, has agreed to keep its weapons to itself and not display them in public in south Lebanon. It's a start. Israel will be keeping an eye on the arms smuggling routes out of Syria to Lebanon and will expect UNIFIL to do the same. Nobody knows for sure what Israel will do if it spots a convoy of rockets heading out of Damascus to Lebanon. It's not even sure Israel knows what it will do. In the meanwhile, it's too busy with the argument over who is to blame for 'not winning.'

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