Now recriminations begin in Israel

By Aussiegirl

Notice the highlighted text. A nation like Israel can never tire of war or tire of defending itself. It cannot hide its head in the proverbial sand and simply choose to ignore reality and live in peace when there is no peace. Unfortunately, this appears to be the increasing tendency of the Bush administration, which is talking a big game on terrorism, but appears to be doing little pro-actively to address the REAL root cases of it -- Iranian adventurism and ambition to take on and destroy Western civilization starting with Israel and the United States. Suddenly after the bungled aftermath of the intervention in Iraq, America too is feeling tired and spent and fatigued with war. But history is not going to allow us to rest, and our enemies are just now tasting blood and weakness. This is not the time to imagine that we can take a breather and revert to the failed policies of yet another useless U.N. resolution. Just as Israel was rudely awakened by Hezbollah, we will find ourselves rudely awakened by a nuclear-armed Iran, and possibly well before we imagined it possible. We cannot tire, the war is only in its earliest stages. Wishful thinking will not make it go away.

Now recriminations begin in Israel - Comment - Times Online

The failure of the Lebanon campaign may destroy the Kadima party and its leader


EHUD OLMERT’S greatest sin in the eyes of the Israeli public is not that the war in Lebanon was “disproportionate”, but that he did not win it. Now that hostilities seem to be winding down, the debate over the conduct of one of the most unsuccessful military campaigns in the history of the Jewish state has begun with a vengeance. And it could bring about the demise of the Prime Minister and the new, centrist, Kadima party that he led to victory in the election in March.

[...]Despite Hezbollah’s (replenishable) losses, no such consolation is possible this time. Contrary to what Mr Olmert told the Knesset on Monday, Hezbollah continues to be state within a state — if not more powerful than the Lebanese Government itself. Although he had vowed to eliminate the Hezbollah leadership, Israel did not “get” Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. That was largely because he spent much of the war in Damascus. Indeed, Mr Olmert conspicuously did not target the two greatest sponsors of Hezbollah terrorism in this conflict — Syria and Iran.

The rocket attacks on northern Israel increased, rather than diminished, as the ceasefire approached. There are anything between a quarter and half a million displaced Israelis within a nation of six million. Another million-plus have had to spend many days in shelters.

Even the original casus belli — the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah — has not yielded their release. And as Israeli reservists return home, expect a rash of horror stories about inadequate equipment and training because of budget cuts in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nor did the military fully take on board Hezbollah’s style of asymmetric warfare that brought to the fore the “suicide fighter” rather than the “suicide bomber”. In the first 20 days of war, the Israelis took hardly any prisoners.

[...]But then Mr Olmert never wanted to be a war leader. As he observed in June last year: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.” If that last goal could not be achieved by negotiation, then he would act unilaterally. Israel would hunker down and lead a normal Western life from behind the security fence — safe in the knowledge that the IDF were so strong that anybody still daring to shoot at the Jewish state would receive a thrashing.