Olmert's Testimony Reveals the
Real Goal of the
War in Lebanon
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
03/13/07 "ICH" ---Israel's supposedly "defensive" assault on Hizbullah last summer, in which more than 1,000 Lebanese
civilians were killed in a massive aerial bombardment that ended
with Israel littering the country's south with cluster bombs,
was cast in a definitively different light last week by Israeli
prime minister Ehud Olmert.
His leaked testimony to the Winograd Committee -- investigating
the government's failures during the month-long attack --
suggests that he had been preparing for such a war at least four
months before the official casus belli: the capture by Hizbullah
of two Israeli soldiers from a border post on 12 July 2006.
Lebanon's devastation was apparently designed to teach both
Hizbullah and the country's wider public a lesson.
Olmert's new account clarifies the confusing series of official
justifications for the war from the time.
First, we were told that the seizure of the soldiers was "an act
of war" by Lebanon and that a "shock and awe" campaign was
needed to secure their release. Or, as the then Chief of Staff
Dan Halutz -- taking time out from disposing of his shares
before market prices fell -- explained, his pilots were going to
"turn the clock back 20 years" in Lebanon.
Then the army claimed that it was trying to stop Hizbullah's
rocket strikes. But the bombing campaign targeted not only the
rocket launchers but much of Lebanon, including Beirut. (It was,
of course, conveniently overlooked that Hizbullah's rockets fell
as a response to the Israeli bombardment and not the other way
round.)
And finally we were offered variations on the theme that ended
the fighting: the need to push Hizbullah (and, incidentally,
hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians) away from the
northern border with Israel.
That was the thrust of UN Resolution 1701 that brought about the
official end of hostilities in mid-August. It also looked
suspiciously like the reason why Israel chose at the last-minute
to dump up to a million tiny bomblets -- old US stocks of
cluster munitions with a very high failure rate -- that are
lying in south Lebanon's fields, playgrounds and back yards
waiting to explode.
What had been notable before Olmert's latest revelation was the
clamour of the military command to distance itself from Israel's
failed attack on Hizbullah. After his resignation, Halutz blamed
the political echelon
(meaning primarily Olmert), while his subordinates blamed both
Olmert and Halutz. The former Chief of Staff was rounded on
mainly because, it was claimed, being from the air force, he had
over-estimated the likely effectiveness of his pilots in "neutralising"
Hizbullah's rockets.
Given this background, Olmert has been obliging in his testimony
to Winograd. He has not only shouldered responsibility for the
war to the Committee, but, if Israeli media reports are to be
believed, he has also publicised the fact by leaking the
details.
Olmert told Winograd that, far from making war on the hoof in
response to the capture of the two soldiers (the main mitigating
factor for Israel's show of aggression), he had been planning
the attack on Lebanon since at least March 2006.
His testimony is more than plausible. Allusions to pre-existing
plans for a ground invasion of Lebanon can be found in Israeli
reporting from the time. On the first day of the war, for
example, the Jersualem Post reported: "Only weeks ago, an entire
reserve division was drafted in order to train for an operation
such as the one the IDF is planning in response to Wednesday
morning's Hizbullah attacks on IDF forces along the northern
border."
Olmert defended the preparations to the Committee on the grounds
that Israel expected Hizbullah to seize soldiers at some point
and wanted to be ready with a harsh response. The destruction of
Lebanon would deter Hizbullah from considering another such
operation in the future.
There was an alternative route that Olmert and his commanders
could have followed: they could have sought to lessen the threat
of attacks on the northern border by damping down the main
inciting causes of Israel's conflict with Hizbullah.
According to Olmert's testimony, he was seeking just such a
solution to the main problem: a small corridor of land known as
the Shebaa Farms claimed by Lebanon but occupied by Israel since
1967. As a result of the Farms area's occupation, Hizbullah has
argued that Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 was
incomplete and that the territory still needed liberating.
Olmert's claim, however, does not stand up to scrutiny.
The Israeli media revealed in January that for much of the past
two years Syria's leader, Bashir Assad, has been all but
prostrating himself before Israel in back-channel negotiations
over the return of Syrian territory, the Golan, currently
occupied by Israel. Although those talks offered Israel the most
favourable terms it could have hoped for (including declaring
the Golan a peace park open to Israelis), Sharon and then Olmert
-- backed by the US -- refused to engage Damascus.
A deal on the Golan with Syria would almost certainly have
ensured that the Shebaa Farms were returned to Lebanon. Had
Israel or the US wanted it, they could have made considerable
progress on this front.
The other major tension was Israel's repeated transgressions of
the northern border, complemented by Hizbullah's own, though
less frequent, violations. After the army's withdrawal in 2000,
United Nations monitors recorded Israeli warplanes violating
Lebanese airspace almost daily. Regular overflights were made to
Beirut, where pilots used sonic booms to terrify the local
population, and drones spied on much of the country. Again, had
Israel halted these violations of Lebanese sovereignty,
Hizbullah's own breach of Israeli sovereignty in attacking the
border post would have been hard to justify.
And finally, when Hizbullah did capture the soldiers, there was
a chance for Israel to negotiate over their return. Hizbullah
made clear from the outset that it wanted to exchange the
soldiers for a handful of Lebanese prisoners still in Israeli
jails. But, of course, as Olmert's testimony implies, Israel was
not interested in talks or in halting its bombing campaign. That
was not part of the plan.
We can now start to piece together why.
According to the leaks, Olmert first discussed the preparations
for a war against Lebanon in January and then asked for detailed
plans in March.
Understandably given the implications, Olmert's account has been
decried by leading Israeli politicians. Effi Eitam has pointed
out that Olmert's version echoes that of Hizbullah's leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, who claims his group knew that Israel wanted
to attack Lebanon.
And Yuval Steinitz argues that, if a war was expected, Olmert
should not have approved a large cut to the defence budget only
weeks earlier. The explanation for that, however, can probably
be found in the forecasts about the war's outcome expressed in
cabinet by Halutz and government ministers. Halutz reportedly
believed that an air campaign would defeat Hizbullah in two to
three days, after which Lebanon's infrastructure could be
wrecked unimpeded. Some ministers apparently thought the war
would be over even sooner.
In addition, a red herring has been offered by the General
Staff, whose commanders are claiming to the Israeli media that
they were kept out of the loop by the prime minister. If Olmert
was planning a war against Lebanon, they argue, he should not
have left them so unprepared.
It is an intriguing, and unconvincing, proposition: who was
Olmert discussing war preparations with, if not with the General
Staff? And how was he planning to carry out that war if the
General Staff was not intimately involved?
More interesting are the dates mentioned by Olmert. His first
discussion of a war against Lebanon was held on 8 January 2006,
four days after he became acting prime minister following Ariel
Sharon's brain haemorrhage and coma. Olmert held his next
meeting on the subject in March, presumably immediately after
his victory in the elections. There were apparently more talks
in April, May and July.
Rather than the impression that has been created by Olmert of a
rookie prime minister and military novice "going it alone" in
planning a major military offensive against a neighbouring
state, a more likely scenario starts to take shape. It suggests
that from the moment that Olmert took up the reins of power, he
was slowly brought into the army's confidence, first tentatively
in January and then more fully after his election. He was
allowed to know of the senior command's secret and well-advanced
plans for war -- plans, we can assume, his predecessor, Ariel
Sharon, a former general, had been deeply involved in advancing.
But why would Olmert now want to shoulder responsibility for the
unsuccessful war if he only approved, rather than formulated,
it? Possibly because Olmert, who has appeared militarily weak
and inexperienced to the Israeli public, does not want to prove
his critics right. And also because, with most of his political
capital exhausted, he would be unlikely to survive a battle for
Israeli hearts and minds against the army (according to all
polls, the most revered institution in Israeli society) should
he try to blame them for last summer's fiasco. With Halutz gone,
Olmert has little choice but to say "mea cupla".
What is the evidence that Israel's generals had already
established the protocols for a war?
First, an article in the San Franscisco Chronicle, published
soon after the outbreak of war, revealed that the Israeli army
had been readying for a wide-ranging assault on Lebanon for
years, and had a specific plan for a "Three-Week War" that they
had shared with Washington think-tanks and US officials.
"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began
giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to
US and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out
the plan for the current operation in revealing detail," wrote
reporter Matthew Kalman.
That view was confimed this week by an anonymous senior officer
who told the Haaretz newspaper that the army had a
well-established plan for an extensive ground invasion of
Lebanon, but that Olmert had shied away from putting it into
action. "I don't know if he [Olmert] was familiar with the
details of the plan, but everyone knew that the IDF [army] had a
ground operation ready for implementation."
And second, we have an interview in the Israeli media with
Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of one of the highest officials in the
Bush Administration, David Wurmser, Vice-President Dick Cheney's
adviser on the Middle East. Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli citizen,
is herself closely associated with MEMRI, a group translating
(and mistranslating) speeches by Arab leaders and officials that
is known for its ties to the Israeli secret services.
She told the website of Israel's leading newspaper, Yediot
Aharonot, that the US stalled over imposing a ceasefire during
Israel's assault on Lebanon because the Bush Administration was
expecting the war to be expanded to Syria.
"The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did
not fight against the Syrians The neocons are responsible for
the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space. They believed
that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the
thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one
backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight
directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran's]
strategic and important ally [Syria] should be hit."
In other words, the picture that emerges is of a long-standing
plan by the Israeli army, approved by senior US officials, for a
rapid war against Lebanon -- followed by possible intimidatory
strikes against Syria -- using the pretext of a cross-border
incident involving Hizbullah. The real purpose, we can surmise,
was to weaken what are seen by Israel and the US to be Tehran's
allies before an attack on Iran itself.
That was why neither the Americans nor Israel wanted, or appear
still to want, to negotiate with Assad over the Golan and seek a
peace agreement that could -- for once -- change the map of the
Middle East for the better.
Despite signs of a slight thawing in Washington's relations with
Iran and Syria in the past few days, driven by the desperate US
need to stop sinking deeper into the mire of Iraq, Damascus is
understandably wary.
The continuing aggressive Israeli and US postures have provoked
a predictable reaction from Syria: it has started building up
its defences along the border with Israel. But in the Alice
Through the Looking Glass world of Israeli military
intelligence, that response is being interpreted -- or spun --
as a sign of an imminent attack by Syria.
Such, for example, is the opinion of Martin Van Creveld, an
Israeli professor of military history, usually described as
eminent and doubtless with impeccable contacts in the Israeli
military establishment, who recently penned an article in the
American Jewish weekly, the Forward.
He suggests that Syria, rather than wanting to negotiate over
the Golan -- as all the evidence suggests -- is planning to
launch an attack on Israel, possibly using chemical weapons, in
October 2008 under cover of fog and rain. The goal of the
attack? Apparently, says the professor, Syria wants to "inflict
casualties" and ensure Jerusalem "throws in the towel".
What's the professor's evidence for these Syrian designs? That
its military has been on an armaments shopping spree in Russia,
and has been studying the lessons of the Lebanon war.
He predicts (of Syria, not Israel) the following: "Some incident
will be generated and used as an excuse for opening rocket fire
on the Golan Heights and the Galilee." And he concludes:
"Overall the emerging Syrian plan is a good one with a
reasonable chance of success."
And what can stop the Syrians? Not peace talks, argues Van
Creveld. "Obviously, much will depend on what happens in Iraq
and Iran. A short, successful American offensive in Iran may
persuade Assad that the Israelis, much of whose hardware is
either American or American-derived, cannot be countered,
especially in the air. Conversely, an American withdrawal from
Iraq, combined with an American-Iranian stalemate in the Persian
Gulf, will go a long way toward untying Assad's hands."
It all sounds familiar. Iran wants the nuclear destruction of
Israel, and Syria wants Jersualem to "throw in the towel" -- or
so the neocons and the useful idiots of "the clash of
civilisations" would have us believe. The fear must be that they
get their way and push Israel and the US towards another
pre-emptive war -- or maybe two.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. His book "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State" is published by Pluto Press. His
website is www.jkcook.netClick here
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