Olmert's
Testimony Reveals The Real Goal Of The War In Lebanon
By Jonathan Cook
14 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
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.net