RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war was a missed opportunity and a grave failure for the Jewish state, a key report said yesterday while sparing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert from a major roasting.
While the long-awaited report by a government-appointed commission into the conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia listed a series of severe failings and shortcomings, it said Olmert had acted in Israel’s best interest.
“Overall, we regard the second Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity,” commission head Eliyahu Winograd said. Olmert, who had faced mounting calls to quit ahead of the report’s release, said he was “satisfied” by Winograd’s findings, according to an official in his entourage.
Hezbollah, however, gloated that the report confirmed its guerrillas had defeated Israel, regarded as having the most powerful military in the Middle East.
In his report, Winograd said: “We found severe failings and flaws in the lack of strategic thinking and planning, in both the political and the military echelons.”
“The way the original decision to go to war had been made; the fact Israel went to war before it decided which option to select and without an exit strategy — all these constituted serious failures, which affected the whole war.” “Responsibility for these failures lay, as we had stressed in the interim report, on both the political and the military echelons.”
Winograd highlighted a controversial ground offensive launched in the dying days of the war, when the United Nations was brokering a cease-fire agreement, saying it did not achieve its objectives.But the retired judge said Olmert and then Defense Minister Amir Peretz “acted out of a strong and sincere perception of what they thought at the time was Israel’s interest.”
His findings come nine months after an interim inquiry found Olmert and other political and military leaders responsible for “severe failures” in the war, launched after Hezbollah seized two soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid in July 2006.
Olmert, 62, is the only senior leader criticized in the preliminary report to have hung on to his job and has been quoted as saying he had “absolutely no intention” of resigning. Former army chief Dan Halutz quit a year ago and Peretz was ousted from the ministry and as head of his Labor Party less than two months after Winograd’s interim findings.
Yesterday’s report had been expected to focus on Olmert’s decision to order a massive ground offensive in south Lebanon 60 hours before a UN-brokered cease-fire agreement was due to take effect on Aug. 14.
