[DEBATE] : Jonathan Cook: Olmert's leaked testimony reveals real goal of summer war

[Salim Vally]

Olmert's leaked testimony reveals real goal of summer war By Jonathan
Cook, Electronic Lebanon, 13 March 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6660.shtml

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 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. However, 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
around.)

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 Israeli 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.


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