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Israeli War Plan Had No Exit Strategy
Israeli forces fire into southern Lebanon from the frontier in northern Israel on July 12, the day Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in an ambush.
(By Oded Balilty -- Associated Press)
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"I think July 12 was the day she accepted the thesis we submitted weeks before that we were being threatened by a radical axis," a senior Foreign Ministry official said. "This was another in-your-face event that if we allowed to go unpunished would lead to many more abductions."
Livni's chief concern was avoiding the international condemnation of a military strike that accompanied Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. She reached out to the Bush administration, to European governments and to moderate Arab nations, whose Sunni leaders publicly criticized Hezbollah for the ambush and viewed Israel's response as an opportunity to rid the region of a menacing Iranian proxy.
The support she found, according to two senior officials, was surprising given the international criticism that accompanied past Israeli operations in Lebanon. Some within the ministry interpreted the support as encouragement to deepen the war.
"It took us more than a week to understand how the world had changed," the senior Foreign Ministry official said.
Internal Dissent
The internal consensus, trumpeted in public by Israel's leaders, crumbled with the military intelligence assessment. A senior Foreign Ministry official said Livni was briefed on the report at 2 p.m. July 14 and immediately ordered her staff to begin devising a diplomatic exit strategy.
Later that day in a meeting of the seven-member war cabinet, she voted against bombing Hezbollah's urban stronghold in south Beirut. She was concerned that the plan would only bring an escalation in Hezbollah rocket fire and not further the government's goals. Most of the cabinet voted to continue the bombing, according to Foreign Ministry officials, even though a number of cabinet members were expressing angry surprise over the size of Hezbollah's arsenal and tenacity on the ground.
In the days that followed, the cabinet, led by Olmert, continued voting to expand the war as proposed by Halutz and other proponents of the air campaign. While failing to deplete Hezbollah's rocket fire, the Israeli bombardment avoided heavy casualties for Israel, casualties that a major ground invasion would have brought.
Avi Dichter, Olmert's public security minister and a member of the war cabinet who also opposed the bombing of southern Beirut, said 10 days after the military intelligence report was filed that "if there are surprises, I think they are local surprises, not strategic ones."
"You can do this in a very short time," Dichter said. "But you are going to kill many more innocent civilians and cause many more casualties among the troops. We have no intention of doing either."
On Aug. 11, Israel finally went beyond the air campaign and pushed thousands of troops across the border as the debate over a U.N.-brokered cease-fire began. The goal of the troops was to destroy Hezbollah's short-range Katyusha rockets that the air force had been unable to knock out.
Just three days later, the troops froze after Olmert's cabinet accepted the cease-fire terms -- a period when 35 soldiers died, nearly a third of all Israeli troops killed in the war. "We realized we had to do this from the ground," Nehushtan said. "And it was left incomplete."
