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The
real aim of Lebanon war finally
revealed |
Posted By Emma Sabry
The Israeli government has long
claimed that the primary objective of
last summer’s war in Lebanon was to
retrieve two soldiers captured by
Hezbollah in July.
But a top military commander recently
revealed the real aim of the war.
"After a couple of hours it
became clear that we would not get the
kidnapped soldiers back through
military means," Gadi Eisenkott,
director of operations at the time of
the war, told a group of students
during a speech at a local school.
Eisenkott also asserted that the
primary objective of Israel’s
offensive in Lebanon was to deal a
major blow to Hezbollah, a mission
that Israel failed to achieve.
Eisenkott's speech caused uproar in
Israel as it contradicted claims by
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who
alleged in a series of important
speeches to the Knesset and the media
that the key goal of the war was to
secure the release of the two
soldiers.
It came just a few days before the
release of a report by a
government-commissioned panel that’s
expected to criticize Olmert’s
handling of the 34-day war against
Hezbollah, prompting many Israeli
analysts to speculate that the prime
minister wouldn’t survive the
political fallout and would be forced
to step down.
Eisenkott’s remarks assert
speculations of several Middle East
analysts who said that Israel used
Hezbollah’s capture of the two
soldiers as an excuse for launching
the deadly offensive in Lebanon, in
which more than 1,200 mostly Lebanese
civilians died.
The Israeli army also lost 116
soldiers, and 43 civilians who were
killed by more than 4,000 Hezbollah
rocket attacks.
A UN-brokered ceasefire ended the
Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in August,
with Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan
Nasrallah declaring a strategic
victory over Israel, whose failure to
retrieve the two captured soldiers,
crush Hezbollah or halt its daily
cross-border rocket attacks led the
Israelis to view the war as a failure.
Since the war ended, there have been
widespread calls for Olmert to resign.
Approval ratings for the prime
minister, already implicated in a
series of corruption probes, have
reached unprecedented lows, and his
political future became uncertain.
"The pressure is rising all
around Ehud Olmert and his chair could
soon be vacated," said a
commentator on army radio.
However, some Israeli analysts
speculate that Olmert’s popularity
could rise if he reached out to his
leftist base and resume peace talks
with the Palestinian Authority or the
Syrian government.
According to an article on World Net
Daily, Olmert, extremely worried about
the conclusions of the upcoming repot,
met with leading leftist officials and
promised them to reach a final status
agreement with the Palestinians and
carry out Israeli withdrawals from the
occupied West Bank in exchange for
their continued support.
The report is expected to be
especially critical of Olmert's
decision to launch a massive ground
offensive in Lebanon in August, just
48 hours before the UN ceasefire
resolution was imposed. According to
Israeli defense sources, the army had
petitioned for a massive invasion to
crush Hezbollah since the start of the
war in July, but the prime minister
delayed the launch of the operation
till the last minute.
Former IDF chief of staff Moshe
Ya'alon said Olmert delayed the
large-scale operation for political
reasons. "That was a spin
move," Ya'alon said. "It had
no substantive security-political
goal, only a spin goal. It was meant
to supply the missing victory
picture.”
"For that you don't even need a
commission of inquiry," he said.
"Whoever made that decision has
to assume responsibility and
resign."
Military leaders have been probing
whether Olmert knew a truce would be
imposed within two days when he
approved the large-scale ground
operation.
"It's possible Olmert knew a
cease-fire was coming. If so, our
stepped-up operation that he approved
two days earlier was a pointless
exercise in which troops were killed.
This is a very serious
situation," a senior military
official said.
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