Minister, I felt it was not my place to criticize Olmert publicly when Israeli troops

/ BARAK / 115 Minister, I felt it was not my place to criticize Olmert publicly when Israeli troops were in action. Two days in, in fact, I told a television interviewer that the government had every right to respond and was doing so effectively. Olmert phoned to thank me. When he, like Shimon, asked what I thought the government should do next, I was straightforward: “Do your best to bring things to an end as soon as you can.” I said that Halutz and the other generals would be caught up in the operational details, which made his role and that of the cabinet even more critical. “In any operation, you’ll have an idea about what represents a satisfactory exit point. But there will be a temptation, when you get close to that point, to take just one more step, to keep going until you’re absolutely sure you’ve reached it.” Resist that temptation, I told him. I said there was a danger that, before they knew it, he and the other minister would be in way over their heads. In pure military terms, there were just two realistic choices in responding the Hibzollah attack: a deliberately limited and fairly brief operation, or a full-scale war. We ended up doing neither. The result was an operation that lasted 34 days, nearly twice the length of the Yom Kippur War. Our air force flew 12,000 missions, more than in 1973 and nearly twice as many as in the 1982 Lebanon War. Hizbollah fired about 4,000 rockets into Israel — from a stockpile we estimated to number nearly 20,000 — and not just at the border settlements but as far south as Hadera and Haifa, keeping hundreds of thousands of Israelis under effective siege. More than 120 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were killed. So were hundreds of Hizbollah fighters and, inevitably, many Lebanese civilians as well, with a predictable surge of criticism from much of the outside world. Only President Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair steadfastly reminded the critics of how the war had actually begun. The one putative victory for Israel was the UN cease-fire resolution that Tzipi Livni helped to negotiate in August. At least on paper, it contained a commitment to a “long-term solution” including the disarmament of Hizbollah and the “unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers, which has given rise to the current crisis.” But as Israeli newspapers began speaking to the returning soldiers and officers, a picture emerged not just of a long and difficult war, but a lack of clearly communicated military objectives, and an often-chaotic chain of command, which ended up costing Israeli lives. Our final advance, alone, shortly before the cease-fire, claimed the lives of some 30 soldiers. And for what, many Israelis were soon asking themselves. One of the newspapers most supportive of the operation at A401 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011872