Three Years on the Divine Victory, “Israel” Still Divided over Defeat

Source: almanar.com.lb, 14-07-2009

Three years have passed on the "Israeli" devastating war against Lebanon...

Three years have passed on the "Israeli" humiliating and unprecedented defeat and the Divine Victory achieved in Lebanon thanks to the Resistance heroes...

Three years have passed... Yet, the "Israeli" political and military leaders are still divided over the defeat, its interpretations and its repercussions on the army that was, once, believed to be the strongest in the region...

In the third anniversary of the war, "Israeli" former Chief of Staff sought to defend the war decision despite everything that happened afterwards, claiming that it was the "right decision" to make at the time going on to say that he would take the same decision in case the same scenario repeats itself.

"Even today, given the same figures, I would have recommended the same course of action," Halutz told a conference at the Tel Aviv University's Center for Strategic Research on Sunday.

"The course of action that I recommended on July 12 was well-considered, not trellised on the day of the capture" by Hizbullah of two "Israeli" soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid, said Halutz, who led the army at the time of the war.

The former "Israeli" chief admitted, meanwhile, that the decision to launch the Second Lebanon War was not derived directly from the kidnapping of "Israeli" soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser by Hizbullah fighters. "The idea was to push Hizbullah over the edge. Yes, we could have continued burying our heads in the sand, we could have made do with a surgical action and we could have waited longer and launched an even wider operation," he claimed.

"I believed that if we crave life in this Mideast arena, we have to sometimes just 'go crazy'. The government's decision to launch the campaign was right and expressed an understanding of reality," he went on to claim.

Prior to Halutz, his former deputy, Major-General Moshe Kaplinsky, took the podium and told the audience that in his opinion, one of the greatest failures of the Second Lebanon War was the fact that the military campaign lacked any clear operational goals.

Kaplinsky, who served as the "Israeli" army's deputy chief of staff during the 34-day war, said that both the army and the government made numerous mistakes. He noted that the "Israeli" military did not employ its preplanned reaction in case of soldier capture and rocket fire.

"The first mistake we made, our first failure as commanders, was that we were unable to change the general perception of the government and of the public, but mostly that of the military. We couldn't properly explain that this was a war - not the continuance of what we'd been doing in the West Bank for the past six years."