Israel Regroups on Approach to War Inquiry
The government pulls the plug on its panel while Olmert considers whether to heed calls for a broader probe. Troops push for resignations.
By Henry Chu, Times Staff Writer
August 23, 2006
JERUSALEM — After one day's work, the Israeli government suspended its review of the way it conducted the war in Lebanon, officials said Tuesday, as scores of reserve soldiers back from the fighting rallied here to press for the resignation of top political figures.
The Defense Ministry halted the work of its war review committee Monday to give Prime Minister Ehud Olmert more time to decide whether to authorize a fuller examination of Israel's monthlong air campaign and ground incursion against the Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Calls for a more aggressive and independent inquiry have grown louder daily as anger here over what some call indecisive and incompetent wartime leadership has snowballed since a cease-fire took effect last week. Some of the harshest criticism has come from military reservists, whose voices carry great weight in Israeli society. The veterans protesting in Jerusalem on Tuesday evening demanded that Olmert, his defense minister and the army's chief of staff step down.
The demonstrators accused the three of rushing into full-scale armed conflict without having adequately laid the military groundwork, and then of dithering over the war's objectives and how to realize them. That resulted in confusing and sometimes needlessly perilous orders on the ground, they said. "The big heads should be the ones to go," said Yossi Avigor, 29, a reserve infantryman who spent two weeks fighting in western Lebanon. "They tried, they failed, they should go home." Families of fallen soldiers, as well as civic groups upset by the state's treatment of northern Israelis who spent weeks under attack from Hezbollah rockets, also have castigated the nation's leaders. The opposition from so many quarters has presented Olmert's young government with its severest crisis in less than four months in power.
With many Israelis concluding that the war achieved few of the government's stated aims — including the rescue of two reservists whose July 12 capture by Hezbollah guerrillas sparked the offensive — Olmert is under intense pressure to find a way to prevent the backlash from knocking him and his fledgling Kadima party out of office. Officials are acutely aware that discontent among reserve soldiers, and the mass movement it sparked, helped bring down the government of former Prime Minister Golda Meir after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a confrontation in which Israel was caught unprepared. Much of Olmert's fate is now likely to depend on how he responds to demands for a thorough investigation into his security Cabinet's management of the recent war, Israel's second in Lebanon in the last 25 years.
more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-israel23aug23,0,1506520.story?coll=la-home-headlines
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