by hilzoy
Yesterday, an Israeli panel issued a damning preliminary report on the war in Lebanon. Among its findings:
“a. The decision to respond with an immediate, intensive military strike was not based on a detailed, comprehensive and authorized military plan, based on careful study of the complex characteristics of the Lebanon arena. A meticulous examination of these characteristics would have revealed the following: the ability to achieve military gains having significant political-international weight was limited; an Israeli military strike would inevitably lead to missiles fired at the Israeli civilian north; there was not another effective military response to such missile attacks than an extensive and prolonged ground operation to capture the areas from which the missiles were fired – which would have a high “cost” and which did not enjoy broad support. These difficulties were not explicitly raised with the political leaders before the decision to strike was taken.
b. Consequently, in making the decision to go to war, the government did not consider the whole range of options, including that of continuing the policy of ‘containment’, or combining political and diplomatic moves with military strikes below the ‘escalation level’, or military preparations without immediate military action – so as to maintain for Israel the full range of responses to the abduction. This failure reflects weakness in strategic thinking, which derives the response to the event from a more comprehensive and encompassing picture. (…)
d. Some of the declared goals of the war were not clear and could not be achieved, and in part were not achievable by the authorized modes of military action.”
It’s worth reading the whole thing; it’s pretty devastating. Despite this, and despite approval ratings at the astonishing level of two percent (h/t Matt Y), Olmert has announced that he has no plans to resign, and that he will instead work to correct the problems the report identified. Since one of the report’s main findings is that the Prime Minister’s conduct adds up to “a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence”, it’s not clear how he proposes to do this — someone who lacks judgment, prudence, and a sense of responsibility is not obviously the best person to figure out how to correct his own flaws. Oh well.
Glenn Greenwald has a very good column about the contrast between Israelis’ response to their failed war and our response to ours. Excerpts:
“First, the contrast between how the Israelis address the failures of their war and the way Americans have addressed our failures in Iraq is depressingly stark. Whereas the Cheney/McCain/ Lieberman/Kristol faction continuously shrieks that recognizing our failures is to aid and abet the Enemy — and therefore we should simply shut our eyes and yell “Victory!” as loudly as possible until we win — the Israelis debated the war from the beginning as candidly and critically as can be, and recognized and openly acknowledged that it had gone terribly awry. (…)
Finally, Israel issued this report even knowing that — to invoke the Cheney-ite cliche — it would “embolden the enemy.” Predictably, Hezbollah immediately cited the Commission’s report as “proof” that it won, that Israel lost, and that in light of the report, “no one will take us lightly from now on, especially since we have only gained strength of late.” Israel obviously knew that the report would be exploited by Hezbollah this way, but it issued it anyway.
Mature societies do not make decisions by wondering what the Bad People want and then automatically doing the opposite. That is the mindset of a child. (…)
All of this underscores a fundamental difference between Israel and the right-wing faction in the U.S. For Israel — whatever else you might think about its policies and government — war is an extremely serious matter. They don’t send other people’s children off to fight the wars they cheer on; their own children fight the wars. During the invasion of Lebanon, missiles continuously landed deep in Israeli territory, killing or wounding hundreds and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes or live in bomb shelters.
Unlike our chest-beating, play-acting warriors here, war is not something that Israelis cheer on for fun like a video game from behind their computer monitor or sitting on their sofa watching CNN or Fox. When they advocate wars, they pay a price. As a result, they don’t have the luxury of shutting their eyes and pretending that things are going well — or exploiting accusations of treason in order to stifle war criticisms — or cheering on failing wars for years for no reason other than to avoid having to admit error or feel weak.”
Glenn is absolutely right. The Israelis know very, very well how serious war is. For that very reason, most of them recognize that they do not have the luxury of (for instance) not issuing a report like this on the grounds that it might embolden Hezbollah. As Glenn points out, it did. But the harm that did is nothing compared to the harm that would be done were Israel not to try to figure out what went wrong, and how to correct it. Because, in the long run, the best way not to embolden Hezbollah is: not to lose. (Compared to actual losing, admitting you lost is trivial.) And the best way not to lose is to learn everything you can from your mistakes.
That Israel released this report is to its great credit as a country (unlike the actual war itself.) If we took war seriously, and realized that it has serious consequences, we’d be doing the same thing. As it is, we seem to be content to incur horrible consequences, and to inflict them on others, without being willing to think seriously about what went wrong, and how we can learn from it. Altogether too many of us are not willing even to ask whether our leaders’ stupid decisions and surreal ineptitude has made the situation in Iraq hopeless, preferring to throw our soldiers’ and Iraqis’ lives away rather than face up to our own failure. While Israel’s response to the war does it great credit, ours should make us ashamed.
Whereas the Cheney/McCain/ Lieberman/Kristol faction continuously shrieks that recognizing our failures is to aid and abet the Enemy — and therefore we should simply shut our eyes and yell “Victory!” as loudly as possible until we win — the Israelis debated the war from the beginning as candidly and critically as can be, and recognized and openly acknowledged that it had gone terribly awry.
That is standard practice in Israel. They can’t afford to blunder and look the other way. Cheney and company think we can afford to spend Treasure and blood for their own personal sake.
I think the differences between how the two countries wage war explains this. In Israel, everyone is involved in war via their conscription policy, including women and powerful people. Here war is something we farm out to a small group of people with very little power: low-income, low-education, many minority members, etc. Even during the Vietnam draft, anyone with money or a little power could evade the draft, eg through educational deferments (as both Bush and Cheney did). So there’s very little political pressure to examine wars, or consider concluding them due to lack of success here.
“Here war is something we farm out to a small group of people with very little power: low-income, low-education, many minority members, etc.”
While having a sound point at base, this, as stated, is a significant exaggeration, and one that unnecessarily offers a refutable point to anyone who wants to argue with the larger point.
I would be unsurprised if, say, Andrew, or countless other serving personnel, felt insulted by being characterized this way. This is a problem with significant exaggerations.
If it just included “to an unfortunate extent, a significant number of enlisted personnel are…” or some similar modifier, you’d avoid this avoidable problem.
Otherwise you’re asking for pointless debates like the one about Kerry’s garbling his own joke.
I don’t agree: I think Israel’s handling of their post-war is disasterous, even worse than the U.S.’s. Their war was handled better then ours, but their prime minister has been pummeled all out of proportion.
Moreover, Olmert’s problem was that he failed to stand up to an overconfident military establishment – because anything other than a supraggressive military response is politically toxic in Israel, even when that military response is counterproductive, or hopelessly incapable of achieving its stated goals.
Israel had no way of destroying Hizballah, but they gave it a try anyway. Other than killing lots of undeserving Lebanese and failing to solve their Lebanon-based opposition, however, their military policy wasn’t that bad. I.E., they probably succeeded in deterring Hizballah.
The reaction to being stupidly over-reliant on military force, thus leading to strategic failure, is to blame Olmert and use any tactical failures as an excuse to pretend that the strategic problems with over-reliance on military force aren’t really there.
When they replace him with Netanyahu, Netanyahu will take them into a similar blind alley. They’ve learned nothing. It’s a very sad thing.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the report except for the passages excerpted in this post, but I’m struck by the way in which it seems to contradict the already-documented fact that the Olmert government’s wildly disproportionate, all-out-war response to the Hezbollah provocation had been planned far in advance of the event.
It strikes me, in other words, as very similar to criticisms of the Iraq invasion and occupation based on “incompetence” and “mishandling”, versus criticisms based on the illegality and fatally ill-conceived nature of the project to begin with.
“…all-out-war response to the Hezbollah provocation had been planned far in advance of the event.”
Of course it was planned. And there are Israeli plans right now to attack every one of its neighbors!
You’re not acknowledging the distinction between contingency planning and “we will attack one year from today, bwahahaha!”
I’m completely in agreement, now, that much or most or all of the Israeli response was bad policy, a mistake, but implying, or explicitly stating, that the response was planned to a date certain, in advance, isn’t based in fact.
Rephrasing, in an attempt for clarity, criticizing that the contingency plan put into effect was a terrible idea, sure, that’s an essential part of the report. But it doesn’t support, and neither does any other information I’m presently aware of, a claim that prior to the Hezbollah kidnapping there was an Israeli specific intent to attack Lebanon that week, or month, or quarter of the year, or whatever.
I can’t find anything in your cite that says remotely otherwise: being “prepared” certainly doesn’t say it.
Israel’s actual attack: very bad idea (yes, I withheld judgment at the time; that time is long past).
Israel being prepared with an attack plan? They’d be insane not to have one.
They also have plans to, if necessary, counter-attack against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, etc. That doesn’t mean they’re intending to do so any time soon. It’s not nefarious. They just need to be prepared.
There was an Israeli plan to respond to a provocation with Hezbollah with a war-scale response, regardless of the scale of the incident would have justified it. It was reviewed with and by the U.S. military and senior administration officials. That’s different than regular old contingency planning.
“…regardless of the scale of the incident would have justified it.”
Perhaps I missed evidence of this; it’s entirely possible. What do you point to as such evidence?
Gary, you’re refering to contingency planning. That wasn’t the case here. Israel was moving their military forces away from Gaza and toward Lebanon. They were going to attack Hezbolah, but not until they were ready. Why they wrecked so much else of Lebanon, without really deterring Hezbollah, I don’t know.
Nell — I think this –” Some of the declared goals of the war were not clear and could not be achieved, and in part were not achievable by the authorized modes of military action.” — is pretty close to saying that the war was ill-conceived.
Basically speaking, most of the key conclusions of the Winograd report blame Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz for letting Chief of Staff Dan Halutz steamroll them into activating Halutz’s favorite plan, about which he stifled dissent from elsewhere in the IDF from being expressed to the Cabinet.
If these guys weren’t to blame for what they did in July of 0f 2006, then the Winograd Report is wrong (I don’t think it is).
What would be the basis for asserting that there was no operational responsibility in July, 2006, but that it all belongs to sometime a year or more before? Did these men not have any other choices available in July of 200?
To quote from the Haaretz link Hilzoy gave:
Presumably either Olmert and Peretz made a “decision of the government on the fateful evening of the 12th to authorize a sharp military response,” or they didn’t, and the key decision was sometime months ago, somehow locking in and committing the future Israeli government to this attack.
I don’t follow how that works, I’m afraid.
The Israelis don’t feel safe enough to engage in the luxury of wishful thinking. Although the US politicians use fear as a motivator, it’s more the boogieman in the closet rather than a realistic threat of invasion.
I recall reports that the Olmert government had the Lebanon contingency plan on standby, and were waiting for a good enough excuse to go :
Does the report say anything about Israel’s responsibility for killing innocent Lebanese civilians? If so, I’m impressed. If not, I’m not.
I’m wondering if anyone has a metric they’d like to propose for when contingency planning becomes, well, more than contingency planning. Some unformed thoughts
-when they are taken out of the hands of military planners and used by political officials
-when they are carried out irrespective of the provocation
I’m not really sure what kind of measure to use, so I’d be interested in a general formulation, followed by a discussion of how the case of Israel-Lebanon fits or doesn’t fit such a case.
“Does the report say anything about Israel’s responsibility for killing innocent Lebanese civilians?”
That wasn’t its mandate, so unsurprising if the answer is “no” (I’ve not read the full [interim] report yet, either; only the summary).
Its mandate was “To look into the preparation and conduct of the political and the security levels concerning all the dimensions of the Northern Campaign which started on July 12th 2006”.
I thoroughly favor and agree that an official Israel examination of the human rights, and rules of war, aspects of the war, and into any possible war crimes, is a moral necessity.
But that’s a criticism that, I think, needs to stand alone, since criticizing this report for not doing what it isn’t tasked to do isn’t, it seems to me, reasonable; the need for a human rights investigation is a separate need.
On the other hand, it could fit into that description, and, besides, this is only the interim report.
So perhaps human rights topics will be included in the final report: impossible to say for sure until it’s issued.
“I recall reports that the Olmert government had the Lebanon contingency plan on standby, and were waiting for a good enough excuse to go”
I take it you didn’t click on Nell’s link.
Not sure exactly of Gary’s point (or counterpoint), but if I recall correctly, the Israeli’s were planning to take serious action against Hezbollah for months in advance. They had plenty of reason for contemplating it (increased provocations and increased missile stocks, for example). The incident with the soldiers became the trigger for a much broader war, which had been in the works for months.
It is not “contingency planning” in the sense that “this is what we’ll do if some of our soldiers are abducted.” It was a war plan waiting for a casus belli to justify naked aggression against Lebanon in general.
The primary thing wrong with it was that terror bombing as a way to make a point was not going to work. How many innocent Lebanese continue to die because of Israel’s immoral use of cluster bomb munition to de facto mine the border region in the final 48 hours of the war?
“I’m wondering if anyone has a metric they’d like to propose for when contingency planning becomes, well, more than contingency planning.”
Sure: just off-the-top-of-my-head, and subject to revision by me if I regret winging it, something along the lines of: when responsible political leadership issue an order that puts into motion such actions of a military plan that make military strikes essentially inevitable.
I’m trying to avoid much more quoting from the official summary of the report (which if people wish to discuss, might actually behoove them to read it — it’s shorter than plenty of long newspaper articles), because it is long enough, but pretty much all of it is in contradiction to the idea that the crucial decisions were taken in July. Those are the the heart of the report. I don’t understand how it’s faintly possible to read the summary and put all the blame on people a year or more before. Unless one is claiming the report is all phony or wrong, or something along that line.
It’s very clear about “the decision to strike” being taken in July, 2006, by these people.
Etc. This took place in July, 2006; not a year earlier.
I don’t understand the logic by which the leaders of July, 2006, shouldn’t bear moral culpability for their decisions. Did orbital mind-control rays force them to put the plan that they did into action? Did they swear a blood oath a year earlier to never consider extant conditions, and thus they were compelled against all reason? I just don’t follow what’s even being suggested.
On preview, I notice that dmbeaster has written:
Um, so, how do you know this?
I place moral responsibility, as I’ve said, on Olmert, Peretz, Halutz, and the cabinent. Not on “war plan waiting for a casus belli.”
War plans don’t have intentions. Or moral responsibility. The people in charge at a given time do. When did this become controversial?
“…but pretty much all of it is in contradiction to the idea that the crucial decisions were taken in July.”
weren’t taken.
weren’t.
Sorry.
I suppose Olmert will leave office before Bush. Until he does, the report will remain just a report.
Completely off-topic, but since this is the most recent thread: Incidentally, when did this become the practice?
I realize it’s almost certainly a Typepad thing — I have no idea whether bloggers have any option or not — but I don’t know that it’s an improvement.
Two percent!? I’d say that’s an important difference there. If the US public didn’t contain 30 percent dead-ender Bushites, the media and politicians would behave differently and we’d be in a very different situation.
Then again, maybe it’s the behavior of our media and politicians that creates and sustains the dead-enders.
Nothing on Lebanon, but a possibly relevant historical factoid on contingency planning vs. plotting for war.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 the Secretary of the Navy (Long?) was away from Washington. In charge was his deputy (Under-Secretary) Theodore Roosevelt, an avowed imperialist. It was Roosevelt who ordered Commodore Dewey to leave Hongkong and attack Manila, an action which became the first step toward the eventual American annexation of the Philippines.
For a century, this sequence of events has been used as evidence (by anti-imperialists both here and in the Philippines) of American designs on the Philippines going back to before the outbreak of the war. Only one piece of evidence, to be sure, but it formed part of a mosaic of plotting that the critics were madly (de)constructing for decades. (And some still are, I suspect.)
But a couple of decades ago someone writing military history actually happened to check on US Navy war planning in the 1890s and – lo and behold – it turns out that the Naval War College had produced, as they should, a whole set of contingency plans and, under the heading of possible war with Spain, had laid down instructions for the Pacific which may be summarized as: “Pacific Fleet should head straight for Manila to try to engage the Spanish fleet there, before it sets out to attack California.”
It appears, therefore, that TR’s imperialist bent had nothing directly to do with Dewey’s attack on Manila. Long would probably have done the same thing; so would anyone else left in charge, down to the Third Under-Secretary For Marginal Manoeuvres And Leftover Laundry.
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
FWIW, I think the headlines on the front page of Haaretz at the moment are a good cross-section of much Israeli reaction and current concerns:
For those who don’t know, btw, regarding those last, Balad is one of the Arab parties, and Azmi Bishara is its leader; he resigned from the Knesset a little over a week ago.
One thing Israel is never lacking for is scandal and controversy. Okay, two things.
“When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 the Secretary of the Navy (Long?)”
John D. Long. A former Massachusetts Governor and Congressman. He stayed on as SecNav when his former assistant became President.
John Hay allegedly said that the best thing McKinley ever did was get shot, so TR could become President, but it doesn’t seem to be John D. Long’s fault that, out of all the accomplishments of his life, history may best remember him as having been out of the office when Teddy was around.
“It appears, therefore, that TR’s imperialist bent had nothing directly to do with Dewey’s attack on Manila.”
A quite interesting point, entirely worth making. One might also note, though, that it still remains that TR was an imperialist, and one of the very most noisiest, and his views carried some weight, whereas Long was not an imperialist. Almost random cite before I fall asleep:
There’s some other stuff there that I’m too sleepy to try to cross-check right now, but I don’t think that all of this sort of thing has been discredited.
The 2% approval (compared to the glorious ~30% of GWB) may have something to do with the fact that Olmert is attacked from both left and right. For those left of him, he is a bellicist, for those to the right of him he is a weakling who doesn’t know how to hit hard enough (the same as the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in WW1). Israel has an “alternative” to the right of Olmert, the US realistically* has not (thank whatever higher power there is, if any).
*i.e. no chance of becoming legally elected
Completely off-topic, but since this is the most recent thread: Incidentally, when did this become the practice?
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Actually, it seems to be a bit trickier than that. If you have a typepad registration, it goes to your profile page, which may or may not be a good idea if your profile page gives some hint to your real life identity. If you list a web page, it redirects to that web page, and you can see the web page address in a mouseover, presumably if you have turned on the correct knobs and faucets on your browser.
If you just list an email and no webpage, you have no link, as Hartmut’s post above seems to indicate.
So, check your typepad registration to make sure that it doesn’t reveal too much. Or, alternatively, you are welcome to redirect to TiO at http://hocb.net/ if you don’t have a webpage of your own.
So, it sounds like the analog of this for the USA would have been Rumsfeld planning the attack while ignoring the data he needed from the military, and then Bush failing to find out that Rummy’s plan wouldn’t work.
And what makes them go on a witch-hunt to decide whose fault it was, is that with multiple parties their guys on the ultra-right don’t feel like they have to support Olmert to keep the leftist crazies out. It isn’t a choice of the lesser of two evils, they have a solid chance to come out on top themselves.
I don’t see that it’s to israel’s great credit to release the report. It looks like politics as usual for them. It’s to our great discredit that we don’t release such reports — except, why should we? We certainly can’t expect the current administration to release reports that make the administration look bad. And whatever reports help the military improve their procedures can be handled entirely within the military. The taxpayers’ place is to pay their taxes and be grateful for our brave soldiers who keep them safe.
The difference between contingency plans and attack plans?
Say we have a plan for what to do in case the mexican army invades the USA. That’s a contingency plan.
Say we have a plan for how to invade mexico. We put a lot of effort into updating it so we can do it soon. We move supplies and troops to be ready to do it. We move aircraft carriers to the mexican coast. We move Special Forces into mexico to prepare the way. And then a bunch of texas national guardsmen gets into a bar fight in mexico and they lose to a larger number of off-duty mexican soldiers and then get thrown in jail, and we invade mexico. Not contingency planning.
Clearly there’s a lot of room for intermediate cases, and israel’s is an intermediate case. When israeli soldiers were taken prisoner and israel wanted them back, of course the first approach was to try to hurt hizbollah enough that they’d surrender and return the soldiers rather than get hurt worse. But hizbollah didn’t surrender. They were dug in too deep, as everybody who lived in southern lebanon should have been. If you live in tornado alley in kansas you have a tornado shelter. You don’t say “Maybe I won’t ever get hit by a tornado.”. If iyou live in southern lebanon you need a bomb shelter because the israelis are going to bomb you. Not if but when. Stupid civilians, getting killed because they were utterly unprepared.
So the israelis needed to stop hizbollah from moving the prisoners out of the area, and they shot at anybody who might be moving the israeli soldiers. The stupid civilians should have known, they needed to have a couple months water and supplies in their shelters and stay there. Trying to leave the area after the bombing started was just asking for it.
And of course it was clear that the prisoners had already been moved out of the area, so israel had to keep everybody from leaving lebanon. For all they knew hizbollah might have rented an old warsaw pact secret prison in eastern europe and they might keep the israeli prisoners there without the knowledge of the czechs or whoever.
Lots of the actions could be argued as necessary responses to the particular situation.
However, the thing is that it was past time for israel to attack hizbollah. If israel let hizbollah get dug in too much, then it would be far too expensive to dig them out. They’d have to accept that hizbollah could live in southern lebanon and israel couldn’t get rid of them. And once they had to accept them as neighbors then eventually they’d have to negotiate with them, and in the long run it would turn into israel being just one more country instead of the nation that kept its implacable enemies continually subjugated. The longer they waited to attack, the worse it would get.
And it turned out that they had already waited too long. A successful attack was already too expensive.
So Olmert’s failure was waiting too long to attack. Probably that was also Sharon’s failure. It could easily be that if Sharon had attacked lebanon he wouldn’t have done much better.
Halutz no doubt made the best plan he could with the resources he had available. And every month the attack was delayed made it that much less likely to succeed. But the alternative was to try for “containment” and watch hizbollah get stronger. So that someday when they inevitably felt they had to attack they’d take even more casualties and face even more of a chance it would be a costly failure.
They’ll have the same problem if they ever try to give independence to palestine. The more rope they give the palestinians the more weapons the palestinians will smuggle in and the harder it will be when israel has to invade again. The longer they go without crushing their enemies the harder to crush their enemies become.
Gary:
On preview, I notice that dmbeaster has written:
[…] It is not “contingency planning” in the sense that “this is what we’ll do if some of our soldiers are abducted.” It was a war plan waiting for a casus belli to justify naked aggression against Lebanon in general.
Um, so, how do you know this?
Two reasons come to mind. First, the response was all out of proportion to the provocation at hand. Second, it was widely reported that the broad scope of action was something long planned, and not something fashioned as a response to the abductions. I don’t know that those reports were themselves correct, although I have yet to see a denial of that storyline.
One criticism in the report is that the overall plan was not well thought out — that would be true whether or not it was put together in June, 2006 as opposed to over the prior year. Another criticism is that little thought was given in 2006 to the full range of implications of the war plan. Again, that is not indicative of timing for generating the plan.
A contingency plan is something put together so that you are not caught flat-footed by an unexpected event, or are unprepared to take action even though you are not actively contemplating such action at the time. By definition, it is something that you are not actively contemplating doing. The Israeli attack on Lebanon was not a contingency plan in this sense because it was not something planned in order to be better prepared for an unexpected event. It seems that the Israelis wanted to initiate the broader war as a means of dealing with the greater Hezbollah threat. Starting it up out of the blue would have been politically ugly — hence the roll out after the soldier abductions.
“They had plenty of reason for contemplating it (increased provocations and increased missile stocks, for example).
…
It was a war plan waiting for a casus belli to justify naked aggression against Lebanon in general.
I think it would be difficult to characterize a US military attack on Canada, say, as “naked agression”, if a party which was part of Canada’s government was routinely launching missles over the border into US population centers, and the Canadian government wasn’t making any efforts to stop it. So let’s not pretend that this war, whether or not it was prudent, was based on some feeble pretext.
Brett:
If the faction in Quebec was responsible, and we were bombing British Columbia based on that, then yes, it is a feeble pretext for a broader war. Particularly since the notion that the new government of Lebanon had the means but not the will to suppress Hezbollah is wrong.
And I made it clear that there was good reason for taking military action against Hezbollah. Engaging in terror bombing of Lebanon in general was a pretty crappy response to the problem.
The problem was not that Israel had just cause to take military action against Hezbollah — it lacked just cause to do what it actually did based on the notion of taking military action against Hezbollah.
Score one for dmbeaster.