Israel's verdict: we lost the war

As the first day passes and the ceasefire holds, a war of words has broken out between Israel and Hizbullah with both Nasrallah and Olmert claiming victory.

Olmert's claims had a hollow ring, as did President Bush's - accompanied by his now almost daily tirade against Iran - the enemy he hoped to bring down by the Israeli attack.

But whilst Bush and Olmert remained - in public at least - confident they had secured a victory, the Israeli parliament, unused to failure, refused to play along with the Olmert/Bush script.

Olmert was frequently heckled as he admitted "shortcomings" although he went on to claim that:

Hizbollah had been dealt a "harsh blow". He added that the guerrilla group was no longer "a state within a state" or a "terrorist organisation that is allowed to act inside a state as an arm of the axis of evil", referring to Syria and Iran.

Benjamyn Netanyahu, a man who Olmert's election had cast into the political wilderness wasted no time in stepping into the void that Israel's non-victory had create.

While refraining from a direct personal attack on Mr Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right- wing Likud opposition, lost little time in declaring "there were many failures, failures in identifying the threat, failures in preparing to meet the threat, failures in the management of the war, failures in the management of the home front."

Critics from right and left were fortified by a Globes Smith poll showing, remarkably given the degree to which the army is embedded in Israeli society, that 52 per cent of electors believed the Israel Defence Forces had been unsuccessful in its Lebanon offensive as opposed to 44 per cent who believed it did well.

Mr Netanyahu also pointedly chose to attack unilateral withdrawals - the issue on which Mr Olmert fought his election in March. Mr Netanyahu said: "We left Lebanon to the last centimetre and they are firing. We left Gaza to the last centimetre and they are firing."

He will now argue that it was the withdrawals that created the instability rather than the occupation. And because of Bush and Olmert and Blair's stupidity, he will be listened to as he states this nonsense. Arguments that were long ago defeated will be given fresh life by this historic blunder these fools have made.

On the ground in Lebanon Robert Fisk reports that Hizbullah are in no doubt over who has proven victorious.

You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying destruction - way south of the Litani river, in the territory from which Israel once vowed to expel them - to realise the nature of the past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over 36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria - which was the Israeli-American plan - these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah's reputation lionised across the Arab world. The "opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armour was to be seen inside Lebanon - just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of their cars , many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens. At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were wounded yesterday.

Bush is used to claiming victory in wars that the rest of the world can see that he has lost so he is in familiar territory. I am unsure , however, that the Knesset will allow Olmert to claim victory where none exists. Indeed, not only has Israel not won, her international reputation is in shreds and her feared military might that deterred all her enemies has been undermined.

Bush, Blair and Olmert have made Israel less safe. It may be only Olmert who pays the political price but we will never forget that Olmert only fired the gun. It was Bush and Blair who loaded the bullets.

If I was dealing with anyone other than the neo-cons I would say that Bush's plans for a wider Middle Eastern war died in southern Lebanon. The tragedy is that their plans haven't died as these guys think reality is something that they create.

They may have been dealt a blow, but we must never delude ourselves that a new Middle East is no longer their overall aim. These guys don't learn from mistakes, they simply repeat them on a larger scale.

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Tags: Israel, Lebanon, Olmert, Netanyahu, Bush, neo-cons