The Osterley Times: Olmert orders a Whitewash

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Olmert orders a Whitewash

Olmert has ordered a whitewash. His excuse?

"We don't have the luxury to spend years examining the past. What we need is a businesslike, professional investigation that gets to the root of the problem quickly," Olmert said in a speech in Haifa, addressing leaders of communities damaged by Hezbollah rocket fire.

He also said he did not want to subject the army to "collective flagellation."

When he says the army, he is also talking about himself. He has rejected both an independent commission of inquiry and a government commission of inquiry which would have had the power to call for resignations.

The inquiry into the government's conduct and functioning during the war will be headed by former Mossad intelligence service chief Nahum Admoni.

Law Professor Ruth Gavison, Professor Yehezkel Dror and Brigadier General (res.) Yedidya Yaari will also serve on the panel.

Olmert emphasized that the decision to go to war had been his alone, and said he was responsible for the war's results. "I want to make one thing clear, the responsibility for the decision to go to war... is entirely mine," the prime minister said.

It's really big of him to state the bloody obvious, that the decision to go to war was his alone, at the exact same time as he sets up an enquiry designed to save him from facing the consequences of that disastrous intervention.

In his speech, Olmert justified the war, saying Israel inflicted heavy damage on Hezbollah. He described the cease-fire, which calls for a beefed-up international force to help police the border, as a major diplomatic success.

Damage was undeniably done to Hizbullah, but the real damage done was to the Irsaeli reputation as a fighting force that trampled all before it.

And to sell the ceasefire as "a major diplomatic success" ignores the fact that the US, UK and Israel went to extraordinary lengths to try to avoid the ceasefire in the first place, such was their confidence that Israel could destroy Hizbullah.

He also said the ground offensive, launched just as the cease-fire agreement was taking form, was "unavoidable," despite the heavy Israeli casualties. He said the offensive put pressure on the United Nations to approve the cease-fire.

This is now bordering on fantasy. The launching of a ground offensive - just as the ceasefire agreement was forming - was one of the most bizarre moves he made in an already highly bizarre military campaign. And to claim that it helped put pressure on United Nations to approve the ceasefire ignores several truths.

1. The United Nations always wanted a ceasefire, it was the US, UK and Israel who didn't.

2. If he's implying, as I think he is, that the ground offensive was pressure to make the UN approve the US version of the resolution that declared victory for Israel where none existed on the ground, then one would have to look at the various drafts that circulated before the vote and ask yourself if the resolutions became more or less favourable to Israel during this time.

The truth is that Lebanon rejected the first resolution proposed and the second was not as favourable to Israel as Olmert might have liked.

The only thing he might be hinting at is that the resolution might have been a lot less favourable had Israel not launched a ground offensive, which is hardly a noble cause for young Israelis to have sacrificed their lives for, especially as the US had the power of veto and, as such, the power to demand that the resolution didn't accurately reflect the sheer scale of Olmert's defeat.

Olmert has only been in office a few months but he has already learned Bush's trick of acting as if reality is what you say it is rather than what facts demand.

However, unlike the USA, the Israeli press is not as cowed as their American counterparts and I find it unlikely that they will sit idly by whilst Olmert attempts to carry out this subterfuge.

Already members of the Labor coalition are expressing their discontent.

Two ministers from the Labor Party, a senior partner in Ehud Olmert's coalition government, said late Monday that they would vote against the prime minister's decision not to hold a state inquiry into the Lebanon war.