Israel was not provoked into the war with Lebanon

Israel & Palestine Forum

Israel was not provoked into the war with Lebanon when the 2 Israeli soldiers were captured. Israel planned the attack months in advance and then waited for something which would give them an excuse to bomb the country.

Apart from successfully devastating the infrastructure in Lebanon, killing over a 1000 with bombs dropped from the sky, destabalising the democratic government, and increasing support for Hizbullah, all the objectives failed, and the war went wrong because "the Israeli army had become accustomed to fighting the ill-equipped Palestinians and was not prepared for Hizbullah 's expertise."

Olmert/Bush, which leader is the most incompetent?

Olmert does appear to be displaying some incompetence.

I doubt it was a pre concevied plan to attack Lebanon. Obvioulsy we are dealing with the Guardian here so we have to be skeptical to say the least they have set out thier stall on the US, Middle East, China and the Iraq situation a long time ago. What I think is that Israel had a contingency plan drawn up in case they were attacked from Lebanon and of course the reaoin it failed so spectacualry was they they used a plan to fight the Lebanese army.
Most countries have these kind of plans do you think that the British government don't have contingency plans for another attack on the Falklands or a Spanish attack on Gibralter? of course they do but it does not mean that Tony Blair is looking for war with Argentina or Spain and when or if Gordon Brown come to power he will review the plans with his defence sec and pick one again does not mean he is planning war just beiung ready. I think Olmert was doing that when he wanted to see plans in March.

I take your point about government's contingency plans but that doesn't change the point of the story: did Olmert want to attack Lebanon anyway and he merely used the Hizbulllah incident as a convenient justification to bomb the country. These tit-for-tat kidnappings, and cross-border incidents are nothing new.

As the Guardian story says, the leak could well be just a way of helping to get rid of Olmert because it shows he had a plan and still screwed up badly. If there was no plan and it was retaliation for the Hizbullah incident (as he claimed at the time) he could possilby have been forgiven for the failure of the war.