Dangerous Prime Minister

In writing this column several hours before the release in Jerusalem of the Winograd Report, the summary of the findings of the government commission of inquiry appointed to investigate the failings of last summer's war against Hezbollah, there is no great need to fear jumping the gun.

Some of the report's findings have already been leaked; others are predictable. No one — not Prime Minister Olmert, nor Defense Minister Peretz, nor ex-Chief of Staff Halutz, nor anyone else in the government or army — will come out looking good in it. The only question left to be answered by tomorrow's headlines is who will look worse than whom.

If the leaks have been accurate, the report, which has been said to blame Mr. Olmert for having launched the war against Hezbollah hastily and without a thorough consideration of the alternatives, is unfair to him.

The war could hardly have been launched "unhastily"; if the Hezbollah attack on July 12, in which guerrillas crossed the Israeli border in a carefully planned action to ambush an Israeli army vehicle and kidnap its occupants, had not been responded to forcefully at once, the moment would have been lost.

After all, had Mr. Olmert waited a week or two to "thoroughly consider the alternatives," the situation along the border would meanwhile have calmed down and heavy international pressure would have been brought to bear on him to try negotiating the soldiers' return. Starting a belated war then would have seemed far more unreasonable, and would have earned him worse grades in any future commission of inquiry's report, than starting it when he did.

And there were good reasons for going to war. For years, ever since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in the early summer of 2000, Hezbollah had been building up its forces there and staging provocative cross-border incidents, to which Israel responded with mere token ripostes.

Every such incident heightened domestic criticism of government inaction; every one increased worries that Israel was losing its deterrent credibility not only vis-à-vis Hezbollah, but also vis-à-vis the entire Arab world. Had Mr. Olmert done nothing after the July 12 incident, which was the worst and most lethal of them all — besides the two kidnapped men, eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the localized fighting that followed — this criticism would have reached a crescendo, and rightly so.

Moreover, Mr. Olmert, as he has sensibly contended, did not simply decide to launch the war by his lonesome self. He consulted his Cabinet, which approved it unanimously, and he consulted the army, which was strongly in favor of it and assured him that it was prepared to do the job. Why should he not have believed it?

And what were the "alternatives" that he is now blamed for not having considered? It took Israel four years of negotiating with Hezbollah to obtain, at the price of freeing 400 convicted Palestinian terrorists, the release of Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum, abducted in October 2000, plus the bodies of three Israeli soldiers abducted and killed the same month in a Hezbollah raid similar to last July's.

Had he decided to negotiate the return of the two soldiers kidnapped last July, Mr. Olmert could not have hoped for anything better, or less humiliating. At the moment, in fact, nearly a year later, meaningful negotiations for their return have not even begun.

Given what he knew at the time, Mr. Olmert did the right thing last July. That he should have known more — that the army, for instance, was not prepared; that Hezbollah's rocket capability would survive weeks of air attacks; that the inhabitants of northern Israel subjected to these rockets did not have adequate shelters or support systems — wasn't his fault. He acted, as he should have, on the basis of the information and the military intelligence that were presented to him.

And yet all that having been said, Mr. Olmert should now resign. This is not only because he made other decisions during the war that were his fault, such as prolonging it unnecessarily, once total victory was clearly not attainable, past the point at which an optimal diplomatic settlement could have been reached. It is above all because the Winograd Commission, which he himself appointed, has judged his handling of the war a failure, and this judgment has to be accepted whether it is fair or not. One does not choose to go to court and then refuse to accept the court's verdict.

Of course, Mr. Olmert will almost certainly not resign. He has made it clear in advance that the commission's report, no matter what is in it, will not induce him to do so. He is determined to hang on to power at all costs — and it is precisely this that will make him, a merely ineffective and floundering prime minister until now, a potentially dangerous one from now on.

With his popularity as prime minister already at a record low in the history of Israeli politics, he may now be tempted to take extreme measures to bolster it and prove the Winograd Commission's opinion of him wrong — this time in the direction, not of a hasty war, but of a hastily conceived peace.

Indeed, Mr. Olmert has already been dropping hints that he is about to embark on an all-out "peace offensive" based on a possible acceptance of the "Saudi initiative," which would involve a rollback of Israel to its 1967 borders or very close to them. If he goes ahead and does this out of desperation, as the last political rabbit he can pull out of the hat, he will be doing Israel a far greater disservice than he did when he opted for war last July. That's one more reason for him to resign now.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.