Last update - 00:00 09/09/2007
Netanyahu to Winograd panel: Decision to enter war was hasty
By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent
Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu told the Winograd war inquiry commission that the decision to enter the Second Lebanon War was extremely hasty, a report published Sunday revealed.
The opposition leader also told the panel, which is charged with investigating political and military failures during the war, that he had been surprised that the Israel Defense Forces hadn't mobilized any reserve units at its onset on July 12.
Netanyahu said that he had met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on the first day of the war and asked him whether reserve units had already been mobilized. Olmert answered in the negative, and it took more than a week for a wide call-up of reservists to begin.
"Olmert was immersed in the war, military secretary Gadi Shamni came in, there were telephones ringing, and it wasn't a very long conversation... I asked him what was next, but didn't get a clear answer," Netanyahu told the war commission.
The former prime minister added that he had presumed that air raids - on which the Israel Defense Forces relied to fight Hezbollah at the start of the war - could not effectively tackle missile fire from southern Lebanon. Netanyahu insisted that he held this view during his premiership in the 1990s.
He submitted to the panel a government paper, dating from February 1999, which said that "the prime minister's opinion is that containing Katyusha fire from the air is virtually impossible."
However, he said that when the Second Lebanon War broke he thought that "the moment holds great opportunities," but did not elaborate further.
Netanyahu said that during his premiership between 1996 and 1999, despite opposition from the security establishment, he promoted the formation of an advisory panel (the National Security Council), but left office before the process was complete. Netanyahu said that Ehud Barak, his successor, was to blame for bringing the panel's formation to a halt.
The Likud chair dubbed Barak's decision to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 as "highly problematic." He said that "the way it was carried out was perceived as giving in to terror" and "the symbolic and defining moment, Nasrallah's speech by the fence - in which the Hezbollah leader likened Israel to a cobweb - was a breach of the deterrence effect I wanted to create."
Netanyahu said that he saw a link between "the hasty withdrawal from Lebanon and the eruption of the Intifada, because the former proved, whether correctly or not, that Israel runs away from terror, and that it can be driven away from other fronts by terror."