The Winograd commission, whose members were appointed by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, has concluded that Olmert does NOT need to be removed from office

February 5, 2008
From Stalingrad to Winograd

by Uri Avnery

For some days, the country looked like the Place de la Concorde in
1793. The entire public sat expectantly facing the guillotine, waiting
for the tumbrel to bring the marquis, for the marquis to lie down, for
the blade to fall on his neck, and for a soldier to hold up the
bloody, severed head for the amusement of the spectators.

All eyes were fixed on the raised blade of the Winograd commission.
The judge sat down before the cameras and read out the report. But the
blade did not come down. No reserve soldier raised the bloody, severed
head. The head remained in its place. Ehud Olmert is no marquis, and
his head remains firmly on his shoulders.

From one end of the country to the other, a deep sigh of
disappointment. The reporters and commentators sprang from their
seats, like the knitting hags of the Paris square whose marquis has
escaped.

The Winograd commission has failed, the commentators exclaimed in
outrage. To the many failures of the war, the failure of the
commission must now be added.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Every experienced politician knows the axiom: He who chooses the
members of a commission determines its conclusions in advance.

That is almost self-evident. After all, the members of the commission
are only human. Human beings have attitudes and opinions. These are
known in advance to the person who appoints them. He can appoint the
members at will. If he appoints tycoons, he can reasonably expect that
they will not decide to raise the taxes on the rich. If he appoints
leftists instead, the recommendations will be quite different.

Therefore, when the proposed Law of Commissions of Inquiry was
debated, we decided that the members of an "official" commission of
inquiry should not be appointed by the government, but by the
president of the Supreme Court. I was a member of the Knesset at the
time and took an active part in the debate. I proposed that not only
would the chief justice appoint the commission members, but that he -
and not the government - would decide on the setting up of an inquiry
in the first place. (This was rejected.)

That happened seven years before the young Ehud Olmert was first
elected to the Knesset. But he understands the law perfectly. When,
after Lebanon War II, the appointment of an "official" commission of
inquiry was proposed, he objected strenuously. He insisted on a
government-appointed inquiry commission. While the members of an
official commission are appointed by the chief justice, the members of
a government commission are appointed by the government itself.

Vive la petite différence.

The appointment of the Winograd commission was greeted by many doubts.
But these evaporated completely when the interim report was released
last April. It was harsh and uncompromising. It contained very
negative remarks about Olmert.

So the public relaxed. The difference between the two kinds of
commission was forgotten. The Winograd commission behaved exactly like
an "official" commission, took decisions like one and spoke like one.
It raised the guillotine blade, and everybody waited for it to fall on
Olmert's neck.

And then it became clear that la petite différence was a very
substantial difference indeed. The commission appointed by Olmert has
now issued a final report that is favorable to Olmert all along the
line, especially about the accusation that Olmert had decided on the
last-minute "ground operation" and sent soldiers to their deaths to
save his personal prestige.

The commission did not lay any personal blame on any politician or
general. Here it could base itself on a decision of the Supreme Court,
which had expressly forbidden the commission to condemn anyone
personally.

How come? When the Knesset adopted the Commission of Inquiry Law, we
paid much attention to Article 15. It prohibits condemning anyone
without giving him a fair opportunity to defend himself. Such a person
must be warned in advance and invited to appoint a lawyer, to cross-
examine witnesses and to summon witnesses of their own.

That is a long process, and a commission of inquiry is generally in a
hurry to finish its report before the subject of its investigation is
forgotten. For example, the commission of inquiry that was set up
after the Yom Kippur war, under Judge Agranat, just disregarded the
article altogether and decided to dismiss the chief of staff, the
commander of the southern front, and other generals, without giving
them any advance warning at all.

The Winograd commission took another path: when the army authorities
petitioned the Supreme Court and demanded that the commission respect
Article 15, the commission just promised that they would not blame
anybody personally.

The commission could, of course, have described Olmert's part in the
war in such scathing terms as to force him to resign. It did not do
so. On the contrary, it concluded that his decisions were reasonable.

The blade did not fall, Olmert was bruised, but still standing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, the "official" commission
of inquiry chaired by Judge Kahan published an exemplary report which
exposed all the facts. But these could have led it to much harsher
conclusions than it did actually reach. Instead of finding that Ariel
Sharon and his minions were guilty of "indirect responsibility" for
the massacre, it could have decided that they bore direct
responsibility. The facts supported such a conclusion. Why did they
not do so, and only dismissed Sharon and some officers? I assume that
they shrunk back for fear of causing severe damage to the state of
Israel.

Now I could write much the same about the Winograd commission. The
facts exposed by it justify more extreme conclusions. What held them
back? One can guess: the five commission members, all pillars of the
establishment - two generals, two leading academics, one judge - did
not want to topple Olmert, the No. 1 establishment person. Perhaps
they feared that his place would be taken by somebody much worse - a
worry shared by many others in the country.

As prominent establishment figures, the commission members also shrunk
back from touching on two basic questions concerning Lebanon War II:
(a) Why it was started at all, and (b) what had caused the shocking
deterioration of the army.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In its two reports, the commission asserted that the decision to start
the war was taken in a hasty and irresponsible manner. The stated war
aims were quite unattainable. But the commission did not say what had
caused Olmert & Co. - the government of Israel - to make such a
decision.

We now know for sure that plans for the war had been prepared a long
time before. These were rehearsed only a month before the war and
changes were made according to the results. In the end, these plans
were not implemented at all. But it is clear that the government and
the army had long been thinking about attacking Hezbollah.

For six years, the northern border had been completely quiet.
Hezbollah did deploy rockets (as it is doing now) but showed then (as
now) no inclination to attack Israel.

The cross-border incursion in which two Israeli soldiers were captured
was an exception. The action was intended to provide negotiating chips
for the release of Hezbollah prisoners held in Israel (and perhaps to
demonstrate solidarity with Hamas, which had just captured another
Israeli soldier in a similar incursion.) Hassan Nasrallah later
admitted that this was a grave mistake and would not have been done if
he had imagined that it would cause a war. (Olmert, on his part, has
not admitted to any mistake.)

As I said right at the beginning, this incident was a pretext for the
war, not the reason for it. If so, what was the real reason? The
desire of the civilian Olmert for military glory? The dream of the
chief of staff, Dan Halutz, to prove that the air force could win a
war alone, by a massive bombardment of the civilian population? The
illusion that Hezbollah could be eliminated by one big strike?

When Judge Winograd tried to explain why a part of the report must be
kept secret, the words he used attracted no attention: "The security
of the state and its foreign relations." Foreign relations? What
foreign relations? Relations with whom? There is only one reasonable
answer: relations with the United States.

That could be the crux of the matter: Olmert fulfilled an American
wish. President Bush wanted to install his protégé, Fouad Siniora, as
ruler in Beirut. For that end, Hezbollah, the main Lebanese opposition
force, had to be eliminated. Also, Bush wanted to effect a regime
change in Syria, one of the main obstacles to American ambitions in
the region.

I believe that this is the missing link in Winograd's chain. Olmert
could have argued: "I was only obeying orders." But that, of course,
is unspeakable.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other black hole in the report concerns the Israeli army. The
report criticizes it murderously. Never before has the army leadership
been described in such a way - as a bunch of people without character,
talent, or competence; generals who are ready to send soldiers to
their death in an operation they believe to be condemned to failure,
just because they do not dare to stand up to their superiors; generals
who do not demand a clear definition of the objectives before going
into battle; generals who do not recognize the fateful faults of their
army, and who are themselves responsible - they and their predecessors
- for these very faults.

All this is being said now. What has not been said is: how did we get
such a leadership? What has caused these faults?

The answers can be summed up in two words: the occupation.

In the last few years I have written dozens of articles about the
disastrous effects of the occupation on the army. One cannot employ a
whole army for decades as a colonial police force for crushing the
resistance of an occupied population, without changing its character.
Soldiers who run after stone-throwing children in the alleys of the
Qasbah, who hammer at night on the doors of civilians, who use
bulldozers to destroy people's homes, and all this for year after year
- such soldiers are not competent to fight a modern war.

Worse: such a colonial army does not attract the best and the
brightest. These now go into high-tech and science. The brutal work of
the army against civilians and guerrilla fighters disgusts people of
conscience and sensitivity, the very ones who are the backbone of a
good officers' corps. It blunts the senses of those who remain, or
sends them home from the occupied territories traumatized.

In the 40 years of occupation, the Israeli army has lost the kind of
officers that led it in the 1948 and 1967 wars, people like Yitzhak
Sadeh, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin, Ezer Weitzman, Matti Peled, Haim
Bar-Lev, and David Elazar, to mention just a few. Their place has been
taken by a mediocre, faceless group, gray but arrogant technicians,
people of shallow thinking, colonialist and extreme right-wing
attitudes, with an ever increasing percentage of knitted kippa-
wearers.

That is the group the report speaks of - but without saying so. It is
an occupation army in which a negative natural selection process
operates - everyone who does not feel comfortable in this milieu just
leaves. As in any army, the atmosphere prevailing at the top - good or
bad - trickles down the ranks to the meanest soldier.

This is not an army of Stalingrad fighters defending their country -
this is an army of Winograd fighters. An army which no genius can
"repair," as demanded by the commission. Because all the faults stem
from the original sin: the occupation.

http://www.antiwar.com/avnery/?articleid=12310
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Military Women Can Hack It!
    ... book form by Brassey's in 1993): "The average female Army recruit is ... and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. ... "The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about ... physical size and strength of the average male are more than 130-to-1. ...
    (soc.men)
  • Re: Military Women Can Hack It!
    ... > trash (the original article was shit: women do just as well, ... > book form by Brassey's in 1993): "The average female Army recruit is ... "The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about ... > physical size and strength of the average male are more than 130-to-1. ...
    (soc.men)
  • Re: 66th Regiment lookup
    ... Edward Stevenson of the 66th Regiment, who was listed in The Times on 26 October 1875 as retiring from the army by the ... what is meant by retiring from the army by the sale of one's commission and was this a common practice? ...
    (soc.genealogy.britain)
  • 66th Regiment lookup
    ... the army by the sale of his commission. ... which seems odd (unless he was Captain at ... what is meant by retiring from the army by the sale of one's ...
    (soc.genealogy.britain)
  • Israeli unease grows over conduct of war
    ... Israeli unease grows over conduct of war ... A majority want a commission of inquiry into its leadership. ... Sixty-four percent of Israelis, according to an Israeli Radio poll released ...
    (soc.culture.malaysia)