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Minister, I felt it was not my place to criticize Olmert publicly when Israeli troops
were in action. Two days in, in fact, I told a television interviewer that the
government had every right to respond and was doing so effectively. Olmert
phoned to thank me. When he, like Shimon, asked what I thought the government
should do next, I was straightforward: “Do your best to bring things to an end as
soon as you can.” I said that Halutz and the other generals would be caught up in
the operational details, which made his role and that of the cabinet even more
critical. “In any operation, you’ll have an idea about what represents a satisfactory
exit point. But there will be a temptation, when you get close to that point, to take
just one more step, to keep going until you’re absolutely sure you’ve reached it.”
Resist that temptation, I told him. I said there was a danger that, before they knew
it, he and the other minister would be in way over their heads.

In pure military terms, there were just two realistic choices in responding the
Hibzollah attack: a deliberately limited and fairly brief operation, or a full-scale
war. We ended up doing neither. The result was an operation that lasted 34 days,
nearly twice the length of the Yom Kippur War. Our air force flew 12,000
missions, more than in 1973 and nearly twice as many as in the 1982 Lebanon
War. Hizbollah fired about 4,000 rockets into Israel – from a stockpile we
estimated to number nearly 20,000 – and not just at the border settlements but as
far south as Hadera and Haifa, keeping hundreds of thousands of Israelis under
effective siege. More than 120 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were killed. So were
hundreds of Hizbollah fighters and, inevitably, many Lebanese civilians as well,
with a predictable surge of criticism from much of the outside world. Only
President Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair steadfastly reminded the critics of how the
war had actually begun.

The one putative victory for Israel was the UN cease-fire resolution that Tzipi
Livni helped to negotiate in August. At least on paper, it contained a commitment
to a “long-term solution” including the disarmament of Hizbollah and the
“unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers, which has given rise to the
current crisis.” But as Israeli newspapers began speaking to the returning soldiers
and officers, a picture emerged not just of a long and difficult war, but a lack of
clearly communicated military objectives, and an often-chaotic chain of command,
which ended up costing Israeli lives. Our final advance, alone, shortly before the
cease-fire, claimed the lives of some 30 soldiers. And for what, many Israelis were
soon asking themselves. One of the newspapers most supportive of the operation at

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