Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Also in late June 2006, Hamas militants in Gaza kidnapped an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit. Israel promptly launched a massive offensive against targets in the territory. Ostensibly it was to recover Shalit. In reality it was the precursor of the war in Lebanon that started in July 2006. That was confirmed by Ehud Olmert on July 12 when Hezbollah guerrillas killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more on the border of south Lebanon. Ehud Olmert called it “an act of war.” Two days later, with strong support from Israel, the U.S. and British missions at the United Nations opposed a motion on a ceasefire. By then, the first Hezbollah rockets rained down on Haifa and other towns in northern Israel. Israel’s powerful air force had made its first strikes on south Lebanon and Beirut. The dead were left where they lay, soon numbering a hundred a day. Meir Dagan found himself at the cutting edge of the conflict, deploying his agents into hostile territory.

Every morning before the sun rose over the Judean hills, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, who was barely three months into office, routinely slipped out of the bed he shared with his wife, Aliza. In no time he had shaved, showered, and dressed in another of his lightweight suits, which nevertheless would leave him slightly perspiring in the fierce midday heat. A consolation, he told an aide, was that it was nowhere near as unbearable as the temperature inside the tanks he had sent across the border to fight in south Lebanon. By 5 A.M. each day Olmert was reading the overnight intelligence summary left for him on a table. No more than two foolscap pages long, the document had been prepared by Meir Dagan and faxed to Olmert. It consisted of little more than bullet points listing the latest number of overnight rocket attacks on Israel’s northern cities, the current body count, the number of injured, the number of missions flown by Israeli air force jets, the assessment from Mossad stations around the world of the criticism of Israel, and the mounting demand for a ceasefire.

In those first weeks of July after the war had started, the summary could only have brought little comfort to the man whom Efraim Halevy had dismissed as “just happening to be in the right place when he could make or break his career.” Already his domestic critics were asking if Olmert’s limited experience of military tactics meant he was the wrong man to lead the war to a successful conclusion for Israel. As July drew to a close and the first body bags with IDF soldiers were brought back for burial, the war showed all the signs of becoming a widespread conflagration. It had all seemed a long way from only two weeks before when President George W. Bush had pronounced at the G-8 summit in Saint Petersburg on July 16, four days into the conflict, that “this is a moment of clarification. It is now clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East and that Iran and Syria are the root causes of instability in the region.” Two days later calls came from several governments for the United States to lead the negotiations to end the fighting. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted that any ceasefire was not possible “until the conditions are conducive.” She never explained what “conducive” meant, brushing aside media requests to do so.

Ehud Olmert had been told by Meir Dagan that Mossad’s intelligence from Washington was that the Bush administration believed that a swift war against Hezbollah would serve as a prelude to the eagerly anticipated preemptive attack that the president and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were still convinced was their solution to “why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” In the meantime, Mossad agents had uncovered another reason. Al-Qaeda had asked an estimated million-plus jihadists to fight alongside Hezbollah. By mid-July the agents were reporting that from the snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan to the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia, the call to join the “Holy War” was being answered.

In Washington, however, Olmert knew he could continue to have the support of an impressive number of organizations and individuals who included a number of influential Christian evangelicals—preachers like Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, and Marion “Pat” Robertson—as well as Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, who had been majority leaders in the House of Representatives. They were all united in a common belief that Israel’s existence was the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy and was “God’s will.” In their support of Israel, they could count on the support of powerful neo-conservative gentiles like John Bolton, now America’s ambassador to the United Nations; Robert Bartley, the former editor of the highly respected Wall Street Journal ; William John Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador. Between them they had established that in Congress, Israel would remain virtually free of criticism. No nation in the Middle East had gone to war knowing it had such powerful backing.

This must have been a comfort to Ehud Olmert as he was driven in his armor-plated car from his official residence in a Tel Aviv suburb for his first appointment of the day with his generals.

Once hostilities had started, critics—especially those in Europe—found themselves under familiar attack for condemning Israel. The specter of anti-Semitism, never far from the surface, was given a fresh outing. Most of it came from Muslims in Germany and France, which has the largest Muslim population of any European nation. The attacks portrayed Israel in Nazi-like terms, ignoring the incident when a French Jew was murdered in France before the fighting broke out in Lebanon and tens of thousands of demonstrators had filled the city streets to condemn anti-Semitism. Even Jacques René Chirac and Dominique de Villepin had attended the victim’s funeral service to show their solidarity. The attacks in the Arab press had predictably been more inflammatory. From Tehran to Cairo they had been united in calling Israel’s actions “war crimes.” Equally predictable, the powerful pro-Israeli elements in the America media had sprung to its defense. One commentator saw it as “a two-word message to be delivered to other hostile regimes: you’re next.” In case there was any doubt who “next” should be, a radio pundit said: “It is time to turn the screws on Syria.” It was described as “terror friendly” by the New York Daily News , and “a serious threat to the United States” in The New Republic .

The reality was that the Bush administration was now divided over attacking the Damascus regime. While Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were in favor, both the new head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, and Condoleezza Rice strongly opposed the idea. Hayden pointed out that Syria continued to provide the CIA with important intelligence about al-Qaeda—the “back door channel” had been created when George Tenet had met with Syrian intelligence chiefs after 9/11. The CIA had been given secret access to Mohammed Haydar Zammar who had been identified as one of the recruiters of the hijackers that had flown their planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Hayden had argued that to attack Syria, either directly or to allow Israel to act as Washington’s surrogate, would almost certainly end Damascus’s cooperation. Dr. Rice had reminded the president that Syria posed no direct threat to the United States and that an attack would encourage it to foment trouble in neighboring Iraq. “Before any dealings with Syria, it would be sensible to finish our work in Iraq,” she was reported as saying to an aide.

Now, on that July morning as Ehud Olmert was driven from his home for his first early morning meeting with his generals, he was fully aware of how much Washington depended on his promise to destroy Hezbollah and its heavily defended interlocked web of bunkers in south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley. Mission reports on the relentless bombing raids conducted by the Israeli Air Force were being routed to the American embassy in Tel Aviv and then on to the Pentagon where they were further analyzed. While the State Department saw the bombing campaign as a means to reinforce their encouragement of the Lebanese government to deal more firmly with Hezbollah—a forlorn hope—the Pentagon strategists saw the round-the-clock aerial assault on Hezbollah redoubts as what one former Pentagon official told the author “was a test run for Iran.” The official had added, “the only real on-the-ground intelligence we have was from Mossad’s undercover agents in Iran. While it confirmed much of what we suspected, and had helped us to devise a proper bombing strategy against Iran’s nuclear facilities, we still needed to know how it would play out. The air attacks on south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley provided such an opportunity.”