Israel's prime minister has said that the strategy used in last year's war with Lebanon was drawn up months in advance, an Israeli newspaper reports. According to Haaretz, Ehud Olmert said it was decided at least four months before that any kidnap of Israeli troops on its border would trigger war. On 12 July 2006 Hezbollah militants seized two Israeli soldiers sparking an all-out assault by Israel's military. Mr Olmert reportedly made the claim to an inquiry last month. The Winograd Commission is an Israeli government-appointed commission tasked with investigating last summer's conflict with Lebanon and identifying lessons to be learned from it. It is expected to release its interim report this month. Knee-jerk reaction? Mr Olmert testified before the commission on 1 February. Haaretz did not reveal how it uncovered details of that testimony. About 1,000 Lebanese, most of them civilians, died in the 24 days of fighting along with 116 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians. The war began within hours of reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev being captured by Hezbollah in a cross border raid into Israel. But it ended without Israel achieving its main aim, the release of the two soldiers. Mr Olmert has borne much of the blame for that failure, with critics accusing him of reacting too hastily with a knee-jerk military strategy which had not been properly thought through. But if the Haaretz report is correct, Mr Olmert said that in fact the plans had been in place for a long time. According to the newspaper, Mr Olmert said he held several high-level meetings on the situation in Lebanon - the first on 8 January 2006, just four days after he took over from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was in a coma following a massive stroke. Mr Olmert reportedly told the commission that at a meeting in March he asked whether any plans existed about how Israel should react in the event of one of its soldiers being taken across its northern border. He is said to have claimed that he looked at the various strategies tabled and decided that a plan, which Haaretz described as "moderate", of air strikes and a limited ground operation would be best. Polls slump Mr Olmert is also reported to have said that he believes in the event he acted as his predecessor Mr Sharon, a man with far greater military experience, would have done. Along with criticism over its handling of the Lebanon crisis, Mr Olmert's government has been beset by a number of political and financial scandals. In two new opinion polls released in Israel on Thursday the prime minister fared badly. In one by Israel's Channel 10 television, 72% said they believed Mr Olmert should not continue in office and 57% favoured holding early elections. And in an opinion poll for the mass-circulation newspaper Yediot Aharonot, just 2% of respondents said that they trusted the current leader. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6431637.stm
It doesn't sound like the war itself was so much planned but a contingency plan was in place. Apparently not a very good contingency plan but to say that the war was planned months in advance sounds like the Olmert intended for the soldiers to get kidnapped.
title is misleading. it's not a pre-planned war which implies Israel wanted to go into Lebanon months in advance. It was a contingency plan as Sishir said. I'm sure we have contingency plans for invading Mexico should anything happen there, it doesn't that mean we pre-planned a war on them
The title is correct in so far as Israel wanted a pretext or excuse to launch the war and had been planning for such a war for a long time. They didn't kidnap the soldiers but knew that such an event would occur and once that occurred would give them the pretext to launch a full scale attack on Lebanon.
If the "contigency plan" is something like the invasion of Russia kind of thing that no one wants and no expects then no. But if the U.S. is hoping and wanting such a war to happen and waiting for a pretext to launch these "contigency plans" then yes it would be pre-planning for a war and I would call it that.
I'm going to guess that there's more to this story than meets the eye. Remember that Israel has the best intelligence in the world. (Even though they lie about it sometimes to get another country to invade their enemy.) I would bet that they got intelligence that Hezbollah was planning or at least considering a kidnapping of Israeli forces. I would also bet that whenever they got word of those plans, they began the war planning.
