And Who is the Real Guilty Party?

Haaretz's Nehemiah Strassler knows.

It is slowly becoming clear who is really to blame for the failure. It's not Dan Halutz, who promised to finish Hezbollah in two weeks only using the air force. It's also not Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz, who did not check the army's plans, but arrogantly decided within an hour to embark on an all-out war with unattainable aims.

The guilty party is one man, a major criminal: former finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is what those in Olmert's office and senior IDF officers say. Netanyahu is the one who pressed for cuts in the army's budget, and the fact is that the army did not provide suitable equipment to reservists, nor food and water to the soldiers in Lebanon. R&D programs were also stopped. Therefore, it is the slasher who's at fault, not the leaders or generals.

But goes on:

But Netanyahu and the budget are a good excuse for a war that ended in embarrassing defeat, where the gap between the aims and gains is huge. We wanted a weak and beaten Hezbollah that is unable to continue firing missiles against Israel, but we got an organization that hung on and whose command structure did not collapse. An organization that, even on the last day of the war, was capable of launching 250 rockets - 14 of them against Haifa. Israel wanted a demilitarized zone between the border and the Litani River, but got an agreement full of holes that does not disarm Hezbollah, does not prevent its rearmament, and leaves it capable of launching missiles. Instead of a multinational force in southern Lebanon, Israel will get, if it is lucky, UNIFIL, an army of "pensioners," that will not do Israel's work for it. They will not prevent the movement of Hezbollah fighters to the border, and the Lebanese army will not prevent the renewed transfer of weapons for Hezbollah from Syria.

Therefore, before the Prime Minister's Office continues with its spin about the budget, it is appropriate to check the size of the budget that Hassan Nasrallah had at his disposal: was it 10 percent of the IDF budget, 1 percent, or perhaps merely 0.1 percent?