So I guess pushing our live soldiers in front of live ammunition was really just, well, duh, an understandable mistake?

It sucks, it well and truly does, but soldiers are there to fight. This means putting them in front of live ammunition when the reason is important enough and there is a reasonable chance of winning. If FDR didn’t push live soldiers in front of live ammunition, Europe would still be occupied by the Nazis. If Ben Gurion hadn’t done the same, Israel would have lost the war of independance and probably most people in the Yeshuv would have been killed.

You can argue that in this instance Israel should have just ignored the kidnapping and killing of its soldiers to avoid losing more lives. Or you can argue that a ground attack would have been too costly in lives, so Israel should have continued the ineffective air campaign. But you can’t argue that putting soldiers are risk is always a bad idea unless you think Israel can afford to disband the IDF.

The IDF has been respected and feared in the Middle East for decades, because of how well-prepared its fighters are. For anyone outside the military, “who would have imagined” is not “lame” at all. That the IDF was sent into a ground war with such a lack of equipment and training should surprise and appall any thinking person.

The problem isn’t that Israel fought a ground war. Israel has a history of winning those. But then the military was ready to fight.

Here’s the lame litany:…”Who would have imagined…?” (Rosenblum)…”a terrible and tragic mistake” (Kaplan)…”he only knows information that is in the public domain” (Pomerantz)…

Rabbi Rosenblum claims competence, reliability, and fact checking. He is supposed to, yes, imagine what could go wrong, and, yes, not make boo-boos that kill kids, and, yes, know more than what’s available on a Google search. Otherwise why read him?

Get serious now. Real lives are at stake.

But I was also critical of the conduct of the war from almost the beginning, in particular the IDF’s failure to order a ground operation. The relevant articles are all posted at http://www.jewishmediaresources.com under weekly columns/other. Nothing in the Winograd Commission Report argues against such a ground operation; only against one commenced without planning or training.

What no one knew or could have known at the outset of the war was how badly prepared the IDF was. Who would have imagined that it had neither prepared plans (Bogie Ya’alon hotly contests this) nor trained for a serious action to take out Hizbullah’s mobile launchers? Nor could we have known that Prime Minister Olmert had never asked for such plans, not even after deciding to hit Hizbullah hard, or that no one was thinking past the original salvo. Only the Winograd Commission revealed how bad things were in that respect.

General Halutz, Defense Minister Peretz, and Prime Minister Olmert had access to top secret military readiness reports. I assume that the Winograd Commission had access to the same reports, and that their criticism is based on the information in those reports. They either knew that an air attack can’t stop the Katyusha rockets, or they should have known (after it was shown ineffective after a few days). They either knew if the IDF was ready for a ground offensive, or they should have known.

Rabbi Rosenblum was one of the biggest proponents of the attack on Lebanon last summer. Here’s from his August 2 column:

“At the end of the day, it appears that Israel has no alternative to destroying much of Hizbullah’s capabilities itself, and no more propitious time than the present. We can only pray that New Republic’s Yossi Klein Halevi is correct when he writes:

“This is not a repetition of the first Lebanon war, but a return to our consensus wars of survival – not a Vietnam moment but a World War II moment. That is why Israel fights, and why it will win.”

A year ago he was telling us we were quite capable of eliminating the Katyshas. Now he tells us it was obvious we couldn’t.

And his implication here that a greater ground operation would have been successful is worse than armchair quarterbacking. We lost big time when we sent in ground forces. It was too expensive in terms of human life to envision even more ground ops.

Based on the title of your post, I expected you to comment on how the Winograd commission would have withstood the scrutiny of our sages. There has been a remarkable dose of honesty and desire to get to the bottom of things which otherwise have been so alien to the political and legal establishments in power of EY. I would very much welcome a P.S. on the topic.