Olmert: Should He Stay Or Should He Go?

JERUSALEM, Israel, Apr 30, 2007— -- All weekend photographers scrambled to snap pictures of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the Winograd Commission released the results of its investigation into last summer's Lebanon war. Yaron Ezrahi, a prominent political science professor at Hebrew University and author.

But not just any pictures. These were shots of Olmert burying his face in his hands, or looking skyward as if hoping for salvation from the heavens, or the moneyshot: tugging at a collar too tight about his.

Indeed the Winograd Commission's preliminary report was to put a political noose around Olmert and his government for its poor handling of last summer's war in Lebanon against the Shiite militia, Hezbollah. But no one expected the commission, which investigated the first five days of the war and the events leading up to it, to blame Olmert personally -- and harshly -- for what it called "severe failures."

The Lebanon war went badly. About 160 Israelis and more than 1000 Lebanese died in the conflict. Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah, failed to retrieve the two soldiers Hezbollah abducted, and failed to remove the rocket threat from northern Israeli towns.

The Commission found Olmert, his bungling Defense Minister Amir Peretz, and the former Chief of Staff Lt. Gen Dan Halutz, responsible for the war's failure. In fact the executive summary of the report uses the term "failures" 15 times -- all in a neat 21 pages.

Akiva Eldar a political commentator for Israel's paper of record Haaretz, put it this way. "The commissions' message was so very straight forward. It said [the government ministers] are a bunch of idiots. They go into a war without asking how the hell are we going to get out of it!"

The above has already become conventional wisdom in Israel, where Olmert's approval rating has plummeted to a mere 3% in recent polls.

But Olmert interrupted the evening news on the three Israeli networks with a taped apology-cum-acknowledgment.

There was no press gaggle, no dogging questions this time. A haggard-looking Olmert squarely faced the camera and said his government would immediately apply the lessons learned from the war and work to adopt the Commission's critiques. But he would not resign.