[Heaven] IDF officers slam Netanyahu's lack of strategy for northern threats
Goodtiding
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 12, 2010, 1:21 PM (GMT+02:00)
High officers leading this week's big war game in northern Israel confronted
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi
with harsh criticism over the lack of a clear government strategy for dealing
with the rising Hizballah threat of aggression and the uninterrupted flow of
advanced weaponry from Syria to
Hizballah. The exercise drilled various war scenarios. debkafile's military sources report
that Wednesday, May 12 at the end of the exercise, the officers accused the
prime minister and chief of staff, who observed the drill, with doing nothing
because they were over-anxious to "keep Israel's borders with Syria
and the Lebanese Hizballah calm, whatever the cost."
This kept the
Israel's military machine waiting in
passive mode for Hizballah to go to war when it was fully armed and ready.
Netanyahu used the occasion to accuse Iran of warmongering and inciting
Syria and Hizballah to attack
Israel with the lie that
Israel was on the point of
attack.
The IDF critics found this statement beside the point, feeble and playing into the hands of Syrian ruler Bashar Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, like many of the lame comments coming from defense minister Ehud Barak, debkafile's military sources quote one officer as saying: "Maybe Iran is feeding them false data, but so what? Assad and Nasrallah don't need an excuse for aggression. We watch them with large binoculars, but theirs are bigger. And what do they see? That the IDF has not made the slightest preparation to make good on the Israeli government's warnings of action if Syria goes through with transferring missiles and sophisticated weapons systems to Hizballah. So what conclusions have they drawn?" asked the officer: "That they can go on supplying Hizballah and preparing for war without fear or hindrance."
Some of the officers drew comparisons between the current situation and the
run-up to the 2006 Lebanon. Then, too,
Israel kept hoping
Hizballah's war preparations would come to nothing if Israel
sat on its hands, but in the end the Lebanese terrorists attacked.
"What
happened then is what's happening today," said another officer. The IDF may have
better hardware and improved logistics but, otherwise, Israel's
policy-maker are stuck dangerously in the 2006 time warp.
"Hizballah's war-planners cannot avoid noticing that Israel has retreated from every warning it issued in the past year," said this officer, and are therefore paying no heed to new ones."
For instance, Israeli threats to strike Lebanon and Syria held Damascus back from handing Hizballah M-600
surface-to-surface missiles, essentially Scuds - but only for a while. Recently,
when they saw nothing happening, Syria went ahead and sent them over
the border.
As a result, Hizballah is now armed with an array of weapons
which are far more destructive in terms of civilian lives, damage to property
and their reach into Israel's major cities than its 2006 arsenal
One officer
summed the situation up by saying: "In view of the Netanyahu government's policy
of inertia, this war game should have been held in Tel Aviv - not just along the
northern borders."
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