Israel's too short war

Ralph Peters:

THE last Israel Defense Forces soldier has left the Gaza Strip. Israel won - for now. But feckless political leadership may have cost Israel a durable victory.

Israel's cause was just, and a response was necessary. Terror can't be tolerated. Unfortunately, Israel's decision to halt military operations prematurely does amount to tolerating terror.

The core leadership of Hamas was allowed to survive. Amid the ruins, cowardly terrorists emerged from their bunkers to declare victory simply because they're still breathing.

Israel now must answer a moral question about the conflict - although not in the Hamas-hugging form the global left has posed.

The question isn't whether the death and destruction was criminal - it wasn't. Hamas, not Israel, ignited this miniature war.

Rather, the question is whether the amount of damage the IDF did was useful, given that Israel's leaders were unwilling to go all the way. Had the bloodthirsty Hamas bosses been killed, every bit of collateral damage would have been justified.

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The IDF performed superbly, redeeming its reputation after the 2006 Lebanon debacle. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government, after an encouraging start, reverted to its past spinelessness - a failure of nerve that served Israelis and Palestinians badly.

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There is more.

Peters has a point, but I don't think the Israeli cabinet was ready to pay the price for achieving his desired objective. Israeli media now says the reports of going deep into Gaza City were overblown.

The bottom line is the Israelis engaged in what can be described as a punitive raid intended to make Hamas recognize the high cost of its war crimes of rocketing Israeli towns. Like Hezballah, Hamas was surprised by the ferocity of the Israeli attack, and it will likely inhibit Hamas attacks for a while.

I do believe that Israeli troops could have captured or killed the Hamas leadership if they had been willing to attack them in the hospitals where they hid. That would not have addressed the Hamas leadership in Damascus which would have tried to reconstitute its control over the area.