It appears that Olmert has easily survived the Winograd report, and will be able to easily brush off any feeble citizen protests that may arise (not that citizen protests have any effect in this country).

(Olmert’s only risk is if Barak now decides to quit, and that will only happen if Barak thinks it will help him become Prime Minister.)

The report states that ultimately Olmert’s decisions weren’t based on political expediencies or motivations, just incompetence.

The report said, of all the branches, the Air Force performed exceptionally well (and the minor mistake there was merely the over reliance on its strategic capabilities).

It is no longer clear to me why Halutz had to quit in the first place. After all, Halutz built up the air force, so they said he did a good job there. And when he was made Chief of Staff (after Boogie was fired) he was told that his primary mission was to kick Jews out of their homes, not to defend the country. He did his job there too.

And everyone knows that you don’t make an air force guy a chief of staff. They are incapable of understanding the strategic and tactical limitations of their forces. He should have just been right-sized back into the air force.

Like Olmert, he was just out of his league, that’s not reason to fire the guy.

(And what’s a little selling-short compared to a discounted house on Cremioux.)

And Peretz?

Poor guy. He was just in his job for 2 months. Why is he responsible for an army that didn’t have supplies, logistic procedures, or soldiers who had been trained to fight?

In fact, just a year or 2 before, the IDF declared the Disengagement to have been the most logistically complex, tactically difficult and multifaceted military campaign the IDF or any modern army had ever successfully completed.

And we all saw the shiny new uniforms and shiny new equipment they got for kicking Jewish children out of their homes. Obviously, the IDF was up to par.

So certainly, the fact that the army was in such bad shape could not have been his fault either, he had no way of knowing. In fact he just said so again today.

But that really isn’t the point, is it?

So let us let bygones be bygones.

Now that that stumbling block is passed, its time Olmert can get back to politicizing the army, and for him to use it to throw more Jews out of their homes.

Ahh, nothing like business as usual.