Even though Ehud Olmert had announced he would set up a public inquiry into the conduct of the war, it did little to reduce the national anger Israelis directed at him. Sixty-three percent of the electorate polled said he should resign at once; his defense minister, Amir Peretz, fared even worse: 74 percent demanded he should leave office as soon as possible. Both politicians had been overwhelmingly dominated by Halutz and his dependence on air power, which had brought swift victory in previous conflicts. Mossad analysts, who had been monitoring public attitudes, also saw a consensus forming among IDF veterans that Halutz had failed to understand air power was only there to assist ground forces and could never win a modern-day war. It was a view Meir Dagan had put forward in those early-day meetings in the war room. He had argued, in the calm, cogent matter which had been his hallmark since taking over Mossad, that air power should have been supported by ground forces capable of driving Hezbollah back from the border area. But now the first murmurs had also surfaced in the street as to why the intelligence—always a critical factor in any past war Israel fought—had been so inept. Why had Mossad not discovered well before battle commenced the exact whereabouts of the Hezbollah rocket sites? Why had its agents not pinpointed the fallback positions of the launchers? Why had they not been able to more effectively track the movements of Hassan Nasrallah?
In Lebanon, Hezbollah, while parading through the streets of Beirut in triumph, also had suffered heavy casualties. Those who had survived watched fifty French army engineers come ashore, the vanguard of the seven thousand UN troops promised by the European Union states as peacemakers. The UN had also received offers of soldiers from several Muslim countries, some of which did not even recognize Israel. It did not augur well for the future—particularly as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria again began to make threatening announcements that time “will once more come when we have to retake the Golan Heights by force.”
But the real threat came from Iran. Not only had it been the real beneficiary of the conflict, it had united the Sunnis and the Shias in common agreement to fight the detested infidels. From having its back to the wall only three years before, when the invasion of Iraq had intimidated the ayatollahs next door, Iran had emerged as the influential power in the region’s Muslim world. It had achieved this position by shrewd opportunism and the miscalculations of its enemies. It had either ignored or played subtle politics against the threats of the UN Security Council to punish it with economic sanctions for consistently refusing to stop producing enriched uranium, a process to make the material for nuclear bombs. In that first week of September, Iran’s contempt continued to be demonstrated when it announced “a new phase” in its heavy water construction, ignoring the opposition of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear inspectorate. Mossad had already discovered the plant had been operational since mid-August. In a memo to Olmert, Meir Dagan reminded the embattled prime minister that India, Pakistan, and North Korea had all opened similar plants to convert uranium into plutonium for bombs.
Mossad analysts believed Iran’s mercurial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was counting on the disunity of the Security Council and the continued support of China and Russia to block any UN sanctions. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, had spoken of imposing them through a “coalition of the willing.” But would they include Jacques René Chirac and Tony Blair? Both were leaders in the twilight of their political power.
In a prophetic memo, a Mossad analyst wrote in late August: “The world must face that Iran is determined to become a nuclear military power. Inevitably that would lead to a nuclear arms race. Syria will feel emboldened to go for ‘the nuclear option.’ Saudi Arabia might well want to do the same. Egypt might also consider ‘going nuclear.’ We would then face a new and most dangerous situation.”
