THE WINOGRAD COMMISSION AND THE SIX DAY WAR: How does the hugely successful Six Day War compare with the disastrous war last summer? Saul Singer writes about a similarity points up the essential difference:

Careful planning and preparation, however, is not what characterized the battles that day. The soldiers sent to capture Ammunition Hill, on the way to Mount Scopus, were not expecting the Jordanians to be so heavily fortified in trenches and bunkers. Nor did they know, as the pre-dawn battle raged, that the Jordanian tanks they were being sent to ward off were being destroyed by the Israeli air force a few kilometers away.

The brigade that was sent to the Rockefeller, which did not even have enough street maps of the city, took a wrong turn on to Nablus Road, where the US consulate still stands, came under hails of Jordanian fire and took many casualties.

There are never commissions of inquiries into victories, but if there were, the Winograd Committee's standards for preparations, training and decision making would not have been remotely met by the battle for Jerusalem. Yet, as in all of Israel's wars, there were battles that were won despite everything, because each soldier knew he could not let his comrades down, and he was fighting for the existence of his family and country.

Surely the IDF knows this today as well.
Maybe it would help if they knew the Israeli government would not let them down.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Six Day War and Winograd Commission.