Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Winograd Committee investigating the Second Lebanon War that the decision to go to war may have been the right thing to do, but refused to take a firm stand on the matter. In the transcripts of his testimony given earlier this year and released yesterday, Barak said it was not fair to ask him how he would have behaved were he prime minister at the time of the Hezbollah attack.

Barak was asked to testify before the Winograd Committee mainly because it was under his tenure as prime minister that the Israel Defense Forces pulled out of southern Lebanon in May 2000, abandoning the security zone established in 1985.

Barak told the committee that he had been skeptical of the usefulness of the security zone, even before the IDF pulled out.

"The situation in Lebanon led nowhere. The year before, there were more than 100 dead [soldiers] including the accident in which more than 70 boys were killed [in which two troop carrying helicopters crashed, killing 73]. I saw a contradiction in the fact that the security zone that was meant to provide security to the residents in the North turned, over time, into a problem instead of a solution," Barak explained.

Barak also pointed out the need to withdraw quickly from southern Lebanon to avoid casualties and also the impression that it was a pullout "under fire," which would be used by Hezbollah for propaganda purposes.

"It was very difficult for the army to accept this because it meant that Hezbollah would reach all the way to the border and occasionally would be very close ... not only to soldiers but also civilians. Naturally, the army wanted to expand the defensive circles and set up a defensive fence ... inside Lebanon. But what is important here is the essence. The minute you are holding Lebanese territory, then you simply undermine the logic of withdrawing to the international border."

Barak was unequivocal about the unilateral withdrawal, saying it "went very well" under the circumstances: "We had been a hair's breadth away from a different sort of withdrawal - not a smart one, a withdrawal under fire."

The chairman of the panel, Eliyahu Winograd, asked Barak why he did not strike at Hezbollah immediately following the kidnapping of three soldiers from Har Dov in October 2000, as he had vowed to do if Israel were attacked after the withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Barak explained that the kidnapping was reported to Jerusalem about 1.5 hours after it had occured. At that stage, the former prime minister said, it was clear to him that a rescue operation was no longer possible, and that the amount of blood at the scene of the attack suggested that the condition of the three soldiers was bad.

"It was very important to secure information that they were alive in order to move on to the negotiations ... we feared they [Hezbollah] would leave them in the field or simply kill them, and they were aware that there would be talks even for corpses. Later, it was matter of logic: The incident had occured several days after the outbreak of the intifada [September 29, 2000] and it would have been wrong to open a second or third front. To its credit, the IDF did not recommend any sort of broad offensive and even if it would have made such a recommendation, I doubt I would have approved. It was simply not logical."

He also described the incident as "embarrassing."

However, in the case of last year's Hezbollah attack, Barak said: "I think this government had to take extensive action," adding that the result of the war is that Israel is the strongest country "in a 1500 kilometer radius from Jerusalem, and everyone understands that."

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