The Real Goal of Israel's War on Lebanon By JONATHAN COOK Nazareth. Israel's supposedly "defensive" assault on Hizbullah last summer, in which more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed in a massive aerial bombardment that ended with Israel littering the country's south with cluster bombs, was cast in a definitively different light last week by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. His leaked testimony to the Winograd Committee -- investigating the government's failures during the month-long attack -- suggests that he had been preparing for such a war at least four months before the official casus belli: the capture by Hizbullah of two Israeli soldiers from a border post on 12 July 2006. Lebanon's devastation was apparently designed to teach both Hizbullah and the country's wider public a lesson. Olmert's new account clarifies the confusing series of official justifications for the war from the time. First, we were told that the seizure of the soldiers was "an act of war" by Lebanon and that a "shock and awe" campaign was needed to secure their release. Or, as the then Chief of Staff Dan Halutz -- taking time out from disposing of his shares before market prices fell -- explained, his pilots were going to "turn the clock back 20 years" in Lebanon. Then the army claimed that it was trying to stop Hizbullah's rocket strikes. But the bombing campaign targeted not only the rocket launchers but much of Lebanon, including Beirut. (It was, of course, conveniently overlooked that Hizbullah's rockets fell as a response to the Israeli bombardment and not the other way round.) And finally we were offered variations on the theme that ended the fighting: the need to push Hizbullah (and, incidentally, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians) away from the northern border with Israel. Vince Foster http://tinyurl.com/37ws2w About his murder: http://tinyurl.com/ysj8o "I am particularly horrified by the use of propaganda and the manipulation of the truth and the revision of history." - Hillary .