They had the plan in the can beforehand, and Bush and Cheney had bought off on it back in July. Bush and Cheney are also practically picking targets, and coordinating all this as a dry run for a similar attack on Iran. That it hasn’t worked isn’t changing much.
I’m still reading the article, but when I saw this on CNN on Saturday (or was it Sunday) my reaction was a bit of a “so what.” It shouldn’t be news that Israel had plans to attack Hezbollah - that’s what militaries do when they’re not waging war; they plan wars. I’m 99% certain that somewhere in the Pentagon you’ll find an occasionally updated plan to invade Australia.
This doesn’t excuse the relative failure of a policy Israel’s Lebanon campaign has become, nor does it diminish the worry that Bush sees this as a warmup for attacks on Iran.
I think pre-clearing it with Bush makes it more than a contingency plan.
Running strategic scenarios by the commander-in-chief is more than planning?
Israel ran it by Bush and Cheney, who don’t really run Israel. :)
OK sorry, I see what you’re saying. I thought you meant the US military running Iran type scenarios by the Pres/Veep. Heheh.
That’s what they want you to think, maaaan!
Not especially. Israel would want to get US approval before trying anything of that nature. I think it’s been pretty clear that at some point hezbollah would step over a line and Israel would respond militarily, and I think the Israeli chiefs of staff wouldn’t want to wait till then to get US approval.
I think it was a contingency plan in the sense that if hezbollah had stayed at a low level of rocket attacks indefinitely the plan wouldn’t have gone into effect.
Put me in the “meh” camp on this article. It just proves stuff we already know (Israel had planned this war for a long time, the US could have stopped it, that sort of thing).
No, no, no, you got it all wrong. The Zionists run the U.S., not the other way round!