Israel’s Hezbollah War: What went wrong?

In the immediate aftermath of Israel’s Hezbollah war last year, I commented that the war was a defeat for Israel. There has been some debate about whether the war was in fact a defeat for Israel. Mark Helprin, for example, argued that Israel won the war. The official Israeli postmortem has yet to be delivered. In the meantime, however, in the summer 2007 issue of Middle East Quarterly, the Israeli academic strategist Efraim Inbar explains how Israel bungled the second Lebanon war. It’s a powerful essay.