Israelis Question War Leadership
Leaving Lebanon, Israeli soldiers came home with relief and fatigue. But as CBS News correspondent Richard Roth reports, they also carried something their army's not accustomed to facing after battle: anger and disappointment.
Reserve Major Yakir Segev says his infantry unit spent three weeks in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah and battling indecision from his own commanders.
"I think we didn't win, so it kind of—military speaking—finished in a tie," Segev says. "My battalion has received 87 different orders - meaning that they changed the orders every two hours."
There are fierce arguments here that the war was badly managed—that the military was unprepared and relied too much on air power instead of ground troops.
Facing calls to quit, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been touring rocket-scarred towns in northern Israel, promising to pour in money.
It's now three weeks since the last Hezbollah rocket fell in Nahariya. The anxiety's gone, but not the sense of vulnerability. How the war was fought -and how it ended - have left all of Israel with a powerful feeling: there's unfinished business.
That includes the unsettled fate of Israeli soldiers captured in the cross-border raid by Hezbollah that began the fighting. To get back her son Udi, Malka Goldwasser says Israel should trade even terrorists it's jailed for murder.
"If you were - your son were kidnapped, would you pay any price to release -including people that you know that have blood on their hands?" she asks.
Now the home front has become a battlefield for a war of words about the war that just ended.
"Instability won," says political columnist Ari Shavit. "Hezbollah was damaged. Israel was deeply hurt. The outcome is instability."
And the fear is that could make a new war even closer.
