Washington, November 10: Former US President George W. Bush has confessed to Israel’s defeat in its 33-Day War against Lebanon in 2006, saying he had lost his “confidence” in Tel Aviv.
In his recently released memoir, Bush also pats Israel on the back for launching an airstrike on Syria, a year after Tel Aviv’s defeat in its 2006 Lebanon war.
The “execution of the strike made up for the confidence I had lost in the Israelis during the Lebanon war,” he wrote in his memoir, Decision Points, which recently hit the shelves, AP reported on Tuesday.
On September 2007 and on the reported orders of the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, at least four Israeli fighters crossed into the Syrian airspace and pounded an alleged nuclear facility.
The assault was followed by a significant rise in the tensions between the two sides, which are technically at war due to Tel Aviv’s continued occupation of the Golan Heights, the territory in southwestern Syria, which was occupied in 1967.
“Olmert told me he wanted total secrecy. He wanted to avoid anything that might back Syria into a corner and force (Syrian President Bashar) Assad to retaliate. This was his operation, and I felt an obligation to respect his wishes,” Bush wrote.
The attack had followed all-out Israeli offensives on southern Lebanon in July 2006. Also known as the 33-Day War, the attacks killed about 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians.
The Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, however, defeated the forces and Tel Aviv was compelled to withdraw without having achieved any of its objectives.
Bush also claimed that he had resisted the Israeli premier’s request from Washington to undertake the strike on Syria.
During his presidency, however, Bush imposed sanctions, which banned nearly all exports to Syria except food and medicine.
Late in his second tenure, helicopter-borne US Special Operations Forces carried out an aerial attack inside Syria along the Iraqi border, killing at least eight civilians. Damascus blasted the move as a “criminal and terrorist aggression.”
——–Agencies