While much of the world has criticised Israel for carrying out a “disproportionate” war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, hardline neo-conservatives have attacked the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for timidity.

As noted by diplomatic correspondent Ori Nir in The Forward, the US’s most important Jewish newspaper, the Israeli government and its military’s chief of staff, Gen. Dan Halutz, have been subjected to unusually harsh criticism, including the charge that, by failing to wage a more aggressive war, they were jeopardising Israel’s long-term strategic alliance with Washington.

“...Olmert’s search for victory on the cheap has jeopardised not just the Lebanon operation but America’s confidence in Israel as well. The tremulous Olmert seems not to have a clue,” wrote Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. In particular, Krauthammer and other leading neo-conservatives have assailed Olmert for not launching a massive ground invasion from the outset, which, in their view, could have effectively crushed Hezbollah’s military capabilities, if not the organisation itself.

The public attacks are widely believed to reflect the positions of hardline neo-conservatives within the administration of President Bush, centred, in particular, in Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office and that of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. They have largely been confined, however, to the more extreme elements in the neo-con movement, particularly those most closely associated with the right wing of Israel’s opposition Likud Party.

With the exception of Krauthammer, they have strongly opposed former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza and have been using the crisis there, as well as the war in Lebanon, to discredit Olmert’s “convergence” strategy — his plan to dismantle many Jewish settlements in all but about 10 per cent of the occupied West Bank.

More pragmatic neo-conservatives, such as those clustered around Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, have generally refrained from second-guessing Olmert’s leadership and the conduct of the war. Instead, they have focused on framing Israel’s war against Hezbollah as part and parcel of Washington’s larger “global war on terror”. They have discouraged any suggestion that Washington seeks to restrain Israel in its conduct of the war or impose a premature ceasefire, and have assailed “realist” and State Department proposals to directly engage Syria and Iran in efforts to stop the fighting or at least de-escalate the crises in which Israel finds itself as “appeasement”.

Even these positions, however, have not been entirely appreciated by Olmert’s government, according to Nir. He said that he had “ascertained for a fact” that Israel had asked the Bush administration to use its influence with the Syrian government to gain the release of the three soldiers abducted by Hamas and Hezbollah, but that Washington — no doubt as a result of internal neo-conservative influence — had declined to do so. It was “quite a disappointment for Israel,” he said.

Of the criticisms of Olm-ert, the most controversial has been the charge that, by failing to prosecute the war more vigorously, his government was undermining the administration’s confidence in Israel as an effective ally in the war on terror. — IPS