the immature careerist hacks Olmert and Peretz were set up by Hezbollah, and lost

Anyone who's ever served on a military staff or at the upper echelons of government during a crisis can tell you what happened: The pressure to obtain results grew ever heavier as it "rolled downhill." The prime minister and his Cabinet pressured the generals. The generals pressured the staffs. Staff principals pressured the intelligence officers and targeting analysts.

When Israel's version of "shock and awe" failed, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert froze like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Committed to a model of war that couldn't work, the stunned Israeli government insisted on "making" it work. Day after day, the pressure increased - until a desperate system dropped its safeguards.

Hezbollah sized up the situation perfectly. It already had succeeded in feeding the Israelis false intelligence about various sites and vehicles, gulling the IDF into attacks on civilian buses and buildings - followed up by prompt hate-Israel orgies in the media. But Hezbollah needed a "name" event, an apparent atrocity that would echo across continents.

Qana was the perfect setup. Hezbollah fired rockets from a position near the building that the terrorists wanted the IDF to bomb. This time, Hezbollah probably didn't "shoot and scoot" but let the launcher linger as bait. Hezbollah also may have fed the Israelis phony info about the doomed building serving as a terrorist safe house.

As for the women and children occupying the target, Hezbollah wrote them off as a necessary sacrifice. The terrorists would have sacrificed 570 innocents as readily as they did 57. Their will to win - at any cost - is their most formidable weapon.

Within the Israeli headquarters responsible for green-lighting the strike - where staffers are undoubtedly weary after weeks of war - the targeting data didn't get the "Are we sure?" grilling that doctrine demands. And - because of the Olmert government's unwillingness to commit serious numbers of ground troops (or even a heavy special-operations presence) - there were no Israeli eyes on the scene to confirm the target's validity.

Anxious to hurt Hezbollah, a chain of command grown tired and careless ended up by harming Israel terribly.

The consequences are grave. At Qana, Israel lost the information war beyond all hope of recovery. It's losing the war on the ground, too. After ill-judged claims a week ago that the Israeli Defense Forces had eliminated 40 percent of Hezbollah's military capability, more rockets rained down on Israel last Sunday than on any previous day of the conflict.

The Olmert government chose war but didn't want to pay war's price. The cost of fighting half-heartedly has been Hezbollah's transformation from a middleweight sparring partner into the Middle East's new heavyweight champion.