The question of whether or not Israel lost the war continues to be debated here in Israel and around the world. As I mentioned in the previous blog, Retired General Ya’acov Amidror, the former head of assessment for Israeli military intelligence spoke to a gathering of diplomats and journalists earlier this week. He discussed the successes and failures of the military campaign.

Amidror pointed to a major success of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces): the elimination of Hezbollah’s long range missile threat. He also pointed to a major failure: the inability to eliminate the shorter range Katyusha rockets which left northern Israel paralyzed.

But what impact did the IDF have on Hezbollah as a fighting force? While Hezbollah “stood up” to the “mighty Israeli army”, Amidror points out that they suffered significant losses during the war. Israeli forces killed more than 500 Hezbollah fighters. In fact, Israel has identified at least 440 of those by name and address. This number represents one half to one third of Hezbollah’s soldiers, a huge number for a guerrilla force the size of Hezbollah.

Armidror estimates it will take Hezbollah two years to restore and retrain this number of soldiers. For this reason, Amidror feels Hezbollah will find it is in their self-interest to maintain the current cease-fire.

But will that cease-fire hold? The world is counting on the new U.N. force to maintain that cease-fire and to supposedly keep Hezbollah from re-arming itself.

Amidror is very skeptical.

He served as the number two Israeli officer in the northern command when Israeli forces maintained a security zone within Lebanon. He observed first hand the actions of UNIFIL, the U.N. force charged with keeping the peace for years. They failed miserably. He says UNIFIL actions allowed Hezbollah to do what it wanted to do and acted as a barrier to Israel. The new UN force will likely be no better and could be a lot worse.

But in one of the most important questions after the war was, who “appeared to win”?, Amidror does point out that Israel did restore some its lost deterrence. And also, that finally Israel showed its enemies that after years of failing to respond to provocations like a kidnapping of three soldiers in 2000 and a cross border attack by Hezbollah a few years later killing six Israelis, it was unafraid to respond.

But he admits too that Israel failed to crush Hezbollah when it had the opportunity to do so. This failure might have sown the seeds of the next war. Nasrallah didn’t have to win. All he had to do was not lose. It punctured the air of invincibility around Israel’s military since Nasrallah, even in his bunker, was a victor in the Arab world because he was left standing when the fighting stopped.

The after-effects are having a profound impact on Israeli politics and its leadership. Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister, summed this up in a recent column for the newspaper Ha'aretz:

"This political uncertainty is painful to contemplate at a time when Israel faces a most serious crisis, which is the direct result of the Olmert government’s handing Hezbollah a victory in Lebanon. Voices, silent for many years, are being heard in the Arab world that Hezbollah has now again demonstrated that it is possible to defeat Israel by the use of force. It is a relatively short distance between this conviction and aggressive action against Israel ... Israel can certainly not afford another mistake like the mismanaged Lebanon war."

When you add up all the failures and successes of Israel in the recent conflict, for many, the outcome seems to be leading the Middle East to another war.