Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war was a missed opportunity and a grave failure for the Jewish state, a key report said while sparing the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, from a major roasting.
   While the long-awaited report by a government-appointed commission into the conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia listed a series of severe failings and shortcomings, it said Olmert had acted in Israel’s best interest.
   ‘Overall, we regard the second Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity,’ commission head Eliyahu Winograd said.
   Most Israelis want Olmert to resign, an opinion poll showed on Thursday after a key report blasted the 2006 Lebanon war as a failure but spared him from a roasting.
   Asked whether Olmert should resign following the release of the Winograd Commission’s report on Wednesday, 57 per cent said yes, while 33 per cent said no, according to the poll published in the Maariv newspaper.
   But Olmert, who had faced mounting calls to quit ahead of the report’s release, said he was ‘satisfied’ by Winograd’s findings, according to an official in his entourage.
   Hezbollah, however, gloated that the report confirmed its guerrillas had defeated Israel, regarded as having the most powerful military in the Middle East.
   In his report, Winograd said: ‘We found severe failings and flaws in the lack of strategic thinking and planning, in both the political and the military echelons.
   ‘The way the original decision to go to war had been made; the fact Israel went to war before it decided which option to select and without an exit strategy – all these constituted serious failures, which affected the whole war.’
   ‘Responsibility for these failures lay, as we had stressed in the interim report, on both the political and the military echelons.’
   Winograd highlighted a controversial ground offensive launched in the final days of the war, when the United Nations was brokering a ceasefire agreement, saying it did not achieve its objectives.
   But the retired judge said Olmert and then defence minister Amir Peretz ‘acted out of a strong and sincere perception of what they thought at the time was Israel’s interest.’
   His findings come nine months after an interim inquiry found Olmert and other political and military leaders responsible for ‘severe failures’ in the war, launched after Hezbollah seized two soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid in July 2006.
   Olmert, 62, is the only senior leader criticised in the preliminary report to have hung on to his job and has been quoted as saying he had ‘absolutely no intention’ of resigning.
   Former army chief Dan Halutz quit a year ago and Peretz was ousted from the ministry and as head of his Labour party less than two months after Winograd’s interim findings.
   Wednesday’s report had been expected to focus on Olmert’s decision to order a massive ground offensive in south Lebanon 60 hours before a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement was due to take effect on August 14.
   Thirty-three Israeli soldiers were killed in the offensive launched just one hour after the final version of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was presented to Israel.
   Major Tomer Buhadana was one of those wounded during the last 48 hours of war, which in all killed 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
   Now Buhadana leads a group of reservists calling on Olmert to quit over the war, widely considered a failure for failing to stop Hezbollah rocket fire and retrieve the two soldiers whose fate remains unknown.
   ‘Our protest is an extension of the war,’ he said. ‘Many people want to turn a new page but are unable because we believe that assuming responsibility is essential.’
   Speculation had been running high about Olmert’s future in light of the report, with the defence minister, Ehud Barak, considered to hold the key to his fate.
   If Barak decides to take his centre-left Labour party out of government, it would leave Olmert’s coalition short of the 61 seats needed for majority in the 120-member parliament.

About 60 per cent of Thais believe their new government under the prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, an ally of deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra, will collapse within two years, a poll showed Thursday.
   The survey by Assumption University found 58.5 per cent of respondents expected Samak’s six-party coalition government would end soon due to a rift among political parties and alleged corruption.
   Samak, who heads the People Power Party (PPP), officially became Thailand’s new prime minister on Tuesday after stomping to victory in December elections, the first polls since the military ousted Thaksin in September 2006.
   He is expected within days to submit his proposed cabinet to King Bhumibol Adulyadej for his endorsement.
   The survey showed only 33 per cent of people were confident his government could boost the country’s economy, beset by stagnant domestic consumption and depressed business confidence.
   Fewer than one in five respondents thought the new government could solve a long-running insurgency in the Muslim-majority south, where more than 2,800 people have been killed since unrest broke out in January 2004.
   The university polled 3,506 voters in 27 of Thailand’s 76 provinces, including Bangkok, from January 20 to 30.

A few months ago it was stuck in the doldrums, but now the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has emerged from state poll wins smelling blood as a ruling coalition limps from crisis to crisis before a likely 2009 election.
   The new mood was evident at a national meeting of the BJP national council this week as party cadres united behind the new prime ministerial candidate, LK Advani, a former hardliner who now cultivates a moderate image.
   ‘The mood in the BJP is upbeat,’ the Times of India said in an editorial on Thursday. ‘The cadre is gung-ho.’
   Obstacles remain for Hindu nationalists to regain the power they lost in 2004, not least a fear among many voters that the BJP, with its concept of ‘Hindutva’ that sees India as more of a Hindu than secular nation, will inflame religious tensions.
   India will see a slew of state elections this year, rehearsals for a general election that is likely to pit Congress against the BJP over who can better manage a trillion-dollar economy growing at about nine per cent a year.
   The BJP hopes to capitalise on signs that Congress’ support may be weakening. While the economy has boomed, the government is perceived as having failed to include hundreds of millions of poor, shown little leadership and failed to push reforms.

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded mosque in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province Thursday, killing its deputy governor and five other people, officials said.
   The Helmand attack tore through the main mosque in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah as men had gathered for afternoon prayers, the police said.
   ‘When the prayers started at the main mosque of Lashkar Gah... a suicide attacker who had strapped explosives to his body detonated,’ Helmand province police chief Mohammad Hussain Andiwal said.
   ‘Six people praying, including the deputy provincial governor Haji Pir Mohammad, were martyred and 18 others were wounded,’ he added.
   The wounded included a four-year-old child who had been begging at the entrance of the mosque, he said.

Western powers have ignored undemocratic acts and rights abuses by Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s government because of its support for the ‘war on terror,’ Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
   The group said in its annual report that Musharraf used a state of emergency in November to head off a Supreme Court ruling on the legality of his re-election and crackdown on a movement for judicial independence.
   Thousands of lawyers and political opponents were arbitrarily detained in 2007, most of the country’s senior judges sacked and harsh curbs were imposed on the media, it said.
   ‘The US, UK, and EU all issued statements urging Musharraf to end the state of emergency, release those arrested, and hold free and fair elections. However, their actions did not match their words,’ the HRW report said.
   ‘At this writing, all three were continuing to prop up Musharraf with substantial military and economic assistance.’
   The group singled out the administration of the US president, George W Bush, for failing to press for rights improvements or the restoration of the country’s sacked chief justice.

A second opposition lawmaker was shot dead Thursday in Kenya, the police said, amid spiralling unrest sparked by disputed presidential elections more than one month ago.
   ‘He was killed by a traffic police officer,’ in a suburb of Eldoret in western Kenya, a police commander said in Nairobi, adding that the killing appeared to be connected to a romantic dispute.
   ‘He was with a girl who is a police officer. He was shot by another policeman believed to be her boyfriend,’ he said.
   The police said the lawmaker was David Kiumtai Too, from the party of opposition leader Raila Odinga, who claims president Mwai Kibaki cheated him of victory in widely-contested December 27 polls.
   Another Orange Democratic Movement lawmaker, Melitus Mugabe Were, was shot dead early Tuesday in Nairobi.
   Odinga accused his political ‘adversaries’ of having a hand in that killing, which sparked further bloodshed in flashpoint western regions and the capital’s slums.
   With the toll from the post-poll violence nearing 1,000 and close to 300,000 people displaced, representatives of Kibaki and Odinga met Thursday for the first time together in Nairobi with former UN chief Kofi Annan.
   Meanwhile, the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, and African leaders gathered in Ethiopia on Thursday urged Kenya’s leaders to act responsibly and do their utmost to quell deadly post-election violence.
   ‘Kibaki and Odinga ... have a special responsibility to solve the crisis peacefully,’ said Ban.
   He lent his full support to his predecessor Kofi Annan, currently in Kenya to broker a political deal to end the crisis that erupted over Kibaki’s December 30 re-election.
   The African Union’s commission chairman, Alpha Oumar Konare, also appealed for swift action to end the bloodshed in the usually stable east African nation, which has claimed around 1,000 lives in a month.
   ‘Kenya means so much to us that today there is an emergency to douse the flames,’ he said.
   ‘We tell all the protagonists to stop, stop, stop. If you burn Kenya, what will be left for you to govern,’ he said in his opening address, which was attended by the 76-year-old Kibaki.
   Japan, a special guest of the summit and represented by former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, also voiced its concern over the spiraling crisis in Kenya, a key nation on the continent and east Africa’s largest economy.
   He urged Kibaki and Odinga to ‘work together with the African Union and the international community to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict.’
   Mori pledged 4.1 million dollars (2.8 million euros) in assistance to Kenya, where at least a quarter of a million people have been displaced by the political violence and ethnic cleansing.
   Kibaki is accused by Odinga of rigging his way to re-election, sparking a wave of riots, protests, the police raids and tribal killings.
   Odinga’s movement had warned that Kibaki’s presence in the ranks of the heads of state would amount to a recognition of his election, despite widespread international concerns over flaws in the December 27 polls.

A massive bomb attack at an election rally in ethnically tense southern Nepal marks a serious escalation of violence by groups intent on derailing the country’s fragile peace process, analysts said Thursday.
   The attack late Wednesday left 55 people with shrapnel wounds, and raises doubts of whether the polls scheduled for April 10 that will decide the impoverished country’s political future can be a success, they warned.
   ‘The bomb on Wednesday at the mass meeting was a show of strength by the armed groups,’ Prashant Jha, a journalist and researcher in southern Nepal issues, said.
   ‘Next, they will kill election candidates and bomb more mass meetings. Violence will escalate,’ he grimly predicted.
   Nepal’s southern Terai region is home to around half of Nepal’s 27 million people, and its residents – known as Mahadhesis – have long complained they have been treated as second-class citizens and excluded from the capital’s corridors of power.
   Unrest in the south kicked off shortly after the country’s mainstream parties and Maoist insurgents signed a peace deal in November 2006 that ended a decade of civil war, but still left ethnic activists in the south feeling left out of politics.
   The bombing came as the Maoists and main parties were trying to rally support in the south for the April elections, which will elect a body that will rewrite the constitution and most likely abolish the monarchy.
   ‘This is a strong sign of things to come,’ Jha said of the bombing. ‘Under the current circumstances, a meaningful constituent assembly election is not possible.’
   The polls are a crucial part of the peace process, and have already been postponed twice in 2007.
   The vacuum of last year left an opportunity for ethnic militants in the south to emerge – apparently with easy access to arms and ammunition from across the border in India – and at least 200 people have already died in violent protests and targeted murders.
   The militants are demanding that the government grant the Terai people increased and immediate autonomy.
   They have said that until they get more representation in the security sector as well as local and national government, they will not allow the elections to take place.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two remaining Democrats in the US presidential race, will be vying later Thursday over who is more capable of beating Republican frontrunner John McCain and winning back the White House in November.
   For months the presidential race has run in parallel in the two parties, with candidates battling their ideological bedfellows to become the formal nominee.
   But the contest has now narrowed dramatically, with McCain emerging as the Republican frontrunner and the Democratic battle reduced to a tense two-horse race.
   Obama and Clinton face off later Thursday in their first one-on-one debate, which could sharply impact how Democrats cast their votes in the potentially decisive multi-state primaries of ‘Super Tuesday’ on February 5.
   Obama, 46, has made ‘change’ the central motif of his campaign, and wants to turn the page on almost 20 years of having either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. The former first lady is a bridge to the past, he says.
   ‘I know it is tempting – after another presidency by a man named George Bush – to simply turn back the clock, and to build a bridge back to the 20th century,’ Obama said Wednesday at a rally in this mountainous western state.
   But Democrats are less likely to reconquer the White House ‘by nominating a candidate who will unite the other party against us,’ he said, touching on a Hillary weakness.
   The former first lady is perceived as a lightning rod for Republican discontent, and much ink has been spilled speculating that her name on the presidential ballot would mobilise Republican turnout in the November 4 election like nothing else.
   Polls deliver somewhat contradictory projections about how each would fare in a hypothetical matchup against McCain. NBC television shows McCain beating Hillary by two percentage points (46 to 44 per cent), while the Los Angeles Times shows Clinton with a four point lead (46 to 42 per cent.)
   If Obama were the candidate, he would tie with McCain, according to NBC, or lose by one point (41 to 42 per cent) according to the LA Times.

Italy’s Senate speaker Franco Marini got down to the Herculean task Thursday of finding a government capable of reforming the country’s flawed voting law, while fighting off demands by the right for speedy elections.
   ‘Marini will try to scale the mountain,’ wrote the economic daily Il Sole-24 Ore. ‘In reality there is no reasonable hope that he will succeed because the election campaign is already under way.’
   Conservative flagbearer Silvio Berlusconi, at age 71 a two-time former prime minister itching to return to power and poised to win if polls are held soon, will not hear of enduring a time-consuming process to fix the voting system.
   Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, would be unlikely to fall into the same predicament that eventually brought down his arch-rival prime minister Romano Prodi a week ago: the proportional representation system gives undue weight to small parties, encouraging instability.
   The left-leaning La Repubblica daily on Thursday was full of praise for cooler heads, saying Italy was ‘in the hands of a wise, competent and expert president (Giorgio Napolitano),’ while also voicing pessimism that Marini, 74, will manage to set up a government that could win the confidence of parliament.
   The widely respected Senate leader comes from the leftist Catholic Daisy party, which merged with the Democrats of the Left last fall to become
   the new Democratic Party, headed by Rome mayor Walter Veltroni.
   Prodi resigned as premier a week ago after losing a Senate vote of confidence, ending 20 months of government by his fragile centre-left coalition.
   He lost his slim Senate majority after a small centrist Catholic party withdrew from his coalition last week.

About 100 people were killed when Myanmar’s military government quashed anti-government protests in September, far higher than the 15 dead reported by the junta, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
   Several hundred people are still believed to be jailed over the protests, in addition to the 1,100 political prisoners already locked away in Myanmar, the New York-based group said in its annual report.
   The protests led by Buddhist monks were the biggest challenge to military rule in nearly two decades.
   Outrage over the crackdown prompted Myanmar to allow UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari to make two visits to the country, where he was allowed to meet with detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and senior military leaders.
   But the report said the junta ‘made no concessions to international condemnation... condemning foreign interference in Burma, and blaming unrest on foreign media reports and exile radio broadcasts inciting protests.’
   Meanwhile, the military government has continued to commit gross rights abuses across the country, the report said.

The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, may have dealt a fatal blow to Pretoria’s ‘quiet diplomacy’ by calling an election in the middle of mediation efforts by his South African counterpart, say analysts.
   Mugabe’s announcement last Friday that polling would be on March 29 appeared to pre-empt a bid by the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, to get an agreement between Zimbabwe’s government and opposition on the framework of the ballot.
   Mbeki, who has steadfastly refused to publicly criticise Mugabe despite the economic meltdown of Zimbabwe, has once again bitten his lip over what analysts have interpreted as an insult and a repudiation of his softly-softly approach.
   ‘I am not surprised any longer by whatever Mugabe does. He has always treated Zimbabwe as his personal fiefdom,’ the political analyst and author Xolela Mangcu said. ‘His latest decision is a demonstration of the failure of Mbeki to persuade Mugabe to behave decently.’
   Mbeki was handed the poisoned chalice of mediating between Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change last April by his fellow leaders from the Southern African Development Community.