Winograd's central concern in this interim installment is not that Israel was waging an unjust, inappropriate or disproportionate war, as some critics have misrepresented it as asserting.

Nor is its main focus the sad fact that most concerns the public - that, by the end of the fighting, decisive victory had not been achieved. This summation doubtless awaits in all its grisly detail in the final report.

What the commission emphasizes so starkly here is:

1) that Israel simply couldn't go to war last summer in an instant response to the July 12 border incursion, the kidnappings and the killings (lest we forget, three soldiers were killed in that initial Hizbullah attack). Why not? Because the IDF was not capable of grappling adequately with Hizbullah. And

2) that even the most cursory examination of the IDF's state of non-preparedness by the political leadership would have immediately exposed this dire state of affairs - except that, astoundingly, the political leadership didn't take the trouble to check.

The individual politicians' culpability has been thoroughly documented in the past few days, and none more so than that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Paraphrasing Winograd, he made up his mind hastily, didn't explore alternatives and didn't consult. He's heavily to blame for the unclear goals of the military response, and "made a personal contribution to the fact that the declared goals were over-ambitious and not feasible." He didn't adapt those plans when it became clear they weren't working. All in all, he was guilty of "a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence." Criticism of a national leader doesn't get much more brutal than that....

IN ITS sections on the six years preceding the conflict, the commission tracks a process in which the IDF concedes sovereignty at the Lebanon border to Hizbullah. Nothing less. An abandonment of the elementary protection of northern Israel in the face of an extremist guerrilla army utterly committed to the defeat of Israel.

The policies of containment and restraint followed by every government since 2000 "essentially enabled Hizbullah to strengthen militarily, without any significant disturbance by Israel."

Almost every one of the statesmen who built this country out of stone and swamp and battle has passed on -- and in this test of the new generation, in the Olmert government, Israelis are witnessing the disgraceful spectacle of leaders not only lacking in the wisdom and dedication of the founders, but who also turn out to be corrupt, ignorant of how to lead the IDF into war, and unreliable under pressure.

And so Israel falls back on its strongest asset, its people. Politicians were not permitted to speak at the protest. There was very little 1960’s pageantry to be found last night, and virtually no dumb sloganeering or vapid pacifism. This was a thoroughly middle class protest. The nation’s grown-ups arrived to announce their desire to take the state back from the ambitious dilettantes who had been mistakenly entrusted with power. The Israelis present, from the left, right, and center, wished to save the nation from unseriousness. Last night, the need for competence trumped ideology.