For page after relentless page it continues, exposing, layer after horrifying layer, a picture of Israel's military and political capabilities so dismal, so complacent and amateurish, as to defy belief. "It can't really be this bad, can it?" you find yourself saying as you turn the pages. And then comes yet another clause, highlighting yet another untenable reality, to confirm that, yes, it really can be.

And this, remember, is only the interim report of the Winograd Committee into the failings related to the Second Lebanon War. This is the critique of that part of the war that was widely supported by the public.

Having had six years to prepare, Israelis had reasonably assumed the IDF was ready and waiting with an effective response to Hizbullah. Chillingly and caustically, Winograd divests us of that misguided confidence, and heaps mountains of blame on those who left us so vulnerable. The final report, cataloguing the stubborn maintenance of the failed hit-and-hope response even as 4,000 Katyushas fell and 163 Israelis were killed, awaits us in the summer.

The conclusions relating to the three key personalities centrally blamed for the failings have, naturally, made all the headlines since Eliahu Winograd delivered his earthquake on Monday afternoon. Unthinkably, to date, those unredeemingly damning conclusions have not begun to remake Israel's political landscape in the way the authors plainly believe is vital and urgent.

But beyond the personal, what has been stressed repeatedly in these and other columns of The Jerusalem Post in the months since this acutely mishandled war was brought to its woefully unsatisfactory end is desperately reinforced by the Winograd panel investigation: The belief that changing a few faces at the top of our political and military guard will be enough to solve our problems is suicidally delusional for the state of Israel.

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.

As for the defense minister, he didn't have the necessary experience, and didn't understand "the basic principles of using military force to achieve political goals"! Yet he didn't systematically consult with those who knew more.

He didn't so much as "ask for the IDF's operational plans" for the military response he was ostensibly overseeing. In fact, his presence, in the words of the panel, "impaired" Israel's ability to respond well to its challenges. The man responsible for the security establishment entrusted with our protection actually made matters worse.

As for the chief of General Staff at the time, how wise he was to have resigned ahead of this bombshell. The portrait that emerges from these dense lines of excoriation is of insistent complacency as the drums of a war Israel was in no position to effectively fight beat ever louder.

The message Dan Halutz was giving the inexperienced duo at the political helm was that everything was fine. He had it all in hand. As if.
What has been less strenuously documented, however, is the wider appalling picture set out in Winograd - the extent of military unreadiness, of misassessment, of absent political-military coordination, all of which must be remedied if we are not to face more and much greater tragedy in subsequent encounters with our enemies.

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."

Hizbullah amassed its arsenal of missiles and rockets. It deployed along the border. And it gradually created a situation where it was able "to act when and how it wished, without any military response from Israel."

We all knew much of this, of course. But the accumulation as presented in Winograd is shocking nonetheless.

There is the documentation of prime minister Ariel Sharon's declared overview that whatever didn't absolutely have to be done, simply must not be done in southern Lebanon - an insistence on restraint borne of the trauma of past Lebanon misadventure and the hope that the unfolding political process in Lebanon would ultimately benefit Israel. There is the detailing of border incidents in which the IDF was consequently refused permission to tackle overt terrorist threats, like the case in November 2005 "when the then-OC Northern Command approved the opening of fire to destroy a terror cell that had emplaced itself along the border." The chief of General Staff overruled him emphatically.