What happened
Olmert, only months into office and untested on security matters compared to his general-turned-politician predecessors, launched a major air campaign within hours of the cross-border abduction, reportedly against the advice of some military planners who wanted more preparation time for a ground campaign. The war's stated objectives — recovering the two captured soldiers and permanently degrading Hezbollah's rocket arsenal — were not achieved by either the air campaign or the late, hastily-organised ground invasion in the war's final days; the soldiers' bodies were returned only in a 2008 prisoner exchange, and Hezbollah's rocket capacity was assessed by Israeli intelligence to have substantially recovered and grown within a few years.
The Winograd Commission, appointed by Olmert's own government under domestic pressure after the war's inconclusive outcome, delivered an unusually blunt verdict for a state-commissioned inquiry: it found the decision to go to war was made hastily, without examining the whole range of options, and that the ground campaign launched in the war's final 60 hours — after a ceasefire had already been agreed at the UN — achieved no clear military gain while costing dozens of additional Israeli soldiers' lives. The Commission recommended Olmert, his defence minister Amir Peretz, and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz all bore personal responsibility for these failures; none resigned as a direct result of the report itself, though Halutz had already stepped down some months earlier.