Don't turn your noses up at the government's ability to sock you with more troubles. Wherever you look, things are smelling bad. But now a mega-trouble is blinking for attention. Close your eyes and think about the possibility that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, together with the chief of staff, the minister for strategic threats and his other advisers, will wrack his brain and decide to act against the Iranian nuclear threat - and imagine what this means for you. This is the man who is responsible for managing a failed war against a guerrilla army in Lebanon. Does this make you feel calm?

We do not have many facts about this important matter in hand. What we do have are mainly leaks. The prime minister does not even refrain from spin, especially when he is not sure what should be done. Last week, for example, Olmert said that "the moment of truth is approaching." When a prime minister talks about the moment of truth, past experience reinforces the need to scrutinize a statement like that closely. Is it true, as he said a week earlier, that Israel has ways to prevent Iran from getting the atom? Or, maybe it doesn't, as a senior American official asserted, and therefore it is doubtful that it will attack Iran.

The Americans are also good at feeding the media. Sources at the Pentagon provided journalist Seymour Hersh with material for his piece in The New Yorker this week. Hersh asserted that Israel is already operating secretly in Iran. He is the inventor of the concept of the "Samson Option," as he called his book on Israel's atom. He has, however, been wrong about clamorous and exclusive information on these matters in the past a number of times. What if this time he isn't? In the information-free context in which we're operating, is it a good thing that Israeli agents might be roaming the expanses of Iran and dealing, according to this report, with locating and marking targets for attack?

	Advertisement

The question is not a simple one, of course, because the impression that emerges from other statements, from the very highest levels, is that the United States will now find it difficult to act there itself. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, during a week packed with statements, that the Iranian nuclear program will be completed within four months. But even if this happens only in another year - America is now bogged down in a period of self-flagellation and attempts to change direction. On its way to the White House is the report of the expert committee that President George W. Bush appointed to make recommendations on the proper Middle East policy for the waning administration. According to all the assessments, its members, headed by James A. Baker, the dynamic secretary of state in the administration of the elder president George Bush, will recommend looking for a way out of Iraq, in part with the help of Iran and Syria.

There's no way, the man in the street will say, that in such circumstances the Americans will attack the Iranian evil. Really? And perhaps suitable weight should be given to George W. Bush's character. It is quite possible that this ideological individual, who has confessed to having conversations with God on the most sublime matters, will not be willing to come to terms with the thought that he will leave the White House without having eliminated - despite everything and because of everything - the Iranian nuclear sword that is hanging over the world. And perhaps it was for this reason that Bush, in a one-on-one conversation with French President Jacques Chirac a few weeks ago, which has now been leaked and perhaps not by chance, told his colleague, "I do not discount the possibility that Israel will attack Iran, and if it does this - I will understand it."

This, in brief, is the fragmentary tangle of information according to which the Israeli citizen has to knit his brow and make up his own mind on a really existential question: Should Israel attack Iran, if the United States refrains from doing so? Are there other ways?

Food for thought: Israel must eventually get into the lane of dialogue with its surroundings, and therefore it is better for it to join the new American wave that apparently, after energetically trying every other way, intends to replace fire with talks.

This new mindset in Washington will no doubt exact a price from Jerusalem. The Golan Heights, for example. The old Israeli mindset, which has fired from all its weapons, must afford this direction the most serious chance. What the governments of Israel chose to do otherwise during the past decade now is something that this suffering nation is no longer willing to tolerate.