the beginning summed up the feeling of most of the country at the end: “If you

/ BARAK / 116 the beginning summed up the feeling of most of the country at the end: “If you don’t win, you lose... Hizbollah survived. It won the war.” Without the botched handling of the war, I might well have remained a mere member of the Labor Party and a private citizen. But when the commission of inquiry released its report in April 2007, three people were singled out: Olmert, Amir Peretz and Halutz. Olmert was portrayed as a military novice who’d gone into battle without understanding the wartime role and responsibilities of a Prime Minister. Halutz’s “excess of charisma” was held responsible for keeping ministers, and military officers as well, from questioning his judgement or pressing him for alternatives. Amir Peretz was found to be the wrong man in the wrong cabinet post at the wrong time. Of the three, only Halutz seemed ready to take personal responsibility. Even before the report came out, he resigned. Olmert and Peretz were determined to stay put, despite calls to quit not just from the opposition but from Tzipi Livni. Inside Labor as well, the war produced a clamor for change. When a vote for party chairman was held in June 2007, I was chosen to return in Peretz’s place. Within days, I replaced him as Defense Minister as well. Yet the main item in my in-box would no longer be Lebanon. I had been briefed a few weeks earlier by Olmert on a threat hundreds of miles further away: a construction site in northeast Syria, along the Euphrates River, where Mossad had uncovered evidence that the Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were building a nuclear reactor. I had got to know Olmert fairly well over the years, initially when I was in the kirya and both he and another rising Likud politician to whom I became closer, Dan Meridor, were members of the Knesset’s defense committee. But from the day I returned to the Israeli government in June 2007, there was growing tension between us over dealing with the Syrian nuclear threat. It was not about whether we should take military action to destroy the reactor, before the fuel rods arrived on site and it could begin producing bomb-ready material. Just as under Menachem Begin in 1981, when we’d launched our preemptive strike on Saddam Hussein’s 402 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028250