A Conversation With Ehud Olmert

I was not born to be prime minister, and I'm not going to stay here until the end of my life. I'm too young for that. Right now, I think it will be a mistake [to leave], and I have a job to accomplish, a vision to realize. This is the great vision of peace which I think is possible this time more than ever.

What about Iran? You told me over a year ago that tolerating a nuclear weapon was not possible.

Yes, Israel will not tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of people who say openly, explicitly and publicly that they want to wipe Israel off the map. Why should we?

If you're not prepared to live with it, is Israel capable [of striking Iran's nuclear facilities]?

I don't want to go into this issue every time I'm asked, "Do you have plans?" The United States is the leader of the international effort to stop the Iranians from becoming nuclear. The European countries, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese -- all the most powerful nations of the world are joined together in an effort to stop the nuclearization of Iran. I hope they will be successful.

But didn't Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just say that he has added 6,000 more centrifuges to his program . . . got them up and running?

We have to listen to him, but that doesn't mean that we have to believe everything he says.

It's widely believed in the U.S. that after the latest National Intelligence Estimate [on Iran, which concluded with "high confidence" that Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003 ], the U.S. will not act.

We have a different opinion about [the Iranian nuclear program] from the NIE, and we haven't changed our attitude. The Israeli information is available for our friends to examine and to come to other conclusions.

You mean that you think [Iran's nuclear program] is closer to being usable?

The main point of the NIE, the estimate, was that there is no evidence that the Iranians restarted their [covert] military program since it was closed in 2003. . . . Based on the information we have, the military program continues and has never been stopped. If this program continues, at some point they will be in possession of a nuclear weapon.

There have been recent revelations in Congress about the North Korean-built Syrian nuclear reactor bombed by Israel last September. The director of the CIA actually said that the Syrian reactor would have had enough plutonium to make two bombs. What do you say?

I heard about the briefing that Mr. Hayden gave Congress. But I didn't talk about it before the briefing, and I won't talk about [it] now.

You can't say anything about September 6th?

We are not looking backward. We are looking forward. We are looking now to establish a peace process with Syria.