On June 17th at the White House residence, just before a scheduled visit from Olmert, Bush met with advisers in the Yellow Oval Room, which encouraged intimacy and informality, and which allowed Bush to “be in a listening rather than deciding mode,” according to another former senior official. Recounting that period for a 2011 Washington Post article, Hayden said that he “told the President that Al Kibar was part of a nuclear weapons program” and that “we could conceive of no alternative uses for the facility.” But, because they “could not identify the other essentials of a weapons program,” such as a reprocessing plant or active work on a warhead, Hayden wrote, “we cautiously characterized this finding as ‘low confidence.’ ”

The Administration conceded that the reactor could go hot in the coming months, but, once the term “low confidence” had been invoked, Bush no longer felt he had the political cover to justify a preëmptive strike. In his memoir, Bush says that he told Olmert, “I cannot justify an attack on a sovereign nation unless my intelligence agencies stand up and say it’s a weapons program.” David Albright, a nuclear-proliferation expert at the Institute for Science and International Security, told me that a reprocessing plant has yet to be found; then again, he noted, Syria has not granted anyone permission to look for one.