A SCATHING official report on the first few days of Israel's war in Lebanon last summer has set off a game of brinkmanship for power. The commission, which Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, himself appointed to investigate the war (but without granting it the power to make binding recommendations), criticised the whole government and military establishment. But Eliyahu Winograd, the judge who headed the commission, reserved his strongest censure for Mr Olmert, Amir Peretz, the defence minister, and Dan Halutz, the then head of the army, for going to war immediately after the Islamist militants of Hizbullah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. There had been inadequate preparation, bad planning and no clear objectives.

The report revealed little that had not already come out in the Israeli press. Its shock value was enhanced at least partly by a campaign by opposition politicians to lower expectations about the report, so that they could criticise the commission if it was indeed tepid but strengthen the blow to the government if it was harsh.

That strategy had some effect. Rebels in Mr Olmert's centrist Kadima party told him to resign. Mr Peretz, whose Labour party, the second force in the coalition, is likely to get rid of him anyway in a leadership election on May 28th, almost decided to quit early. And Kadima's Tsipi Livni, the foreign minister, who largely escaped the commission's criticism because she had tried to cut the war short, told Mr Olmert to his face that he should step down.

Yet this daring move was also a sign of Ms Livni's weakness. She is popular due to a reputation for honesty, rare at the top of Israeli politics these days, and has long been spoken of as a possible successor to Mr Olmert. But either she could not enlist enough Kadima members to mount a challenge or she did not try to do so. She said she would stand only when Kadima held its own primaries. And by not quitting herself, daring him to fire her, she gave Mr Olmert back the initiative. As The Economist went to press, he seemed to have decided to let her stew in her job for the time being, and the rebellion—save for a couple of members—had been put on ice.

So Mr Olmert, a consummate politician if not warmaker, is more or less back in control, and will stay so unless a protest rally scheduled for the evening of May 3rd turns out to be unusually massive. Ms Livni is pressing him to involve her more in security-related issues, after being shut out during the war. But having agreed to stay on, she will have to grin and bear the sniping from Mr Olmert's allies, who are already trying to paint her as a coward.

Mr Olmert, meanwhile, may negotiate a graceful exit from the party after an agreed period—perhaps after the Winograd commission's final report in the summer, which will examine the rest of the war and may actually call for resignations. By that point, Ms Livni may find herself competing with other Kadima heavyweights for the leadership.


It's quite a gamble

That is a hard one to call. The Likud, as the only big party untainted by the war, has a strong lead in the polls. Labour has huge debts, making it hard to assemble a campaign fund. But victory in such testing times would probably depend more on a persuasive candidate than a slick campaign. The Likud's leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, best-remembered as a hard-nosed finance minister in the previous government and as a bellicose but ineffective prime minister in the late 1990s, may have trouble convincing Israelis that he is the man to rebuild their country's military reputation and find a way out of its diplomatic stalemate with the Palestinians.

Mr Barak, on the other hand, is remembered for leading Israel into the stalemate after failing, by a whisker, to strike a deal with the Palestinians in 2000; the second intifada then started on his watch. Kadima is split, has no real political base or ideology, and corruption scandals threaten to engulf Mr Olmert and his finance minister. Yet if it can close ranks around a strong candidate, those who have been prophesying its imminent collapse for a while may be disappointed.