While America’s attention is on the primaries, Israelis appear to be on the edge of their next political abyss. Two days from now, the much-feared Winograd Commission will be unleashing its final report on the 2006 Lebanon war, and no one is looking more uncomfortable than Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Over the last few weeks there has been a great deal of speculation as to both the contents of the report and its political ramifications, and Olmert has been deep in spin-control. On last Monday night, he announced that he would not step down regardless of the report’s findings — a pretty scary statement, considering that the report could tar him for deep ineptitude. Today he sweatingly announced that his government has “many more years to govern.”

The more Olmert talks, the more his face is obscured by the shadows of vultures circling over his head. For months, about a dozen members of his ruling Kadima party have threatened to bolt if the report turns out bad and Olmert does not resign. Last week, Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beiteinu faction pulled out of the coalition, leaving the government with just 67 seats (they need 61 to govern). Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who eagerly seeks Olmert’s post, has been undermining Olmert ever since the war. The Shas party is thinking about pulling its 12 seats out of the coalition over negotiations with the Palestinians. Olmert ‘s popularity has bottomed out, with his party getting only 10 seats in a recent poll (as compared to their current 29). Oh, and let’s not forget that Olmert is currently under multiple criminal investigations. But the biggest vulture of them all is former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose Labor party holds 19 seats in the coalition, and who may lose a great deal of public support if he cannot take a principled stand against Olmert.

The Winograd report has the potential to tip any of these over the edge. The report will probably lay heavy blame on then-IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who failed to prepare the military for war and failed to run the war while it was happening; and on the mustachioed then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz, whose breathtaking ignorance of military affairs raises serious questions about the merits of parliamentary democracy. But the real questions will rise about Olmert, who laid out major objectives for the war, none of which were achieved; and who ran the war as if he were still trading favors at Jerusalem City Hall.

Today, Olmert got a slight boost from the leak of a secret U.S. State Department letter from the war, in which John Bolton, then UN Ambassador, blames Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for capitulating to the French in the last hours of the war. This bolsters Olmert’s claim that he had to launch Israel’s last-minute offensive, in which 33 IDF soldiers were killed, because things had gone bad at the negotiation table. According to Bolton, however, the offensive had no impact whatever on the final agreement. So it is hard to believe this is the kind of spin Olmert really wants: Not incompetent, just impotent?

Every day Olmert’s government looks increasingly like the Ottoman Empire in 1914.