The president of Israel had suffered politically for years because many Israelis thought him two-faced. As if trying to live up to this unsavory reputation, and in stark contrast to his bipartisan role as president, Peres delivered two completely opposite messages in the same week. That’s vintage Shimon Peres.

Here’s Sunday’s Peres:

Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, said in an interview with Israel’s Kol Hai Radio on Sunday that Israel would attack if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn’t drop his plans for the nuclear program. “We’ll strike him,” Peres said in the interview.

And here’s Thursday’s Peres:

Talk of a possible Israeli strike on Iran is “unfounded” and the solution to the nuclear standoff with Teheran is “not military,” President Shimon Peres said Thursday during a meeting with special U.S. envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell.

Unfounded? This talk was based on Peres’s own words.

So, what happened? One possible explanation: Peres realized that he went too far, thus forcing Defense Secretary Robert Gates to publicly declare his opposition to an Israeli attack. So he had to renege on his initial threat. Another explanation: Peres is deliberately fabricating this confusion because it allows Israel to apply maximal pressure toward a solution, without committing it to measures hard to implement. One last explanation: Peres was born in August of 1923. We can cut him some slack.