  The long standing mystery of smallness of diffractive dissociation of hadrons
to large effective masses (the Pomeron-proton cross section is only 2 mb)
witnesses that the gluonic clouds of valence quarks are so small (r_0=0.3fm)
that soft interaction hardly resolves those gluons (diffraction is \propto
r_0^4). A color-dipole light-cone (LC) approach is developed which incorporates
a strong nonperturbative interaction of the LC gluons. The energy dependent
part of the total hadronic cross section is calculated in a parameter-free way
employing the nonperturbative LC wave functions of the quark-gluon Fock states.
It rises with energy as s^\Delta, and we predict \Delta=0.17 +/- 0.01, as well
as the normalization. However, the energy independent part of the cross section
related to inelastic collisions with no gluon radiated (gluons are not
resolved) cannot be calculated reliably and we treat it as an adjustable
parameter which is fixed fitting just one experimental point for total cross
section. Then the energy dependence of the total cross section (the Pomeron
part) and the elastic slope are fully predicted, as well as the effective
Pomeron trajectory in impact parameter space, in a good agreement with data.
These results naturally explain the x-dependence of the diffractive DIS
observed at HERA. Although diffraction is expected to be dominated by soft
interactions the observed effective \Delta is about twice as large as one
(0.08) known for total cross sections. Diffractive excitations of large
effective mass correspond to diffractive gluon radiation and should be
associated with our calculated \Delta.
