Creating Iran's Nuclear Weapon: The US, Israeli Intelligence, and "The Laptop Documents"

Related Post: Text of The Latest IAEA Report on Iran’s Nuclear Programme

It has been a near-open secret that the source for allegations of Iran's continuing programme for nuclear weapons is a mysterious Iranian laptop supposedly obtained by US officials in 2004.

This article by investigative journalist Gareth Porter goes further. Putting together reports and interviews, he claims that Israeli intelligence played a key role in assembling the "laptop documents" and then feeding them to Washington.

And, as Porter notes, this is an ongoing story. For despite the lack of any additional evidence --- laptop or other --- for an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon --- Israel's covert operators continue to get this tale into the US Congress and thus the American press.

Iran nuclear leaks 'linked to Israel'

by Gareth Porter



WASHINGTON - A report on Iran’s nuclear program issued by the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated news stories publicizing an incendiary charge that US intelligence is underestimating Iran’s progress in designing a “nuclear warhead” before the halt in nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.

That false and misleading charge from an intelligence official of a foreign country, who was not identified but was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of Israel’s key themes on Iran - that the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is wrong, and that Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible.
But it also provides new evidence that Israeli intelligence was the source of the collection of intelligence documents which have been used to accuse Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research.

The committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed “foreign analysts” as claiming intelligence that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because it had mastered the design and tested components of a nuclear weapon and thus didn’t need to work on it further until it had produced enough sufficient material.

That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already decided to build nuclear weapons, contradicts both the 2007 NIE on Iran, and current intelligence analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had ended nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because of increased international scrutiny, and that it was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005″.

The report included what appears to be a spectacular revelation from “a senior allied intelligence official” that a collection of intelligence documents supposedly obtained by US intelligence in 2004 from an Iranian laptop computer included “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”.

It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the blueprints “precisely matched” similar blueprints the official’s own agency “had obtained from other sources inside Iran”.

No US or International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official have ever claimed that the so-called laptop documents included designs for a “nuclear warhead”. The detailed list in a May 26, 2008, IAEA report of the contents of what have been called the “alleged studies” - intelligence documents on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work - made no mention of any such blueprints.

In using the phrase “blueprints for a nuclear warhead”, the unnamed official was evidently seeking to conflate blueprints for the re-entry vehicle of the Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged Iranian documents, with blueprints for nuclear weapons.

When New York Times reporters William J Broad and David E Sanger used the term “nuclear warhead” to refer to a re-entry vehicle in a November 13, 2005, story on the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear program, it brought sharp criticism from David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security.

“This distinction is not minor,” Albright observed, “and Broad should understand the differences between the two objects, particularly when the information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead.”

The Senate report does not identify the country for which the analyst in question works, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff refused to respond to questions about the report from Inter Press Service (IPS), including the reason why the report concealed the identity of the country for which the unidentified “senior allied intelligence official” works.

Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas Frantz, said he was under strict instructions not to speak with the news media.

After a briefing on the report for selected news media immediately after its release, however, the Associated Press reported May 6 that interviews were conducted in Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli officials from revealing their national affiliation as a condition for the interviews.

Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, had extensive contacts with high-ranking Israeli military, intelligence and Foreign Ministry officials before joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He and co-author Catherine Collins conducted interviews with those Israeli officials for The Nuclear Jihadist, published in 2007. The interviews were all conducted under rules prohibiting disclosure of their identities, according to the book.

The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer’s statement that the “blueprints for a nuclear warhead” - meaning specifications for a missile re-entry vehicle - were identical to “designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran” suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called “alleged studies” actually originated in Israel.

A US-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the “alleged studies” intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained by US intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as US officials have claimed to US journalists.

The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop.

The anonymous Israeli intelligence official’s claim, cited in the committee report, that the “blueprints” in the “alleged studies” collection matched documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the analyst’s finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.

German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the Iranian resistance organization, brought the laptop documents collection to the attention of US intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organization in broadcasting into Iran from Paris.

The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that “Western” intelligence was “laundered” to hide its actual provenance by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA.

They cite US, British and Israeli officials as sources for the revelation.

New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006 article that an Israeli diplomat confirmed to her that Israel had found the MEK “useful” but declined to elaborate.

Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively seeking to use alleged Iranian documents to prove that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program just at the time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced in 2004 would have been put together.

The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such documents to influence international opinion on Iran’s nuclear program comes from the book by Frantz and Collins. They report that Israel’s international intelligence agency Mossad created a special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a campaign to provide secret briefings on the Iranian nuclear program, which sometimes included “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere”.

The “alleged studies” collection of documents has never been verified as genuine by either the IAEA or by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said senior United Nations officials and foreign intelligence officials who had seen “many of the documents” in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents had told committee staff “it is impossible to rule out an elaborate intelligence ruse”.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

[Link]

Video: Meanwhile in Iran - The Significance of (Presidential) Debates

NOW POSTED: The Video of the Ahmadinejad-Mousavi Debate in English

The other eight sections are available from the same YouTube member.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3TGHq8-SlY[/youtube]

I do not think it is an exaggeration to call the developments in Iran's Presidential campaign "extraordinary". Contrary to many stereotypes put about in the "West", this is not the Islamic Republic's first unscripted election --- both the victories of Khatami in 1997 and Ahmadinejad in 2005 were unexpected --- but the combination of issues at hand, the fervour of the candidates, and the new format of head-to-head debates amongst the candidates has generated an intensity and excitement that has been striking.

Wednesday night's debate between President Ahmadinejad and one of his challengers, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was greeted by large crowds shouting in the streets, and even Iranian journalists with whom I spoke were swept up in the excitement. In the far-from-polite discussion, Ahmadinejad turned from Mousavi to accuse politicians behind the scenes, notably former Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani, of organising against him, and even launched an attack on Mousavi's wife. Mousavi, who appears to be gaining in strength, put forth a sustained critique of Ahmadinejad's economic and foreign policies.

Beyond this immediate contest, I have been struck by the extent of the re-examination of Iran's domestic and international position. Mousavi generated headlines for his criticism of Ahmadinejad's rhetoric on Israel and the Holocaust, but just as importantly, he was firm in putting forth the idea of engagement with the US and other countries. And this re-examination is not just occurring in Presidential campaigning: there have been a series of high-profile public discussions reconsidering long-standing Iranian policies. We'll have much more on the election and the wider issues before the first ballot on 12 June.

Obama in Cairo: A "Challenging, Thoughtful Speech"

Related Post: President Obama’s Speech in Cairo - The “Right Path” Runs Through Israeli Settlements

I'm going to take another 24 hours to sift through the reactions to President Obama's speech in Cairo, but the general perception is that it has been well-received in the US. There were expected levels of idiocy (Joe Pagliarulo on The Glenn Beck Program that Obama should have done what Ronald Reagan would have, telling moderate Muslims to love America or "live in your cave") and political confrontation (Liz Cheney, who is clearly making her move from State Department bureaucrat and Vice President's daughter to rising Republican star, scoffing at Obama's "hand-holding" in a world of "terrorism,...the slaughter of innocents, and Iran’s hegemonic hopes for the Middle East"); however, even former Bush Administration officials like Peter Feaver declared, "For the most part, I think [Obama] did what he had to do," and The Wall Street Journal gave support, albeit through the fatuous and misleading claim, "Barack Hussein Bush".

There was sustained criticism of Obama's presentation from Noam Chomsky, who saw no substance apart from Israel-Palestine, where Obama was continuing "the path of unilateral US rejectionism". Yet other analysts who have been hostile to the President's interventions in Afghanistan and Pakistan were positive about this engagement with the Middle East; Robert Dreyfuss wrote, "Obama hit a home run."

In addition to the shrewd observations of Canuckistan and Chris E on my original analysis, I was particularly struck by the evaluation of Marc Lynch, which had high praise for Obama's "thoughtful, nuanced and challenging reflection on America's relations with the Muslims around the world". At the same time, I think there is a convergence of possible weakness both in this evaluation and the speech of the President. Lynch's question on Israel and Palestine, "How will the U.S. and the international community support...non-violent action and redeem...moral authority?", could be applied to Obama's vagueness on plans beyond an initial challenge to the Israeli expansion of settlements.

My First Take on The Speech

MARC LYNCH

President Obama's speech today in Cairo met the bar he set for himself.  In an address modeled after the Philadelphia speech on race, he forewent soaring oratory in favor of a thoughtful, nuanced and challenging reflection on America's relations with the Muslims around the world (not "the Muslim world", which for some reason became a major issue in American punditry over the last few days).  As he frankly recognized, no one speech can overcome the many problems he addressed.  But this speech is an essential starting point in a genuine conversation, a respectful dialogue on core issues. After the initial rush of instant commentaries and attempts to inflame controversy pass, it should become the foundation for a serious, ongoing conversation which could, as the President put it, "remake this world."

Before I get into the substance of the speech, a few preliminary notes.

First, Obama made an admirable effort to speak a few words in Arabic, even if he mangled the pronunciations (hajib instead of hijab, al-Azhar). As anyone who has traveled abroad knows, a little effort learning local languages signals respect and goes a long way.  He also effectively interspersed quotes from the Quran, without it being too obtrusive -- I would have liked to have seen some bits from the great Islamic philosophers, but oh well.

Second, the rollout of the speech already stands as one of the most successful public diplomacy and strategic communications campaigns I can ever remember -- and hopefully a harbinger of what is to come.  This wasn't a one-off Presidential speech.  The succession of statements (al-Arabiya interview, Turkish Parliament, message to the Iranians) and the engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian policy front set the stage.  Then the White House unleashed the full spectrum of new media engagement for this speech -- SMS and Twitter updates, online video, and online chatroom environment, and more.  This will likely be followed up upon to put substance on the notion of this as a "conversation" rather than an "address" -- which along with concrete policy progress will be the key to its long-term impact, if any.

Third, I am going to refrain from commenting on the Arab response for now.  That will take a few days, at least, to unfold.  The usual suspects will appear on the media, and some will have valuable things to say, but I want to wait to see the talk shows on the major TV stations, op-eds, forums, blogs, and more.  A cautionary note, though --- English-language Egyptian blogs are likely to be a particularly poor initial "focus group" for  judging the response.  But listening to the response and engaging in the debate which emerges will be key, for American officials and for the American public.  Because Obama's address sought to reframe the conversation, we won't know whether it succeeds until we see how the subsequent political debate unfolds.

OK, now to the speech itself.   This was a challenging, thoughtful speech which will be picked at and discussed for a long time.  It wasn't as revolutionary as some might have hoped, but that's not surprising -- the ground is so well-trodden that it would have been astonishing to see something genuinely new.  Instead, it struck me as a thoughtful reflection and invitation to conversation, with some important nuance which might easily be missed.  It was neither "just like Bush" nor a total departure from past American rhetoric.    I will only focus here on some of the most interesting and important aspects from my perspective -- and I have intentionally not read any other commentary or talked to anyone about it, in order to keep my own impressions fresh for now.

Violent Extremism. Obama's lengthy early discussion of violent extremism was politically necessary, if a bit excessive -- the most Bush-like part of the speech in some ways, but not others.   He made clear the reality of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and invoked 9/11 to provide context for American efforts in Afghanistan. But crucially, without drawing attention to it, he pointedly did not refer to a "Global War on Terror."   He took care, as in his Turkey address, to correctly placed the challenge on the marginal fringe of Islam: "The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism - it is an important part of promoting peace."

This deflates rather than exaggerates the threat, while still taking it seriously -- his lengthy discussion of violent extremists should reassure skeptics who feared he would ignore it, but hopefully without dominating and driving out the other messages.  Throughout the speech he took care to present a vision for a convergence between the values, interests and aspirations of those vast majorities.   Such a convergence must not be held hostage to those few violent extremists, he made clear, while also forcefully repeating that those extremists will be combatted.  He did well to insist that the U.S. was changing course on deviations from its ideals -- torture, Guantanamo -- without belaboring the point. All of this was fine, similar to the Turkey speech, and was what needed to be said.

It worries me, though, to hear him say that the U.S. must remain in Afghanistan and Pakistan until "we [can] be confident that there [are] not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can."  By that standard, U.S. troops probably can never leave... but that's a topic for another day. But he did very well to point out firmly that the U.S. had no aspirations for bases in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and that "America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future – and to leave Iraq to Iraqis."

Israelis and Palestinians. I'm still struggling to grapple with this truly astonishing portion of his speech.  I don't think I have ever heard any American politician, much less President, so eloquently, empathetically, and directly equate the suffering and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians. This is the one part which I have to quote:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

This is quite possibly the most powerful statement of America's stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the urgent need for justice on both sides that I have ever heard.  He posed sharp challenges to Israelis and Palestinians alike, directly addressing the realities of Palestinian life under occupation and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza while also empathizing with Israeli fears.  He positioned the U.S. as the even-handed broker it needs to be:  "America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs." Left unsaid, but clearly in the background, was the fact that he has been matching those words with deeds by forcefully taking on the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

He also offered a powerful analogy to the American civil rights campaign and other global experiences to argue that "that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."  I really like this analogy, which he extended well beyond America's shores. Some Palestinians will likely complain, though, that their own attempts at non-violent activism too often get crushed beneath Israeli bulldozers.  How will the U.S. and the international community support such non-violent action and redeem such moral authority?

Iran and "Resistance". The section on Iran was artful, though not as exceptional as some other parts of the speech.  He did well to offer to move beyond the past and to offer a way forward, but with few new details about that course. The key may be not in the comments on nuclear weapons or even on the offer of dialogue, but in this line:   "The question, now, is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build."  This seems to be a nod to the reframing which I have been urging for months now:  challenging the "Resistance" narrative which has increasingly dominated regional discourse.  This reading is reinforced by an essential absence:  the whole notion of a new cold war of "moderate states" confronting "radical states" -- the regional alliance against Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah advocated by the Bush administration, the Israeli government, and certain Arab leaders such as Hosni Mubarak -- was totally absent from the speech. While Obama did not confront the Resistance narrative directly, his entire speech sought to challenge it in practice -- offering partnership, declining to endorse the old lines of division or attempt to rally those forces in a new conflict, and challenging all sides to articulate what they are for rather than what they are against.

Democracy. Many people have worried that Obama would not address issues of human rights and democracy in the speech.  He certainly did not offer a Bush/Rice style grand call for democratic transformation of the region -- but, it again has to be noted, those grand calls for democratic transformation accomplished virtually nothing and had been abandoned within a year.  It's not like Bush left a legacy of active democratization which Obama is supposedly abandoning.  Rather than repeat the old buzzwords to please those invested in the democracy promotion industry, Obama did something more important by addressing head on some of the most vexing issues which have plagued American thinking about democracy in the region. This, to my eye, was the key statement:

America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments - provided they govern with respect for all their people.

As I noted yesterday, that suggests clearly that the U.S. will accept the democratic participation of peaceful Islamist movements as long as they abstain from violence --and respect their electoral victories provided that they commit to the democratic process.  He made a passionate defense of that latter point, that victors must demonstrate tolerance and respect for minorities and that elections alone are not enough.  But he clearly did not prejudge participants in the electoral game -- the old canard about Islamists wanting "one man, one vote, one time" thankfully, and significantly, did not appear.

Liberalism and Faith. Finally, Obama offered a genuinely challenging reformulation of how to think about religion in public life: "We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism."  There's a lot packed into that simple statement, which I think gets to the heart of the hypocrisies and bad faith of much of the Western public discourse about Islam (particularly, but by no means exclusively, on the right).  He defended the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab if they so choose, while passionately defending their right to education and to full participation in public life.  And this links back to his lengthy, forthright discussion with which he began his speech: "Islam is a part of America."  Too often, an idealized, supposedly secular America is juxtaposed against religious Islamic countries -- but the America where I live is one filled with religious people of all faiths who bring that faith into the public realm on a daily basis for better or for worse.   Recognizing that reality, and how the U.S. has and has not successfully managed the tensions between liberalism and religion, strikes me as potentially productive.

President Obama's Speech in Cairo: The "Right Path" Runs Through Israeli Settlements

Latest Post: After the Obama Speech - Israel Re-Positions on Settlements, Two-State Solution
Latest Post: After the Obama Speech - Hamas Asks, “Is He Ready to Walk the Way He Talks?”

Near the end of his hour-long speech in Cairo, President Obama declared, "We must choose the right path, not just the easy path." An Enduring America colleague blurted, "How very Obi-Wan Kenobi".

Of course, Obama's address wasn't just Star Wars. It also drew from the Koran on at least five occasions, concluding, "May God's Peace Be Upon You", the Bible ("Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You", "Blessed are the Peacemakers", and the Talmud. It tried to bring Heaven and Earth together from democracy to religious freedom to women's rights to economic development. It rejected the "clash of civilisations" by calling for mutual respect based on an overlap of common principles.

It was, in short, a speech that will draw acclaim from many in the US for its high vision and lofty rhetoric (even though I have no doubt that the Koran references, the self-citation of his name "Barack Hussein Obama", and the President's identification with his audience through his experience from Kenya to Indonesia to Muslims in Chicago will be duly castigated by the Usual Critics). And that general ambition, I think, will ensure the warm applause of the listeners at Cairo University will echo today for many people overseas, including Obama's primary audience in the Middle East.

But what will be heard tomorrow? The "right path" may be laid out with ideals of distant Nirvanas, but Obama has to get there through more immediate, less-exalted territory. And it is in his self-defined three tests that the President's sweeping call to live together will be confronted by people still dying and suffering in different camps.

1. THE HOPEFUL CLIMB: THE IRAN TEST

Obama actually labelled this "rights and responsibilities on nuclear weapons", but that was a clumsy excuse to raise the Tehran issue.

Indeed, it was initially a very misguided sleight-of-speech since it immediately put the case that Iran is close to nuclear weaponry and, more importantly, that it was the only case worthy of notice. (The Twitter boards immediately lit up with, "Nuclear weapons? Israel?")

Obama, however, rescued himself with a shift to an acknowledgement of shared historical blame --- the US acknowledges trying to knock off the Iran Government in 1953 while the Islamic Republic has its own acts of violence since 1979 --- and then the key declaration. Talks will move forward without preconditions. No mention of deadlines, either.

In short --- are you listening, Tel Aviv? --- "engagement" is on.

2) THE DIVERSION: "VIOLENT EXTREMISM" (AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN-IRAQ)

This was Obama's lead item on his seven challenges, and it could have come straight from the George W. Bush playbook (although not delivered so eloquently). The US was "not at war with Islam" but it was "relently confronting extremists who threaten our security". Afghanistan was a war of necessity, as "Al Qa'eda killed nearly 3000 people on that day" of 11 September 2001. Al Qa'eda had continued to kill in many countries, and many of those killed were Muslims.

The President's message? Eight years after 9-11, the US would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan if there were "no violent extremists". Or, turned around, since "violent extremists" are likely to be present in those two countries, the American military --- overtly and covertly, leading operations and pushing for them from Pakistan and Afghanistan allies behind the scenes ---- will be on a long-term mission.

Of course, Obama balanced the military dimension by talking about the economic aid the US is giving to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's the omissions, however, that were striking. No reference to US bombing, missile strikes, or drone attacks; indeed, the President did not even put a number on the troop escalation.

If this speech had been given closer to the affected areas, I think Obama would be facing some very bad press tomorrow. As it was, a more distant audience in Cairo could greet the call for the Long War against Violent Extremism (former known as Terror) with a shrug, apart from applause for the line that Islam does not condone the killing of innocents.

As for other battlefronts in that LWVE, the President's discourse on Iraq was also received patiently but fairly quietly --- this, in comparison with other issues, appears to be yesterday's conflict. There was a much heartier response to the brief but pointed declarations of an end to torture and a closure of Guantanamo Bay.

3) THE TOUCHSTONE: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

"Here we go," my colleague and I said. Obama, after 25 minutes, had finally said, "We need to discuss...the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world."

It was an almost breath-taking rhetorical dive. The President immediately made clear, "America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable." He buttressed that with an extended emphasis on the Holocaust: "Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful."

Having linked support of Israel with historical memory and the fight against anti-Semitism, Obama could put the other half of the equation just as boldly: "Let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own."

Yes, George W. Bush had also mouthed "Palestinian state", but not with this force. And there was more. While Obama went to great lengths to say, "Violence is a dead end," he offered a political opening. His call was not just on the Palestinian Authority to prove its "capacity to govern". He also held out recognition of Hamas, provided that organisation "put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist".

As one listener wrote, "[It was] refreshing to hear a US President go further than any previous in relation to the [Israeli] occupation." However, that listener also added, "Now we need action."

And it is here that Obama's words and post-speech reality meet. The test case for his policy is now the a defining test:

Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

The President added equally important demands: "Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society....Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress." For now, however, the line is drawn: Tel Aviv concedes on settlement or Obama's Middle Eastern plan falls at the first hurdle.

Indeed, that line is so stark that the President did not even refer to other significant issues. He referring to the general responsibilities of Arab States, but there was no mention of Syria (and thus an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement), no reference to Lebanon, let alone Hezbollah, no place for Saudi Arabia apart from an allusion to "King Abdullah’s Interfaith dialogue".

And so the paradox of Cairo: at the end of Obama's hour, his exaltation of values across faiths comes to Earth in those buildings in East Jerusalem and across the West Bank. It is their spread, rather than the spread of goodwill or religious blessings, that will determine the fate of this President's "right path".

A Beginning, Not an End: The Inside Story on US Talks with Iran

As American and Britain news agencies continue to misunderstand and misrepresent President Obama's strategic approach on Iran --- the BBC's Justin Webb was particularly bad on Tuesday morning when he summarised his interview with the President --- Foreign Policy's blog The Cable offers an essential view from inside the Administration.

Using sources from the Interagency Working Group on Iran, The Cable knocked back the idea that the US was pursuing negotiations merely to set up tougher economic sanctions when the talks inevitably fail: "They insist there is hardly a prevailng assumption the effort will fail, and they are doing everything in their power to make it succeed."

The blog reveals that the "negative" camp inside the State Department is, unsurprisingly, led by Dennis Ross. They are arguing for in-depth negotiations even before the completion of Iran's Presidential elections while at the same time contending that Tehran has failed to discuss US communiqués. This sets up their case for "an accelerated deadline for responding to U.S. overtures".

(Clearly it is Ross's group who are leaking to the press the misleading tale that President Obama has given Iran until the end of the year before moving from talks to tougher sanctions. By coincidence, David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy --- who has written a book with Ross on US-Iran relations, to be published next month --- has been putting out this line on BBC Radio as I type.)

Importantly, the Ross camp is opposed --- and arguably overruled --- by two leading officials, Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke (who sees Iran's cooperation as a significant and possibly essential element in a US resolution of the Afghan problem) and the National Security Council's Director of Iran Affairs, Puneet Talwar.

So far the Holbrooke-Talwar line has ensured that the Obama Administration does not treat negotiations with Iran, especially before the end of the Presidential campaign, as "make or break". While Ross' negative message was boosted by its intersection with Israel's drumbeat for an Iran-first approach, it has then been dented by Tel Aviv's playing of the Tehran card to stall on any movement regarding Palestine.

So, far from seeing the autumn and winter as the endpoint of US-Iran talks, with either significant Tehran concessions or an American suspension of the talks to concentrate on economic sanctions, look for the end of 2009 to mark the beginning of a longer-term discussion.