It was just a phrase at the end of President Obama’s news conference on Tuesday, but it was a stark reminder of a far-reaching shift in how the United States views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how aggressively it might push for a peace agreement.

When Mr. Obama declared that resolving the long-running Middle East dispute was a “vital national security interest of the United States,” he was highlighting a change that has resulted from a lengthy debate among his top officials over how best to balance support for Israel against other American interests.

This shift, described by administration officials who did not want to be quoted by name when discussing internal discussions, is driving the White House’s urgency to help broker a Middle East peace deal. It increases the likelihood that Mr. Obama, frustrated by the inability of the Israelis and the Palestinians to come to terms, will offer his own proposed parameters for an eventual Palestinian state.

Mr. Obama said conflicts like the one in the Middle East ended up “costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure” — drawing an explicit link between the Israeli-Palestinian strife and the safety of American soldiers as they battle Islamic extremism and terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Mr. Obama’s words reverberated through diplomatic circles in large part because they echoed those of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the military commander overseeing America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent Congressional testimony, the general said that the lack of progress in the Middle East created a hostile environment for the United States. He has denied reports that he was suggesting that soldiers were being put in harm’s way by American support for Israel.

But the impasse in negotiations “does create an environment,” he said Tuesday in a speech in Washington. “It does contribute, if you will, to the overall environment within which we operate.”

The glimmers of daylight between United States and Israeli interests began during President George W. Bush’s administration, when the United States became mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three years ago, Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, declared during a speech in Jerusalem that a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was a “strategic interest” of the United States. In comments that drew little notice at the time, she said, “The prolonged experience of deprivation and humiliation can radicalize even normal people.”

But President Bush shied away from challenging Israeli governments.

The Obama administration’s new thinking, and the tougher policies toward Israel that could flow from it, has alarmed American Jewish leaders accustomed to the Bush administration’s steadfast support. They are not used to seeing issues like Jewish housing in the West Bank or East Jerusalem linked, even by implication, to the security of American soldiers. Some fret that it raises questions about the centrality of the American alliance with Israel, which the administration flatly denies.

“In the past, the problem of who drinks out of whose well in Nablus has not been a strategic interest of the United States,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel and the vice president and the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He said there was an interest now because of the tens of thousands of troops fighting Islamist insurgencies abroad at the same time that the United States was trying to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“Will resolving the Palestinian issue solve everything?” Mr. Indyk said. “No. But will it help us get there? Yes.”

The administration’s immediate priority, officials said, is jump-starting indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians. There is still a vigorous debate inside the administration about what to do if such talks were to go nowhere, which experts said is the likeliest result, given the history of such negotiations. Some officials, like Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, advocate putting forward an American peace plan, while others, like the longtime Middle East peace negotiator Dennis B. Ross, who now works in the National Security Council, favor a more incremental approach.

Last week, National Security Council officials met with outside Middle East experts to discuss the Arab Israeli conflict. Two weeks before, General Jones and Mr. Obama met with several national security advisers from previous administrations and discussed putting forward an American proposal, even though it would put pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians.

Several officials point out that Mr. Obama has now seized control of Middle East policy himself, particularly since the controversy several weeks ago when Israeli authorities announced new Jewish housing units in Jerusalem during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Obama, incensed by that snub, has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a list of demands, and relations between the United States and Israel have fallen into a chilly standoff.

“The president is re-evaluating the tactics his administration is employing toward Israel and the entire Middle East,” said Robert Wexler, a former Democratic congressman who resigned in January to lead the Center for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based nonprofit institution that is working for a peace agreement.

“I don’t think that anybody believes American lives are endangered or materially affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Mr. Wexler, who has close ties to administration officials. “That’s an oversimplification. However, you’d have to have blinders on not to recognize that there are issues in one arena that affect other arenas.”

For their part, administration officials insist that their support for Israel is unwavering. They point to intensive cooperation between the American and Israeli militaries, which they say has allowed Israel to retain a military edge over its neighbors.

The sense of urgency in Washington comes just as many Israelis have become disillusioned with the whole idea of resolving the conflict. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government has long been skeptical about the benefits of a peace deal with the Palestinians. But skepticism has taken root in the Israeli public as well, particularly after Israel saw little benefit from its traumatic withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

Among American Jewish groups, there is less skepticism than alarm about the administration’s new direction. On Tuesday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, publicized letters to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, signed by 76 senators and 333 House members, that implored the administration to defuse tensions.

In an open letter to Mr. Obama from the World Jewish Congress, the organization’s president, Ronald S. Lauder, asked, “Why does the thrust of this administration’s Middle East rhetoric seem to blame Israel for the lack of movement on peace talks?”

Mr. Lauder, who said the letter was scheduled to be published Thursday as an advertisement in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, said he discussed the letter with Mr. Netanyahu and received his support before taking out the ad.

A row about how to name the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories has scuppered a 43-nation scheme for managing Mediterranean water resources.

The Mediterranean Union conference in Barcelona had hammered out 99% of a draft text, delegates said.

But the deal failed when Israel and Arab countries disagreed over how to describe the Palestinian territories.

Israel objected to “occupied territories”, while “territories under occupation” did not suit the Arab bloc.

The United Nations has warned that almost 300 million people in the Mediterranean region will face water shortages by 2025.

The Mediterranean Union was launched by France during its EU presidency in 2008, to foster co-operation between European states, and countries in the Middle East and North Africa bordering the Mediterranean.

In Barcelona on Tuesday the Union’s secretary-general, Ahmad Masadeh from Jordan, called for urgent action to guarantee access to water for all the region’s residents.

Spain, the conference host, warned that the Mediterranean was prone to cyclical floods and droughts that required a “common strategy for a scarce resource”.

Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have lived under Israeli occupation since 1967. The settlements that Israel has built in the West Bank are home to around 400,000 people and are deemed to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

Israel evacuated its settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and withdrew its forces, but Israel and Egypt maintain an economic blockade on the Palestinians living there.

The EU has turned a blind eye to the way post-Communist countries are dealing with their totalitarian legacy, with former secret police officers still filling powerful positions, says Nobel literature prize-winner Herta Mueller.

Ms Mueller, a Romanian-born German, has focused most of her novels and essays on life under dictatorship, under constant fear and intimidation by Romania’s secret police, the Securitate. Deportation and labour camps in the Soviet Union, as experienced by her own parents, are depicted in the latest novel, Atemschaukel (in English: Everything I Possess I Carry With Me), for which she won the Nobel prize last year.

In Brussels on Tuesday (13 April) to promote the book, Ms Mueller however focussed on the present, expressing her dissatisfaction with the EU’s lack of pressure on new member states to deal with their Communist past.
“I think the EU acted pretty naively by taking these countries on so quickly and was not able to foresee what kind of crafty and obstructionist barriers they would be faced with,” she told journalists during a press conference at the Passa Porta literature house in Brussels.
“I know that in Romania, scores of people who used to work for the Securitate are now in high-level positions and this has virtually no consequences. It is not important for the society,” she said.
“These people have gained so much influence that they have managed to almost re-create their old network of power, where they all know and serve each other. It is the second life of the dictatorship. Under different circumstances, organised in a different way. And without ideology. Without Socialism.”
One example of how little lustration – the term used to refer to government policies of limiting the participation of former Communists in political positions – has worked in Romania is the case of Radu Tinu, a self-acknowledged former Securitate chief who was responsible for planting microphones in the author’s appartment.
Mr Tinu – head of the Romanian branch of an Austrian insurance company – last year said that the new Nobel prize winner was suffering from a mental disease, that she was exaggerating her accounts and jokingly claimed the Securitate deserved the award.
“This irritated me a lot. Not that he exists, but that he holds this post, that Austria’s biggest insurance company – Staedtische Versicherung – employs such people. Also, that someone like him has such a standing in Romania that he can express himself in all newspapers. This would not have been possible in Germany,” Ms Mueller said.
Although she personally felt “nothing special” about being a Nobel prize winner, the 57-year old said there was some positive impact in the sense that it “pushed the topic of dictatorship into the spotlight.”
“Maybe what I say is being listened to by more people and perceived differently. That’s what I’m trying to use the prize for.”

Literature is political
Ms Mueller finds nothing wrong with claims that the Nobel prize jury is making mainly political decisions when granting these awards. “Literature is not something apolitical. All literary prizes are now and then surrounded by scandals and mostly because of political reasons.”
Asked if she felt any pressure for her future writing having won the award, Ms Mueller replied: “Pressure was during the dictatorship. When my house was being searched, when I was interrogated.”
“If I am satisfied with anything concerning my life, it is not the books, but the fact that I somehow managed to keep my integrity during the Romanian dictatorship. That’s the most important thing. For me, writing is a job like any other.”

Conflicting views: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) with US president Barack Obama in Washington last year. Their poor personal and political relations have played a part in the rift between their countries

The world clustered around Barack Obama on Monday – with one very notable exception. Leaders of some 40 countries, from Argentina and Armenia to China and India, gathered in Washington to attend the nuclear security summit convoked by the US president. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, stayed away.

Israeli diplomats attribute Mr Netanyahu’s last-minute cancellation to Turkish and Egyptian plans to discuss Israel’s nuclear arsenal. But his absence from an event intended to show US allies and partners rallying around the American president’s agenda was, at the very least, deeply symbolic.

The US-Israeli alliance, for decades the cornerstone of Middle East power politics, is in rocky shape. The Obama administration is angry about Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Mr Netanyahu’s government is recoiling at what it depicts as Mr Obama’s unreasonable demands.

The tension between the two sides has become a story of personal snubs and policy differences even as the US and Israel profess their devotion to each other. As George Mitchell, Washington’s Middle East envoy, prepares to return to the region, US officials are considering eventually issuing outlines of their own for an Israeli-Palestinian deal – a turn of events Israel is desperate to avoid.

But at root, the differences stem from the two countries’ contrasting reactions to an issue seen by both as crucial to their national interest, and, in Israel’s case, to its national survival: Iran.

“The principal difference between now and previous administrations is the Iran problem,” says a senior US official as he discusses the current US-Israeli stand-off. “From our perspective, it increases the urgency of Israel keeping the international community focused on that problem and not on other problems. And the Israelis need all of us to be working together on the common goal of keeping the pressure on the Iranians to back off.”

Still, as diplomats and analysts study the underlying causes of the US-Israeli rift, there can be little doubt that the poor personal and political chemistry between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu plays a part. Their relationship is clearly much more confrontational than that between President George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime ministers.

Washington officials say Mr Obama was infuriated by Israel’s announcement of the expansion of a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem during a fence-mending visit last month by Joe Biden, the vice-president. Little more than a week later, Mr Netanyahu paid one of the most ignominious visits to the White House of any major ally in recent years – out of sight of the media, left to confer with his team in the Roosevelt room while Mr Obama dined without him, and exiting the building without any agreement despite two meetings with the president in a matter of hours.

Mr Netanyahu also presides over perhaps the most right wing coalition in Israeli history, while Mr Obama is widely perceived as among the most liberal presidents in decades. The Israeli leader is seen in Washington as obstructionist, while many Israelis regard Mr Obama as naive, inexperienced and – worst of all – the architect of a US policy of appeasement.

Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu share the view that Tehran must be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons capability, a scenario both maintain would destabilize the wider Middle East and embolden Israel’s most committed foes. But there is a fundamental, and increasingly visible, rift on how best to respond. Crudely put, the Americans view Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts as the key ingredient in building an Arab coalition to curb Iran. Israel, by contrast, argues that a lasting Middle East peace is only attainable once the world has dealt with the threat from Tehran.

Speaking to more than 7,000 people at last month’s annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the powerful pro-Israel lobby group, Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, highlighted the propaganda value of images of the occupied Palestinian territories, calling for Israel to help change “the facts on the ground” to “refute the claims of the rejectionists and extremists and in so doing create the circumstances for a safe, secure future for Israel”.

She added: “Behind these terrorist organizations and their rockets, we see the destabilizing influence of Iran. Now, reaching a two-state solution will not end all these threats … but failure to do so gives the extremist foes a pretext to spread violence, instability and hatred.”

The US is also stepping up work with Arab states to contain Tehran. But as General David Petraeus, head of US central command, said last month: “If you go to moderate leaders in the Arab world they will tell you that the lack of progress in the Middle East peace process causes them problems.”

Mr Netanyahu’s government treats the rise of Iran – and its nuclear ambitions – as an issue so urgent it leaves the peace talks in the shade. On his last trip to Washington he told members of Congress that the Palestinians were not presently a willing partner for peace. He also encouraged the passage of unilateral US sanctions legislation against companies investing in Iran – despite the Obama administration’s objections.

The White House was not happy. “The more you resort to throwing your weight around in someone else’s backyard the less compunction they will have about doing the same,” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now at the New America Foundation think-tank in the US.

In his own speech to Aipac, the Israeli prime minister brushed aside any suggestion that the broader conflict between the Muslim world and the west was linked to Israel: “Militant Islam does not hate the west because of Israel. It hates Israel because of the west – because it sees Israel as an outpost of freedom and democracy that prevents them from overrunning the Middle East.” — This is not a view widely shared outside Israel. “We are all saying to Israel that if the main threat in the area is indeed Iran then they are not on the right road for a solution,” says a senior western diplomat, stressing European and Russian support for Mr Obama’s position.

The logic sketched out by the US and its allies goes as follows: containing Iran requires an Arab coalition; an Arab coalition requires an Israeli-Palestinian peace process; an Israeli-Palestinian peace process requires Israeli concessions; and the Israeli concession required right now is a halt to new settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem. In her Aipac speech, Mrs Clinton also argued that, in the absence of a peace deal, demographic trends and other factors put Israel’s long-term survival as a democratic Jewish state at risk.

“They can stick to their position of principle on East Jerusalem but just because they can doesn’t mean they have to,” the senior US official says of the Israeli government. “And that’s what we are suggesting, just out of their own self interest – some forbearance there to make it possible for the Palestinians to be more forthcoming.”

Israeli analysts close to the Netanyahu government see things differently. “President Barack Obama capitalised on a minor Israeli glitch [the announcement during Mr Biden’s visit] … to fabricate a crisis in US-Israeli relations,” says Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Affairs. “This appears to fit Obama’s overall foreign policy approach of estranging democratic allies while appeasing anti-American dictators.”

Yet to other Israelis the fighting talk of the country’s political right masks a dangerous complacency. They note that Israel has become even more dependent on US military and diplomatic support than in the past.

“If you look at the threat perception in Israel, the threat is mainly considered to be coming from Iran. But it is also quite evident that Israel cannot deal with the Iranian threat on its own,” says Shlomo Brom, a senior analyst at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and the former director of the army’s strategic planning division.

It is a view widely shared among US analysts. Israel, they say, is likely to need US assistance for any effective military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities – and to deal with the backlash certain to follow such an attack.

Meanwhile, there is considerable discomfort in Washington about some of Mr Netanyahu’s language on Iran, which he has likened in the past to Nazi Germany. “I don’t think it is in America’s interest or of anybody else who is a friend of America to encourage America into a collision with Iran,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser. “The issue really is how can one achieve an outcome which is going to be good for the American national interest, ensure Israel’s indefinite well-being and security, and some measure of genuine justice for the Palestinians?”

Many people maintain that Israel and the US will ultimately be able to patch up their differences and resume their traditional close relations. Powerful forces in Washington feel uncomfortable with the current tensions. Many conservatives view Israel as an ally unlike any other, a fellow democracy in a sea of authoritarian states. The administration’s stance has found opposition or only muted support on Capitol Hill, where Aipac remains a formidable force despite increasing divisions among Jewish-Americans themselves. Leading Republicans have voiced sharp criticism of the tougher line on Israel.

That kind of support leads some Israelis to believe Mr Netanyahu can, and should, defy US pressure. As Dore Gold, the president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs and a former Netanyahu adviser, says: “The relationship between the US and Israel is not restricted to their governments … The people of the US are with us and Congress is certainly with us.”

One thing is clear: even as the diplomatic tensions mount, no one in Washington is questioning the American commitment to Israel’s security, a pledge described by Mrs Clinton as “rock-solid, unwavering, enduring and for ever”. She boasted in her Aipac speech that Washington was increasing the $3bn military assistance the US delivers to Israel each year. Nor does the Obama administration see much scope in reducing other subsidies to Israel. All the same, some officials are looking at one possible source of pressure: eventually issuing US “parameters” or guidelines for a peace deal.

The Obama administration is, in other words, shaping a policy more nuanced than its predecessors’: it seeks to blend a cast-iron commitment to Israel’s security with a much more critical stance on settlement building and the peace process. As Iran continues its progress towards nuclear capability, it is a distinction that seems unlikely to disappear. For Mr Netanyahu and his government, uncomfortable times lie ahead.

ISTANBUL — Since the Turkish republic’s founding 87 years ago, the military has stood as unquestioned guardian of secular democracy, intervening when it deemed necessary to keep religion out of politics in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation.

But now, battered by allegations of corruption and scandal, the authority of the once-unchallenged military is being whittled away by an increasingly assertive and confident public. The critics are a diverse array of democracy advocates, head-scarf-wearing Muslim women, journalists and others who complain that the military’s grip on power has largely benefited wealthy and secular elites.

Old taboos are collapsing amid the new questioning of a military-political order established by revered national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ceren Kenar, 25, a graduate student in Istanbul, recalled marching in the streets of Ankara to protest against a blunt military foray into domestic politics in 2007. She said that when she wasn’t detained, “that was the moment I knew Turkey had changed.”

Turks now freely discuss and criticize the military. Most remarkably, senior officers, once immune from any kind of prosecution, have been arrested in an alleged conspiracy to oust Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party from power.

A secret organization

The officers are accused of taking part in an underground organization, known as Ergenekon, that allegedly plotted to overthrow Erdogan after he was elected in 2002. The arrests have deeply demoralized and rattled the military upon which Washington depends.

The United States wants Turkey to continue with democratic reforms, but it also wants its military to remain a strong, reliable ally in the region. President Obama signaled the importance of Turkey — which borders Iran, Iraq and Syria — a year ago when he made it his first international destination as president.

After visiting Ataturk’s tomb, Obama told the Turkish parliament that the founder’s “greatest legacy is Turkey’s strong and secular democracy.” That legacy is at the heart of Turkey’s current power struggle.

Erdogan is pushing a major overhaul that would amend the country’s 28-year-old military constitution with reforms including changes to statutes covering the prosecution of military officers. In a recent poll, 58 percent of respondents said Turkey needs a civilian constitution compared with 20 percent who said it doesn’t. Three months ago, a law was passed limiting the military’s role to guard against external threats rather than perceived domestic ones.

The Turkish military is not clearly controlled by civilian leaders — unlike that of the United States, where the president is commander in chief of the armed forces.

“The Turkish army chief of staff doesn’t consider himself subordinate to the minister of defense. He does not consider himself subordinate to the prime minister, either,” said Yasemin Congar, 43 and editor of Taraf, the two-year-old Turkish newspaper that has broken most of the Ergenekon stories.

“In Turkey, the elected governments have never been the real power,” she said. “That’s what’s changing now. It’s kind of an unwritten law that they always abide by the military. It’s the founder of the republic, guardian of the regime, guardian of secularism. Now it’s changing a bit. But it’s a very, very hard process.”

Because of her dangerous central role publicizing the Ergenekon plot, Conger travels with bodyguards. She is careful not to take the ferry to work across the Bosporus, the beautiful strait that splits Istanbul and separates Europe from Asia, presumably for fear that she could be assassinated and dumped overboard.

Ergenekon is maddeningly complex and filled with pulp-fiction plots such as alleged plans by the military to blow up mosques to create chaos. Some Turks say the stories sound too fantastical to be real. But many others say that they ring true in a nation where the military has a history of orchestrating coups to oust governments it doesn’t like.

For many, the most startling aspect of Ergenekon is that it is discussed at all, and that the military has not been able to quash it.

“The significant thing about Ergenekon isn’t that it’s happening — because there’s some amount of truth behind some of these allegations,” said a Western diplomat in Ankara who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The significant thing about this is that they’ve managed to resolve these things up until now without any kind of crisis.”

Beyond more open criticism of the military, society is shifting in more subtle ways.

Symbolic change

Ataturk’s image is still just about everywhere, but when Turkey issued a new currency last year, the founder of the republic was put on only one side of the bill rather than both. The military no longer guards the parliament building, a symbolic change.

Still, the military has many fans who believe it has nobly guarded against religion undermining the nation’s secular character. Many here suspect, for example, that Erdogan wants to turn Turkey into an Islamic state.

Critics cite Erdogan’s push to allow women to wear head scarves at state universities — a major political issue here — and to make adultery illegal. He failed at both. His advocacy of taxes on tobacco and alcohol, both prohibited under Islam, also raised red flags.

Erdogan’s biggest political problem may be that he has failed to convince much of the traditional elite that he won’t take away their secular freedoms. One prominent critic, retired Brig. Gen. Haldun Solmazturk, said he doesn’t trust Erdogan to make decisions that will preserve Turkey’s secularism.

Still, many Turks are questioning whether Ataturk’s vision is appropriate in modern, diverse Turkey, a burgeoning economic and regional power with aspirations to join the European Union.

Kenar, the Ankara graduate student, predicted that protests against the military’s dominant role in society would continue to grow.

“The overuse of Ataturk created a generation like mine,” she said.

Syria is providing Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon with the Scud missiles that traumatized Israel in the 1991 Gulf War, and a “Scud Crisis” is threatening to ignite an all-out war between Israel and Hizbullah, the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper reported.

President Shimon Peres confirmed the reports prior to leaving for his three-day visit to France.

Paraphrasing Psalms 120:7, the president said on Israeli radio, “Syria claims it wants peace while at the same time it delivers Scuds to Hizbullah whose only goal is to threaten the state of Israel.  “I am for peace; When I speak, they are for war.”’

Al-Rai reported this week that Israel warned the Obama administration “it will take steps” if the United States does not succeed in pressuring Syria to cease arming Hizbullah with the weapons. The U.S. State Department then summoned Syrian Ambassador Imad Mustafa “to inform his government about the level of danger if the missiles crossed the border.”

Israel reportedly sent warnings it would bomb Lebanese and Syrian targets if the long-range missiles cross the border into Lebanon. There are conflicting reports on whether several Scud missiles already have been delivered to Hizbullah terrorists. Despite the almost invisible line between Lebanese armed forces and Hizbullah, the Obama has administration shipped weapons to the Beirut-based government, which is heavily dominated by Syrian interests.

The increasingly open threats made by Syrian leaders and members of the Hizbullah terrorist group in Lebanon have led analyst David Schenker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank to warn that war may be on the horizon. In addition, he noted, a future war could include Syria and not only its proxy Hizbullah: in February, Syrian leaders said Syria would not “sit idly by” in case of another war with Israel.

Syrian President Bashar Assad recently told visiting U.S. Senator John Kerry that Syria was not arming Hizbullah with the deadly weapons, but the American government was not convinced.

“These reports are unequivocally false and are a product of the Israeli government that is trying to speciously create a raised level of tension in the region to justify a future conflagration of violence on their part, or simply to divert attention from the real issue at hand: Israeli settlements and expansionism,” Syria’s Washington embassy spokesman told Foreign Policy’s The Cable.

U.S. President Barack Obama, as part of his “engagement” policy, recently renewed official diplomatic relations with Syria even though the United States defines it as country that supports terror.

Iraq, which was under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in 1991, pounded Israel, including metropolitan Tel Aviv, with 40 missiles (pictured at left). In what has been termed a Divine miracle, no one was killed by the explosions.