Olmert's Overture To Assad.

The mysterious Sept. 6 raid in the Syrian desert contributed to a surge in the popularity of Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, with an opinion poll showing a gain of up to 10 points. For nearly a fortnight Israel has pointedly declined to comment on the "alleged strike", which hit between Aleppo and al-Rakka. But pride that Israel is flexing its military muscles appears to have lifted Olmert's approval rating. Olmert on Sept. 17 said: "We have no reason to rule out dialogue with Syria", praising President Assad in a rare Israeli boost for the Syrian ruler. He was quoted by the Ha'aretz daily as saying he had "a lot of respect" for Assad and was ready to resume peace talks with Syria without preconditions.

Olmert's popularity dipped to just 3% after the debacle of the July/August 2006 Lebanon war when Israel failed to crush Hizbullah despite a month-long bombing campaign. The premier's rating gradually climbed back to 15% this year. Now, according to Dahaf Polling Institute, the Syria incident has bumped it up to 25%, amid suggestions in Israel that the Jewish state has regained some of its deterrent capability. Pollsters reported that 78% supported an Israeli attack on nuclear targets inside Syria and 51% felt it would not heighten the risk for war against its neighbour.

ElBaradei - At Centre Of The West's Confrontation With Iran: Late in August ElBaradei put the finishing touches on a secret deal with Iran which could be one of the biggest gambles of his ten years as head of the IAEA. With no advance notice, he ordered the plan released in the evening. The next day, diplomats from Britain, France, Germany and the US went to his Vienna office and delivered a joint protest. The deal, they said, amounted to irresponsible meddling which threatened to undermine a UNSC strategy to punish, not reward, Tehran.

ElBaradei, an Egyptian-born lawyer, was polite but firm, asking: "If Iran wants to answer questions, what am I supposed to do, tell them it can't?" Then he dismissed his critics as "living room coaches who shoot from the hip".

Almost five years after he stood up to the Bush administration on Iraq and then won the Nobel Peace Prize, ElBaradei now is at the centre of the West's confrontation with Iran, derided yet relied upon by all sides. To his critics in the West, he is guilty of bias towards Iran, recklessness and, above all, a naive grandiosity which leads him to freelance beyond his station. Over the past year, even before he unveiled his deal with Tehran, Western governments had presented him with a flurry of formal protests over his stewardship of the Iran case.

The New York Times on Sept. 16 said even some of his taff had become restive, questioning his leadership and what they saw as his sympathy for the Iranians. The Iranians themselves seek to humiliate him and block his inspectors. The NYT quoted Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman respected for his foreign affairs acumen, as saying of ElBaradei: "He is the man in the middle. The United States and Iran simply do not believe one another. There is deep distrust", and that makes the situation "very difficult" for any go-between.

Even so, while ElBaradei's harshest detractors describe him as drunk with the power of his Nobel, what keeps him on centre stage is that he has grown ever more indispensable as American credibility on atomic intelligence has nose-dived and European diplomacy with Tehran has stalled. For the world powers, he is the best source of knowledge about Iran's nuclear progress - information Washington uses regularly to portray Tehran as an imminent global danger. The NYT said of ElBaradei: "Even the Iranians need him (as he likes to remind them) because his maneuvers promise to lessen and perhaps end the sting of UN sanctions".

ElBaradei, 65, alludes to a sense of destiny pressing him into the role of world peacemaker. He calls those who advocate war against Iran "crazies", and in two recent interviews described himself as a "secular pope" whose mission is to "make sure, frankly, that we do not end up killing each other". He added: "You meet someone in the street - and I do a lot - and someone will tell me, 'You are doing God's work', and that will keep me going for quite a while". It is that self-invented role which enrages his detractors. They say he has stepped dangerously beyond the mandate of the IAEA, a UN agency inspecting atomic installations in an effort to find and deter secret work on nuclear weapons.

The NYT quoted Robert Einhorn, the State Department's non-proliferation director from 1999 to 2001, as saying of ElBaradei: "Instead of being the head of a technical agency, whose job is to monitor these agreements, and come up with objective assessments, he has become a world policy maker, an advocate". In particular, ElBaradei is faulted for his deal with Iran, which has defied UNSC demands to suspend its enrichment of uranium. Critics say the plan threatens to buy Tehran more time to master that technology, which can make fuel for reactors or nuclear bombs.

Despite Iran's history of deception, ElBaradei's supporters cite his vindication on Iraq - no evidence of an active nuclear programme has been found - as reason to listen to him now. The NYT quoted Thomas Franck, an international law professor at New York University Law School who taught ElBaradei there decades earlier "and remains a close friend", as saying of ElBaradei: "He could have saved us a disastrous war if we had paid attention to him".

After the Iran accord became public, The Washington Post published an editorial branding ElBaradei a "Rogue Regulator". His wife, 'Aida, who is his closest political adviser, came up with a response - T-shirts which succinctly frame the ElBaradei debate: "Rogue regulator" will be stencilled on the front, "Or smooth operator?" on the back.

When ElBaradei received the Nobel in December 2005, he used his acceptance speech to lay out an ambitious agenda - helping the poor, saving the environment, fighting crime, confronting new dangers spawned by globalisation. He said: "We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons or dispatching more troops. Quite to the contrary, by their very nature, these security threats require primarily international co-operation".

Yet ElBaradei's expansive view of himself is a striking counterpoint to his personal style. That Nobel night, he was celebrating with friends at the Grand Hotel in Oslo when thousands of people appeared on the street below, holding candles and cheering. Unsure of himself, he froze. The NYT quoted Franck as recalling: "He was clearly nonplused and adrift at what to do. His wife told him to wave back".

A tall, shy man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, aides say ElBaradei is so averse to small talk that he refuses even superficial conversation with staff members in the agency's elevators. Rather than venture into the dining room or cafeteria, he brings lunch from home and eats at his desk. He must be arm-twisted to make even the briefest appearance at important agency functions. The NYT quoted 'Aida ElBaradei "over tea in their apartment, filled with rugs from Iran and the awards and other baubles that come with her husband's rock-star-for-world-peace persona", as saying: "He is very reserved, very aloof. He thinks these diplomatic receptions and dinners are a waste of time". He shares confidences with only a handful of associates.

The paper quoted a former IAEA official as saying: "He doesn't have meetings where he seeks input. It's, 'Here's what I want to do'". Citing diplomats, The NYT said ElBaradei had become "a compulsive name-dropper". It quoted a European non-proliferation official "who knows him well" as saying: "He remains a shy man, but one who is somehow dazzled by his own destiny. He's always saying, 'Oh, I talked to Condi last week and she told me this'. or 'I was with Putin and he said this or that'. He's almost like a child".

The eldest of five children from an upper-middle class family in Cairo, ElBaradei grew up with a French nanny and a private school education. At 19, he became the national youth champion at squash. His father, a lawyer, was the head of Egypt's bar association. The son studied law and joined the foreign service, eventually serving in New York.

Living there in the late 1960s and early 1970s was so transforming, Elbaradei said, that today he feels greater kinship with New York than Cairo, more comfortable speaking English than Arabic. While working on his doctorate in international law at New York University, he went to Knicks games and to the Metropolitan Opera, stayed up late talking American politics and drinking wine in Greenwich Village bars. His first girlfriend, he said, was Jewish.

Moving up the diplomatic ladder, he eventually settled in Vienna, where he became the nuclear agency's legal counsellor and then head of external relations. His ascent to the top job, in 1997, was a surprise. After none of the proposed candidates received the needed votes, the US ambassador to the agency at the time, John Ritch, led a quiet campaign for ElBaradei, a close friend. In a cable to Washington, Ritch recalled, he said the US could do no better than backing "an Egyptian who is a passionate Knicks fan".

ElBaradei started out with the modest goal of re-organising the IAEA, which today has about 2,300 employees. Then came Iraq. Before the war, the Bush administration repeatedly warned of Saddam Hussein getting the bomb, and called on atomic inspectors to confirm that view. Instead, in March 2003 ElBaradei told the UNSC that, after hundreds of inspections over three months, his teams had found "no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme".

And while President Bush charged that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa, ElBaradei dismissed the underlying intelligence as "not authentic". The invasion, 13 days later, was "the saddest day of my life", he said. Even as American troops found no unconventional arms, the Bush administration took aim at ElBaradei and his agency, barring his inspectors from Iraq and working behind the scenes to keep him from a third term.

Elbaradei said he had been 99% decided against running until he learned that John Bolton, then Washington's UN ambassador, was determined to block him. ElBaradei recalled "a sense of revulsion" that such a personal decision should be made "by anybody else". His wife said she told him to run. Ultimately, with no candidate of its own and no international support, the US backed down. In October 2005, a month into his new term, the Nobel call came.

The standoff with Tehran entered its current phase on Jan. 10, 2006, when Iran broke the IAEA's protective seals on equipment at its underground site at Natanz and resumed efforts to enrich uranium. When the West began imposing sanctions, Iran retaliated by cutting back on its co-operation with the IAEA and barring dozens of its inspectors. As the Iranians ramped up enrichment, the IAEA and the rest of the world were steadily going blind.

ElBaradei himself was humiliated on a rare visit to Tehran in April 2006. Two days before his arrival, the Iranians announced a breakthrough - industrial-level enrichment. Still, ElBaradei hoped to meet the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Instead, he spent much of his time in a hotel room.

Critics say ElBaradei has responded to such provocations by going soft on Tehran - glossing over its violations, caving in to its demands and writing reports which bend over backwards to be conciliatory. For instance, they say he has added to inspection woes by moving a half-dozen top investigators off the case, which the IAEA defends as normal rotations. The chief Iran inspector, Christian Charlier, who spoke out publicly about Iran's evasiveness, was put on the Brazil file.

The NYT quoted Bolton as saying of ElBaradei: "He's naive and idiosyncratic, and that amounts to being dangerous. His argument for years was that he could talk Iran out of being a nuclear threat. Then it was, 'OK, we'll just let them experiment'. Now it's, 'You're never going to get them to give up'".

ElBaradei's supporters, however, say he is engaged in a balancing act which deals as much with Washington's excesses as Tehran's. In May 2007, after Vice President Dick Cheney warned from an aircraft carrier off Iran's coast that the US was ready to use its naval power to keep Tehran from "gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region", ElBaradei offered a quick response: He declared that Iran had achieved "the knowledge" of enrichment - implying it was too late for military action or other Western punishment for refusing to stop its atomic efforts. He said: "The fact of the matter is that one of the purposes of suspension - keeping them from getting the knowledge - has been overtaken by events".

Elbaradei's remarks out-stripped the analyses of his own inspectors, who were reporting technical problems at Natanz, and fuelled suspicions that he was exaggerating Iran's progress as a political manoeuvre. Even so, that argument - that Iran had already crossed an important line - was the tacit assumption behind the new accord. The plan, out n Aug. 27, sets a firm timetable for Iran to clear up a half-dozen controversies about past secret activities, while also improving access for IAEA inspectors.

The diplomats who marched into ElBaradei's office the next day shredded the plan point by point. They expressed dismay that the accord, negotiated with no diplomatic input, omitted any stipulation that Iran suspend enrichment. One envoy noted that the plan was to force inspectors to ask questions on only one issue at a time, leaving the most sensitive topics until the end. There was general alarm that the document suggested treating Iran like a "routine" case, instead of a country which had lied repeatedly and, according to some governments, harboured a secret nuclear-arms programme.

ElBaradei's response, paraphrased by a Western official, was that "all you are doing is being suspicious", adding: "The agency cannot judge Iranian intentions". In the days that followed, representatives of other countries hammered ElBaradei. But a week later, many governments had started to believe that their strategy was back-firing. They decided to try to co-opt ElBaradei rather than isolate him. The new thinking went like this: He and the Iranians had won this round. Much of the world would consider the agreement on a timetable a step forward.

By contrast, Western diplomacy was stalled. On Sept. 7, envoys from the four Western powers again visited ElBaradei's office. But this time they offered support for his effort to clear up the past and said they welcomed his renewed support in pressing Iran to suspend enrichment and let inspectors conduct wider inquiries. The NYT quoted a "senior European official as saying: "We told the Americans it would do no good to criticize ElBaradei, that it would only make him look even more like a hero".

In the interview, ElBaradei called the shift "a complete change" - the result of his explaining and "standing firm". He called his accord a sound step towards defusing the Iran confrontation. He said: "I have no qualm that some people have distrust because of Iran's past behavior". But sanctions alone, he added, would solve nothing. He said: "You need to sit together and talk about it and try to work out mechanisms to build confidence". And if the Iranians do not keep their promises, he said, "I told them very openly that it will backfire. Absolutely".

Recently, when IAEA's board met in Vienna and discussed the new plan, the US envoy, Gregory Schulte, stunned colleagues by praising ElBaradei. He told the board the deal was "a potentially important development and a step in the right direction". Even so, diplomats and visitors say that, in unguarded moments, ElBaradei has expressed the conviction that a lasting accommodation with Iran must wait until the Bush administration is gone.

The danger, some analysts say, is that by then Iran might have acquired the ability to make a bomb. American intelligence analysts put that date at anywhere from 2010 to 2015. Even if Iran begins to deliver on its latest promises, ElBaradei faces a potential deal-breaker.

As part of the accord, he is demanding that the US give Tehran copies of American intelligence documents related to alleged secret Iranian military work on nuclear warheads. As a lawyer, he said, he was determined to give Iran the access it deserved.

And if it turned out that Iran did, in the past, make secret moves towards nuclear weapons?

ElBaradei said: "Many countries had ambitions in the past", raising the prospect that, in theory, Iran, too, might "have to make certain confessions". At the end of the day, he added, the most important thing "is for them to come clean".