Suspension of enrichment-related activities is a precondition set by France, Britain, Germany, Russia, the United States and China for talks with Tehran on a package of economic and other incentives in exchange for Iran scrapping the program.

"Iran ... has accepted to talk about the question of suspension. That for us is a positive development," spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei told a regular news briefing.

Iran has so far ignored an August 31 U.N. Security Council deadline to suspend its enrichment program, which Tehran says will only be used for civilian purposes, not to make atomic weapons as many Western countries suspect.

In the latest in a series of recent presentations and writings, Gingrich called this week in a speech at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for, among other things:

- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to "clear out any Taliban forces" in Waziristan if Pakistan fails to do so.

- Washington to "take whatever steps are necessary" to force Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to stop the flow of weapons, money and people into Iraq.

- To help "organize every dissident group in Iran" with the goal of replacing the regime, failing which, "we certainly have to be prepared to use military force".

- "End" the North Korean regime if it ships nuclear weapons or material anywhere.

- Insist that Congress immediately pass legislation "that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the US will use all its resources to defeat our enemies - not accommodate, understand or negotiate with them, but defeat them".

Gingrich's remarks, which significantly earned a rave review in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, came in the context of early jockeying in the 2008 presidential race, whose leading - albeit unannounced - candidates besides Gingrich include Arizona Senator John McCain, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Virginia Senator George Allen, and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Of these, McCain, the neo-conservative favorite until his defeat by Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, is the most popular, along with Giuliani, among the electorate as a whole. However, McCain's occasionally maverick ways - such as his support for reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions and his efforts to ban torture and other abuse against terrorist suspects - have created tensions with the right-wing core of the party.

According to the latest polls, Gingrich, who is widely credited with masterminding the stunning 1994 Republican landslide that gave the party control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, ranks third behind Giuliani and McCain and appears to be making steady progress among the Republican faithful, who have, according to pollster Frank Luntz, forgotten the many controversies he generated during his four-year tenure as Speaker.

After taking responsibility for Republican losses in Congress in 1998, Gingrich resigned as Speaker, but he has remained politically active as a senior fellow at the AEI, an advisory board member of the pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a member of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB).

In all of these capacities, he, along with fellow DPB members Richard Perle and James Woolsey, has been an outspoken champion of the hardline hawks within the Bush administration led by Vice President Dick Cheney and a constant critic of the State Department, which, from time to time, he has accused of disloyalty to the Bush agenda.

Indeed, in mid-April 2003, just one week after invading US forces had consolidated control of Baghdad, he gave a speech in which he charged that the department was undermining Washington's military victory by endorsing a high-level dialogue with Syria and the "Quartet's" roadmap for reviving peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

His remarks, which were also delivered at the AEI, were so extreme that they provoked blunt-speaking deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage to give USA Today one of the most memorable quotes of the Iraq war: "It's clear that Mr Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy."

Although both more Churchillian and alarmist in tone, Gingrich's latest speech, titled "Lessons from the First Five Years of War: Where Do We Go from Here?", was very much in the same vein in that it included attacks on the State Department, the news media, and even Harvard University, whose recent hosting of "tyrants" such as former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami should, he said, be openly compared to hosting Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels or SS commander Heinrich Himmler in 1937.

While praising Bush for his "courage and determination" in pursuing his "war on terror", Gingrich implicitly criticized the president for failing to communicate the potentially cataclysmic threats posed by "an emerging anti-American coalition" consisting of al-Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and doing more to counter them.

Bush's "strategies are not wrong, but they are failing", he said, in part because "they do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be".

"We have vastly more to do than we have even begun to imagine," he stressed, larding his text with quotes by Iranian officials, "Islamic fascists", and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatening the United States and Israel, and warning against "appeasement" and "utopian elites [at home who] suffer from ... denial of near-psychotic proportions".

Gingrich proposed a series of steps to counter the threat, beginning at home with gaining "absolute control of our borders" and "decisive port security", adopting a "one war" model in which everything in the country is "done in a coordinated, integrated manner with the same precision and drive in the civilian as in the military agencies" and major increases in the military and intelligence budgets, and developing a "strategic energy policy which is explicitly aimed at making the Persian Gulf and the dictatorships less wealthy and less important".

In Afghanistan, NATO should "clear out "any Taliban" in Pakistan if Islamabad cannot police the border areas and provide a major economic-aid program that would reduce the Afghan economy's dependence on heroin production and that would not be based on "hopelessly obsolete" State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) rules.

For Iraq, Gingrich called for "revitaliz[ing]" the economy by asking US corporations to buy "modest amounts of light manufacturing from Iraq" and creating a new US agency, other than USAID, capable of administering expanded public-works programs; improving security by doubling the size of the Iraqi military and police forces to get a "much larger forces-to-bad-guys ratio than we currently have planned"; and putting Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia "on notice" against any interference in Iraq.

In Iran, "a dictatorship dedicated to Islamic fascism and ... a mortal threat to our survival", Gingrich called for a regime-change strategy through support for all dissidents, diplomatic and economic sanctions, and military force, if necessary. "This strategy means no more visas for Iranian leaders" and United Nations sanctions against President Mahmud Ahmadinejad for "threatening to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth".

"If we do not stand up against a Holocaust-denying, genocide-proposing, publicly self-defined enemy of the United States, why should we expect anyone else to do so?" he asked.

Washington must also pursue regime change in Pyongyang, according to Gingrich, who called for militarily preempting any launch of a North Korean missile and the announcement that "any effort by North Korea to ship nuclear weapons or material anywhere will be a casus belli and will lead to the end of the regime".

It was "vintage Gingrich: brassy, confrontational, direct, polarizing, articulate, harsh, disarming, and charismatic", wrote the Standard's Matthew Continetti approvingly. "His rivals should take note. The first speech of the 2008 presidential campaign was delivered on the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001."

At the yearly conference organized by the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, experts noted Iran was developing missiles that could reach Western Europe. With a nuclear umbrella, Iran or its proxy Hezbollah for example, could launch more daring attacks. It could use chemical or biological weapons, something it has avoided so far, warned Col. Shlomo Mofaz, a reserve officer, who recently retired from the military intelligence. Iran has sleeper cells in Europe that it could activate within a very short time, he noted.

One Israeli analyst, the head of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, retired intelligence Col. Ephraim Kam, doubted Iran would attack Israel.

Its conventional capabilities are limited. Most of its aircraft are 30 to 35 years old and so are its tanks. Its Shehab missiles could inflict casualties but the Shehab is not a strategic weapon, he said.

Israel can deter Teheran with the threat of air and missile attacks. Iran believes Israel has a nuclear capability and is "very much aware of the special relationship between the United States and Israel." It must take that into account if it decides to "cross red line."

Will that change once Iran has a nuclear bomb, Kam asked? "Not very likely," he suggested.

Kam was in a minority. For most Israelis Iran's nuclear program threatens their very existence.

"As crazy at it sounds, the current regime, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in particular, believes that the destruction of Israel is an attainable goal. The ayatollahs have said they are ready to pay a very heavy price in order to destroy Israel. In their thinking, the Christian West will be ready to tolerate the obliteration of the Jewish state in exchange for a long truce with the Islamic world," wrote the Director of Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies Efraim Inbar, in bitterlemons.org

A few participants in this week's conference advocated political efforts to undermine the Iranian regime. "I strongly believe the Iranian radical regime will not be able to contain the popular demand, that comes from bottom to top, to change the nature of the regime," Kam suggested.

Critics argue Iran is too close to having a bomb to be able to wait for such a development.

In bitterlemons.org Shmuel Even of the Jaffee Center probed the option of economic sanctions. They could vary from freezing financial transactions and cooperation agreements to a total economic embargo.

Iran could withstand even an embargo, for some time, but the price would be very high, Even wrote.

It exports some 2.4 million barrels of oil a day. At current prices that brings in $60 billion a year. It is $15 billion more than last year, he noted.

However, Iran must import gasoline because its refinery capacity is too small to satisfy local needs. An embargo would force it to reduce gasoline consumption by about 37 percent, Even predicted.

An economic embargo would therefore hurt its industry, reduce its national product, imports would nose dive, tens of billions of dollars would no longer reach Iran, and the government would be forced cut its budget and cancel projects.

The sanctions "Would help prevent the import of raw materials and equipment for the development of non-conventional weapons and surface-to-surface missiles and would limit Iran's ability to export weapons. Iran would also be left with far fewer resources to support terrorist organizations and finance the export of the Islamic revolution to other countries," Even added.

On the other hand, Iran provides some 3 percent of the world's oil consumption. Most oil producers "are now stretched to the limit of their production capacity" Hence, oil prices would rise, he predicted.

Would the world accept the hardship? It should, Even argued.

"A nuclear Iran could threaten the global economy even more than would sanctions. The Persian Gulf currently holds about two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves and until some real alternative to oil is developed, the world will remain dependent on the Gulf as its main source of energy.

"Iran is known as a 'price hawk' in the oil market... (So)if and when Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it could well try to dictate new and more expensive rules for the world oil market," he predicted.

Inbar doubted economic sanctions would stop Iran.

"Islamic Iran, which seeks a nuclear bomb primarily to gain regional hegemony and oppose a Pax Americana, is ready to pay a high price for its foreign policy orientation. Actually, external pressure has been used more than once as a focal point for rallying domestic support for the embattled regime," he noted.

An Associate Professor of Political Science at Tehran University, Sadegh Zibakalam, bore that out in bitterlemons.org.

The majority of Iranians want to avoid a confrontation with the West over their country's nuclear program, "Yet at the same time they do not want the Islamic regime to abandon its nuclear program. .... The general mood among many is a solemn belief that Iran must not back down from its 'just stance,'" Zibakalam wrote.

"For many Iranians, the nuclear issue has turned into a highly charged nationalist issue: the West vs. Iran and, for quite a few, the infidels vs. Islam," he added.

With the diplomatic track almost exhausted and economic sanctions unlikely to be effective, "only military measures or an unequivocal threat to use force remain as viable options," maintained Inbar.

Sent to the head of the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Intelligence by a senior aide to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, the letter said an August 23 committee report contained serious distortions of IAEA findings on Iran's activity.

The letter said the errors suggested Iran's nuclear fuel program was much more advanced than a series of IAEA reports and Washington's own intelligence assessments have determined.

It said the report falsely described Iran to have enriched uranium at its pilot centrifuge plant to weapons-grade level in April, whereas IAEA inspectors had made clear Iran had enriched only to a low level usable for nuclear power reactor fuel.

"Furthermore, the IAEA Secretariat takes strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" that the IAEA opted to remove a senior safeguards inspector for supposedly concluding the purpose of Iran's program was to build weapons, it said.

The letter said the congressional report contained "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion" that the inspector was dumped for having not adhered to an alleged IAEA policy barring its "officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.

Diplomats say the inspector remains IAEA Iran section head.

The IAEA has been inspecting Iran's nuclear program since 2003. Although it has found no hard evidence that Iran is working on atomic weapons, it has uncovered many previously concealed activities linked to uranium enrichment, a process of purifying fuel for nuclear power plants or weapons.

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said: "We felt obliged to put the record straight with regard to the facts on what we have reported on Iran. It's a matter of the integrity of the IAEA."

Diplomats say Washington, spearheading efforts to isolate Iran with sanctions over its nuclear work, has long perceived ElBaradei to be "soft" on Tehran.

"This (committee report) is deja vu of the pre-Iraq war period where the facts are being maligned and attempts are being made to ruin the integrity of IAEA inspectors," said a Western diplomat familiar with the agency and IAEA-U.S. relations.

The congressional report also falsely stated that Iran had enriched uranium at its pilot centrifuge plant to weapons-grade level in April, while IAEA inspectors made clear that Tehran had enriched only to a low level useable for nuclear power reactor fuel, the letter said.

"We felt obliged to put the record straight with regard to the facts on what we have reported on Iran. It's a matter of the integrity of the IAEA," said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.

"Outrageous and dishonest"

"Furthermore, the IAEA Secretariat takes strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" that the IAEA opted to remove a senior safeguards inspector for allegedly concluding that the purpose of Tehran's nuclear program was to build weapons, the IAEA letter said.

The congressional report contained "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion" that the inspector was removed because he didn't adhere to an IAEA policy prohibiting its "officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.

Diplomats say the inspector remains IAEA Iran section head.

The letter also recalled clashes between the IAEA and Bush administration before the 2003 invasion of Iraq over findings cited by Washington about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction that proved to be false.

"This (committee report) is deja vu of the pre-Iraq war period where the facts are being maligned and attempts are being made to ruin the integrity of IAEA inspectors," said a Western diplomat familiar with the agency and IAEA-U.S. relations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has been inspecting Iran's nuclear program since 2003. It has not found any evidence to substantiate Washington's claims that Tehran is working on an atomic weapons program.

Iran denies the U.S.'s accusations, insisting that it has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report that Tehran failed to freeze uranium enrichment ahead of an August 31 deadline set by the UN Security Council.

Tehran's failure to meet the Council's demands could lead to UN sanctions, something the U.S. has been pressing for.

"Differences"

Differences between Western partners in a group of six powers dealing with Iran were revealed yesterday at the UN nuclear watchdog's board of governors, with U.S. officials saying that Tehran should "face sanctions now", but their EU allies calling for more talks.

"The time has come for the (UN) Security Council to back international diplomacy with international sanctions," the U.S. envoy Gregory Schulte told the 35-nation board in Vienna.

On the other hand, the U.S.'s fellow permanent UN members, China and Russia, France, Britain are wary of imposing sanctions on the world's fourth biggest oil exporter and want more time to find a diplomatic compromise, correspondents say.

"I can't see a military way through this and I'm not sure that even there's an easy way for the UN to impose sanctions," Britain's Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells told his parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee.

Meanwhile, a meeting between EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani, set for Thursday, was postponed without reasons given.

However, Solana's spokeswoman said that lower-level EU and Iranian officials would still meet in Paris.

The Treasury Department claimed that it has information that Bank Saderat, which has 3,313 domestic branches and overseas branch offices located, in France, Bahrain, Egypt, UK, Greece, Oman, Qatar, Turkmenistan, Germany, UAE, and Lebanon, "supports terrorism."

"Bank Saderat facilitates Iran's transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations each year," claimed Stuart Levey, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

"We will no longer allow a bank like Saderat to do business in the American financial system, even indirectly," Levey said.

"By prohibiting U-turn and all other transactions with Bank Saderat, the bank is denied all direct and indirect access to the U.S. financial system," Levey added.

The Department alleges that the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, which means "Party of God," received 50 million dollars in transfers though Bank Saderat during the past 5 years.

The U.S. government has been intensifying efforts to cut off funding to the Lebanese resistance movement, as the Bush administration grows more concerned that if the dispute between Washington and Tehran over Iran's nuclear program heightens tension between the two countries, that could provoke attacks, which would be carried out with the help of Hezbollah, against U.S. and Western targets in Iraq and Afghanistan and other nations where American forces are deployed.