This is odd. The NIE claim that Iran's nuclear weapons program was suspended four years ago should have been, in Arab eyes, a signal that the prospect of a U.S. airstrike against Iran was off the table, and business could resume as usual.

That has not been the way the Americans see it. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been attending a security conference in Bahrain, the Gulf headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, has been sounding even tougher than usual about Iran's regional role.

"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing," Gates said. "The United States and the international community must continue -- and intensify -- our economic, financial and diplomatic pressures in Iran."

This will not be an easy sell, but Gates has been warning Gulf state rulers and other Bush administration officials have warned U.S. allies in Europe that a sharp new crackdown is coming on Iran's commercial and financial links. To understand why this should be, look no further than the latest issue of Computerworld Magazine, which produces blowups of the shipping documents that suggest Iran's new supercomputer came through the United Arab Emirates.

The Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center, located at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, boasts on its Web site that it has produced a Linux-based system that can process 1 billion floating-point operations per second. This is pretty fast, and the computer (supposedly developed for a climate-research team) is said to use 216 Opteron processing cores from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The export to Iran of such advanced U.S. computing technology is a real breach in U.S. sanctions.

Few U.S. officials are surprised at the vital trans-shipping role of the Emirates suggested in the Computerworld photos. It is an open secret that the great trading city of Dubai has become to Iran what Hong Kong was for so long to China, the window to the world, access point and entrepot. It is a place where goods and money can be easily transferred and easily laundered, a place used by the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan to build his secret sales network to market nuclear technology.

Although the frenetic economic growth and construction of recent years has made Dubai one of the most modern and fastest-growing cities on Earth, the old traditions of smuggling and piracy and the gold trade across the Indian Ocean are not entirely forgotten. A trading city and an open port and financial center, Dubai and the Emirates have attracted hardworking and ambitious expatriates from all over the word, including some 300,000 Iranians, more than 12,000 Iranian companies and a very healthy share of the almost $100 billion in oil export revenues that Iran has hauled in this year.

The Bush administration is now threatening a real clampdown on Iranian goods and money. At the same time, both U.S. and European politicians are proposing new controls on Sovereign Investment Funds, state-owned investment bodies. The controls are aimed at SIFs from China and Russia, whose strategic intentions are seen as suspect, but the controls would doubtless affect the longstanding SIFs of the Gulf states such as Abu Dhabi and Kuwait. The Emirates are still resentful over the refusal of the U.S. Congress to let one of their funds buy the American ports that came with the deal when Dubai World bought Britain's P&O Group two years ago.

So far, there is no sign that the new threats of sanctions and the proposed controls of the SIFs have taken any of the shine from the glittering prospects of Dubai. Its landmark man-made islands, shaped like palm trees or like a map of the world, are still being developed, and homes there are selling like hotcakes.

But there is no doubting the concern in Dubai. Sheika Lubna al-Qasimi, the brilliant young woman economics and planning minister who helped develop the Dubai Financial Center, has been making the rounds in Europe and the United States and telling boardrooms and officials alike that two can play at that game. If the West wants to block Arab investment funds, the oil-rich SIFs of the Gulf states can go elsewhere and get a warmer welcome in Beijing and New Delhi.

At the same time, the Emirates officials have trouble understanding the American strategy (and they assume that a superpower must have one) because it appears so contradictory. On the one hand, the Bush administration blusters about "a third world war" and attacking Iran, and then it releases the NIE that almost destroys any justification for such an attack.

Then the Americans outrage their closest allies in the Arab world by blocking their visas to visit the United States and study at its colleges, and threaten to block their investments into "strategic" American companies. And finally the head of the Pentagon visits the Gulf to threaten tough new sanctions against Iran and its Gulf trading partners, while at the same time seeking to sell them Patriot and other antimissile defenses against Iran.

The Arabs go crazy trying to figure out the deep and subtle American logic that they believe must lie behind these contradictory policies. They find it hard to believe that in America's pluralist society and sprawling bureaucracy, it is not just possible but well-nigh inevitable that the right hand will never know what the left hand is doing. That's why Washington can still threaten sanctions and even military action when U.S. intelligence says that justification for such action no longer exists.

But having learned not to trust U.S. intelligence when it solemnly insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and then trusting U.S. intelligence when it said (just two years ago) that Iran indeed had a secret and advanced nuclear weapons program, the Arabs are now supposed to believe than Iran is not building nukes after all. Nonetheless, the U.S. defense secretary still wants them to buy Patriot antimissile systems. Why? To defend against the kind of Iranian attack that would follow an American strike against Iran. But the NIE report suggests that such a U.S. attack is not longer a serious option.

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