Only weeks ago the story was all about the imminent US attack on Iraq. Now, however, the spiralling violence in Israel and Palestine has pushed Iraq off the front pages and forced a reappraisal of the administration's timetable and, some observers say tentatively, even of its whole strategy.
Officially President Bush is still as determined as ever to block Baghdad's access to weapons of mass destruction, but his campaign is "effectively on hold, even if the planning is going forward," says Dr Martin Indyk, of the Brookings Institution and a former US ambassador to Israel.
Not only is the administration unwilling to open a second front at a time when the region is highly volatile, but it has also taken note, he argues, of the "huge setback for George Bush" that the Beirut Arab League summit represented.
Although the US was pleased by the Saudi peace initiative, it was horrified to see the warm, very pointed, public embrace between the Saudi and Iraqi representatives - a clear hands-off warning from the Saudis.
If politically the US could consider military action in Afghanistan without strong support from friendly Arab states, it is impossible against Iraq without the backing of the surrounding states.
The violence in Palestine and the US inability to rein in Israel makes that highly unlikely now.
What has qualitatively changed the strategic situation, Dr James Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser to the Clinton administration, argues is the re-emergence of the "Arab street", that force for domestic instability in the region that many commentators had wrongly described as dormant.
Dr Steinberg says the wave of mass demonstrations in countries across the region, including such powerful friends of the US as Turkey, makes even tacit, silent consent by Iraq's neighbours to US action very problematic.
While the unpopular Taliban never rallied the Arab masses, the Palestinians are dear to their hearts. Prof Shibley Telhami, of the University of Maryland, who has polled extensively in the Middle East says that even prior to September 11th in four of six moderate Arab countries surveyed by him 60 per cent of respondents said the Palestinian issue was "the single most important political issue for them".
In Saudi Arabia he found 86 per cent frustrated by US policies. Prof Telhami, who has just returned from the region in the wake of Vice-President Dick Cheney's recent tour says he believes from speaking to people who met the vice-president that Mr Cheney did not even raise with many of his hosts the issue of US military action against Iraq.
Such was the predictable reaction in the face of the deteriorating situation in Palestine, Prof Telhami suggests that Mr Cheney confined himself to urging support for a return of UN inspectors and to warnings about the dangers of letting Saddam Hussein acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Prof Telhami suggests that the administration may already be reconciling itself to embracing the diplomatic path which its European allies have been urging on it. But concern that just such a reality may be emerging has prompted two close collaborators of the administration's hawkish right wing, commentators Robert Kagan and William Kristol, to call a halt in the latest Weekly Standard. "President Bush needs to stay focused on Iraq," they warned."By turning Bush into a Middle East mediator, they think they can shunt him off the road that leads to real security and peace - the road that runs through Baghdad. We trust the President will see and avoid this trap." Trap or not, they may be losing the argument.
