Last week's visit to the Middle East by President Bush received a great deal of attention in the U.S. media. Over and over, one theme was pounded home by politicians and pundits: Iran is a grave threat that must be dealt with decisively and effectively.

Underscoring the president's high-level meetings and the bellicose rhetoric they generated was a dramatic video released by the U.S. Navy that ostensibly showed Iranian naval vessels threatening U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. This aggressive action, according to U.S. officials, nearly precipitated an armed response.

The timing of the video release, on the eve of the president's visit, and the speed with which the Bush administration and the mainstream media used it to make the case that Iran is a threat to U.S. national security was astounding. The only problem was that the event so dramatically recounted by the U.S. Navy did not occur.

In an embarrassing retraction, the Navy now admits that it had spliced together video and audio clips. Furthering the Navy's discomfort, the Iranians released their own unedited video, which appeared to demonstrate that there was never a confrontation of the sort alleged by U.S. officials.

As the U.S. media was engaged in its feeding frenzy over the confrontation that wasn't, another story was unfolding in the Middle East which received little attention. The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed el-Baradei, landed in Tehran to meet with Iranian officials, including an unprecedented audience with Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mr. el-Baradei's visit focused on bringing to closure the six-year crisis over Iran's nuclear programs.

The Bush administration has contended that Iran, particularly by enriching uranium, plans to make a nuclear bomb. The Iranians have countered that their nuclear program is intended exclusively to produce electricity. The IAEA has been caught in the middle, charged with inspecting the Iranian nuclear program to make sure that it complies with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This is a daunting task, full of technical and political hurdles.

While Iran's history of cooperation has been imperfect, the policies of the Bush administration, geared more toward changing the regime in Tehran than encouraging it to forgo nuclear weapons, also have hindered the work of Mr. el-Baradei and his inspectors.

For years, the mantra of the Bush administration has been that the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons under the noses of IAEA inspectors. A 2005 draft national intelligence estimate made this assessment the centerpiece of its analysis on Iran.

The U.S. intelligence community seemed to ignore the work of the IAEA, which included inspections of unprecedented access and technological capability. These inspections had gathered sufficient data to enable the IAEA to conclude that there was no evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program in Iran, contradicting the findings of the CIA and other agencies.

In the fall of 2007 the U.S. intelligence community released a new, bombshell estimate, this time asserting that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons activities in 2003 and that there was no evidence of ongoing weapons work. This estimate in one fell swoop confirmed the IAEA's conclusions, while leaving open the possibility that Iran remains a dangerous nation. It said Iran at one time had an undeclared nuclear weapons program that had been undetected by the IAEA prior to 2003, and that this program easily could be restarted by the Iranians at any time.

President Bush jumped on this part of the estimate as vindication for his hardline Iran strategy. The problem with this contention, though, like the U.S. allegation of Iranian naval aggression in the Persian Gulf, is that it is supported by little more than rhetoric and speculation. There is no hard evidence whatsoever that such a program ever existed.

It is curious that, after the Bush administration failed to find the weapons of mass destruction it cited to justify its invasion of Iraq, the U.S. media has not more closely questioned its alleged evidence of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program (or similar allegations offered by this year's presidential candidates). Please recall that, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Mr. el-Baradei and IAEA inspectors checked every U.S. lead but could not find evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a program to make weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, the Iranian government seems more than willing to engage in the kind of substantial diplomacy needed to reduce tensions.

The meeting between Mr. el-Baradei and Ayatollah Khamenei, in particular, is remarkable. It represents active diplomatic involvement by the supreme leader in Iran who really makes the decisions.

The U.S. focus on Iran's fiery president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, has been misplaced. Constitutionally, all powers over Iran's military, police, diplomacy, economy and national security reside with the ayatollah. The fact that he would meet with el-Baradei is a clear signal that the Iranians are serious about peacefully resolving their differences with the West over their nuclear program. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei has stated that nuclear weapons are incompatible with Islam.

So when President Bush emphasizes, as he has repeatedly, that "all options" are on the table when it comes to dealing with Iran, it would be wise for him to focus on the diplomatic option, ala Mr. el-Baradei, instead of the military option, ala Iraq.