In denouncing the president's dramatic appeal as "un-American," Oklahoma's hard-line conservative senator James Inhofe convinced skeptics in the Muslim world that Obama's change of direction is real and not just deceptively soothing rhetoric. 

Inhofe was irate at the president's public acknowledgment that the invasion of Iraq ordered by George Bush was not a response to any attack but instead a war of "choice," and indignant at Obama's repudiation of torture. 

On both counts, the cranky conservative's outrage reassured doubters among the world's billion Muslims that, after eight years of deafness and a quarter-century of denial, America once again offered leadership they could believe in.

Discredited by the calamities of the Bush-Cheney years, American conservatives have already returned to the fringes of the country's political life.  Not so Ahmadinejad in Iran, who is still hoping to salvage reelection.  

And it was his fight for his political life that Obama's address cut to the quick.  Just a day after a candidates' debate in Tehran in which Ahmadinejad's strongest challenger berated him for isolating Iran by his foolish and repeated denials of the Nazi Holocaust, Obama drove a political stake through the incumbent's heart.

"Six million Jews were killed" in the Holocaust, Obama declared flatly.  "Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful."

And he added, "Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews -- is deeply wrong."

Iranians can read the tea leaves.  Who is the planet's only national leader who publicly denies the reality of the Nazi extermination camps?  Who is its only leader who has talked wistfully about seeing Israel disappear from the map? 

From Cairo, the world's most wildly popular political leader was unmistakably signaling that their impulsive, simplistic president is--not to put too fine a point on it--ignorant, hateful, and wrong.  

That makes him not exactly the guy to take up the olive branch of rapprochement that Obama's America is extending to the Islamic republic--a rapprochement that most Iranians eagerly want to see happen.

It was in the context of nuclear weapons that Obama specifically addressed Iran.  And it is on this front that his administration was simultaneously taking the first steps to convert his stirring rhetoric into concrete change.   Here too he has marked a dramatic change from the conservatives' frozen policies.

It never seemed to occur to George Bush and Dick Cheney that their devotion to enhancing America's nuclear weapons arsenal, and their blind eye to Israel's, would make their bellicose campaign against Iran's nuclear program unconvincing to the rest of the world.  

Obama in one breath blew away the hollow hypocrisy that had undermined U.S. nonproliferation policy:  "I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not.  No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons."

Obama accompanied this straightforward statement of simple reality with his remedy:  "a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons," a goal of all post-war presidents through Ronald Reagan's time.  

The reassertion of this global goal has set Washington's discredited war hawks, like John Bolton, sputtering incoherently, and the nuclear weapons lobby has plotted to ambush the president's disarmament agenda at the presumed first step toward its implementation, by torpedoing Senate approval of the nuclear test ban treaty.

But Obama has outflanked both the Dr. Strangeloves in Washington and their counterparts in Tehran by opening another nuclear disarmament front.  This week his team forged agreement with other nuclear-armed powers to begin negotiations on two key nuclear issues on which conservatives' intransigence had blocked any movement for a decade.

For years the United States had called for a treaty that would prohibit the production of the fissionable material required to make nuclear weapons.  But Bush conservatives, ignoring Ronald Reagan's dictum to "trust but verify," had developed the same allergy to on-site inspections that the Soviets had exhibited since Stalin's day, and they insisted that a ban on nuclear fissile materials should not be burdened with any verification provisions.

Beyond that poison pill for a treaty that the United Nations General Assembly had stipulated should be "verifiable," the past administration posed an even more forbidding roadblock--an adamant refusal to permit discussion of China's top arms control priority, a ban on weapons in outer space. 

The Bush administration, determined to claim weapons primacy in every theater, saw space as a new frontier for military dominance.  It was particularly suspicious that a prohibition against space weaponry would limit more exotic elements of its beloved antimissile weapons program.

If space weapons were not on the agenda, the Chinese and then Russians declared, there could be no negotiations on cutting off fissile material:  You get your priority, we get ours.  And the U.N. negotiating forum, the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament, requires unanimous consent to its work program.  One result:  No negotiations on any global controls on nuclear arms at all through the Bush years.  

The other result:  Instead of progress on reducing nuclear weapons, we saw their spread.  And as Iran edged closer to nuclear weapons-making capacity, the charge of "double standards" sapped international resolve to prevent Tehran from crossing the line.

At the Conference on Disarmament this past week, Obama's negotiators turned the page on the failed script from the past.  They embraced verification as part of a negotiating mandate on halting all production of bomb-ready fissile materials.  

They agreed to create a conference working group on banning space weaponry.  And they won adoption of the first negotiating agenda in the Conference on Disarmament since the negotiation that produced the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty in 1996.

This represents tangible progress toward achieving Obama's goal of a world without nuclear weapons.  And that progress, along with Obama's words in Cairo, tighten the international noose on Iran's advocates for nuclear weapons.  The maneuvering room and blurred blame that Washington conservatives'  double standards on nuclear weapons had given them are gone.

Obama has spent his first few months in office outlining his ambitious agenda on dozens of fronts, and with his uncanny sense of political timing he seems to be moving, step by step, to accomplish it.  

In Cairo he both laid out a bold vision for America's relations with "Muslim-majority countries" and put down the markers for that vision's implementation.  It is hard to see how narrow-minded politicians of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's caliber can be part of the emerging new order.  

     JeffreyLaurenti@MaximsNews.com