What will Joe Biden say next?

Despite high expectations, Vice President Joe Biden's first months in office were disappointing. This, remember, is the man who opened the more recent of his two futile runs for the presidency by saying of Obama that he was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man".

Yes, that Joe Biden. The one who hollered at wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator Chuck Graham to "stand up." The one who plagiarised a speech by former UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock. In other words a man who has flung himself into one rhetorical pratfall after another with the unswerving momentum of a blind rhino.

But then, as Biden and his wife Jill ensconced themselves in the vice president's official residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, came a phase of decorum, irksome to those wagering that the former senator from Delaware is incapable of keeping his foot out of his mouth. There were those who said sadly, "Joe just isn't Joe any more." They were wrong.

Joe Biden has always been conspicuous for his deference to the Israel lobbyAppropriately, it was on the topic of Israel that Biden first threw aside unmanly prudence. Even by the zeal of almost every member of the US Congress to satisfy the Israel lobby, Biden has always been conspicuous for his deference.

Accepting Obama's offer of the vice-presidential nomination last summer, he announced emphatically that he would not have considered accepting the invitation if he had entertained the slightest suspicion that Obama was not 100 per cent in Israel's corner. In fact the Israel lobby did entertain these unworthy suspicions, which is why it pushed strongly for Biden as Veep.

It wasn't far into Obama's first months in the White House that the lobby began to feel that even though Obama's chief of staff is Rahm Emanuel, their suspicions were not unjustified. The President talked publicly about the right of Palestinians to their state. He said the settlements on the West Bank had to stop. (True, he didn't say anything categorical about actually existing illegal settlements.) He seemed too eager to parley with Iran, too demure on the topic of its nuclear programme.

On July 5 George Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden in Baghdad for his Sunday morning talk show on the ABC network and promptly put the question: "If the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat, [and] they have to take out the nuclear programme militarily, the United States will not stand in the way?"

Biden lunged for the driver's wheel and swerved US government policy in a whole new direction: "We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination that they're existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country."

The White House spent the next two days categorically denying that it was giving - via Biden - Israel the go-ahead to make a unilateral attack on Iran. The United States is "absolutely not" flashing Israel a green light to attack Iran, President Barack Obama told CNN on July 7. "We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international