"What will happen in the one-on-one -- the ONLY important meeting -- will only transpire when and where the White House chooses to divulge,"

...."Generally speaking, I think the reference to benchmarks probably suggests an interest on the part of the administration in documenting some measure of achievement with respect to Iran -- an interest which is totally sensible," says former State Department policy planning official Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert with the Brookings Institution. "....I am generally a skeptic of matrices and metrics as a means of assessing U.S. strategy on an issue as complex and broad as Iran, but I can see the utility of some mechanism that attempts to catalog the efficacy of our approach."

The risk of such a mechanism, Maloney says, will be the tendency to declare failure too quickly. "If your benchmarks for success are too ambitious, it would be inevitable in the short term to view any negotiations, or engagement more broadly, as an ineffective path for addressing our concerns about Iranian activities," she said. "For this reason, I'd hope that whatever benchmarks exist have been devised by people who know something about Iran and how its politics operate. Because however frustrating engagement/negotiations may prove, the alternatives have not proven to be more cost-effective."

An Israeli diplomat said that while Netanyahu has day-long meetings at the White House, and a private dinner planned with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the key meeting is Obama's private meeting with Netanyahu, which kicked off at 10:30 this morning.

"What will happen in the one-on-one -- the ONLY important meeting --  will only transpire when and where the White House chooses to divulge," the Israeli diplomat told The Cable.

He predicted that Netanyahu will tell Obama, "something along the lines of: ‘At the end of the process of nation-building and transparent government processes and institutions it is possible that a demilitarized Palestinian state may emerge,'" the diplomat said. "I imagine he'll say it to the president, not necessarily in public."