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“It’s a setback,” Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks satellites and rocket launchings, said of the North Korean launching. He added that the North Koreans must now find and fix the problem. “The missile doesn’t represent any kind of near-term threat.”

The United States Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs, issued a statement on Sunday that portrayed the launching as a major failure. It based its information on a maze of federal radars, spy ships and satellites that monitor global missile firings.

The command emphasized that “no object entered orbit,” apparently a reference to both the rocket’s third stage as well as the supposed satellite.

North Korea’s public portrayal of the event as a complete success was similar in its celebratory tone to the happy note it struck in 1998 after having failed to loft a satellite into orbit.

A general rule of engineering is that failures reveal more than successes. If so, North Korea — which has now test-fired three long-range rockets, each time unsuccessfully — is learning a lot about limitations.

“It’s not unusual to have a series of failures at the beginning of a missile program,” Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington, said in an interview. “But they don’t test enough to develop confidence that they’re getting over the problems.”Dr. Lewis added that an influential 1998 report by Donald H. Rumsfeld, before he became secretary of defense in the Bush administration, argued that the North Korean rockets might be good enough to pose a threat to the United States, even without flight testing. “But given that both versions of the Taepodong-2 have failed now,” he said, “we have very little confidence in the reliability of the system.”

In August 1998, North Korea’s first attempt at launching a long-range rocket, the Taepodong-1, managed to scare Japan but failed to deliver a satellite to orbit. The troubles continued in July 2006 when its second test of a long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, ended in an explosion just seconds after liftoff.

The findings of other intelligence agencies in the Middle East also indicate that Iran is sending weapons and explosives to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to the Palestinian radical group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. The latest indication of this kind of support came with a failed attack on a shopping center in the Israeli port of Haifa on Sunday, March 22. Security forces managed to disable several dozen kilograms of explosives that had been loaded into a car parked outside the mall. Both Palestinian and Israeli experts who cooperated on the case believe that the attempted attack was the work of Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have carried out aerial attacks in Sudan in an attempt to halt the delivery of weapons to Hamas -- including rockets with a range of 70 kilometers, far enough to reach Tel Aviv from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Air Force bombed a convoy of 17 trucks travelling through the Sudanese desert which were attempting to deliver weapons to Gaza via Egypt. The two bombing raids in January and February killed more than 30 people, including Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans. Last Thursday a Sudanese government official confirmed the attacks took place and on Friday the New York Times quoted unnamed US officials saying Israeli warplanes had attacked the convoy.

The level to which Iran is intervening politically in the region is made evident by the failure of attempts so far to achieve reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions.

Sources close to the Egyptian mediation efforts say that an agreement between the two sides has been tentatively close on several occasions. There had even been a deal to release 450 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who is being held hostage by Hamas. However, even the veteran Egyptian mediators had underestimated Iran's influence.

Khaled Mashaal is regarded as Tehran's man in Hamas. The politburo chief lives in exile in Damascus but in recent months he has been frequently on the move, with Iran one of his most important destinations. Many Fatah officials, such as Ibrahim Abu al-Nasha from Gaza City who has known Mashaal for over 30 years, are convinced that the Hamas leader allowed the talks to fail under pressure from Tehran.

The report estimated China's military spending in 2008 was roughly double that of a decade ago.

China's armed forces are undoubtedly undergoing a dramatic transformation from a poorly-equipped peasant army to an increasingly sophisticated modern military, the BBC's defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says. But its level of training and co-ordination as well as actual war fighting capability is still in doubt, he adds.