"Isn't This An Act of War?"

Today comes word that there is now direct, incontrovertible evidence that Iran is supplying "insurgents" inside Iraq with new, upgraded explosive ordnance that can penetrate our soldiers' strongest body armor:

U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.

They are a very nasty piece of business, capable of penetrating U.S. troops' strongest armor.

What the United States says links them to Iran are tell-tale manufacturing signatures - certain types of machine-shop welds and material indicating they are built by the same bomb factory. "The signature is the same because they are exactly the same in production," said explosives expert Kevin Berry. "So it's the same make and model."

U.S. officials say roadside bomb attacks against American forces in Iraq have become much more deadly as more and more of the Iran-designed and -produced bombs have been smuggled in from the country since last October.

"I think the evidence is strong that the Iranian government is making these IEDs, and the Iranian government is sending them across the border and they are killing U.S. troops once they get there," said Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief and an ABC News consultant. "I think it's very hard to escape the conclusion that, in all probability, the Iranian government is knowingly killing U.S. troops."

Here is but one more provocation thrown in our national face by the mullahgarchy. And while Ed Morrissey goes on for half a dozen paragraphs fretting about what, if anything, we'll do about it, Brother Hinderaker gets right to the heart of the matter: "Isn't this an act of war?"

Indeed it is. And his colleague Paul Meringoff now sounds so much like me on this topic, you'd think I was hacking onto Powerline and posting under his name:

[T]he Bush Administration must decide whether it is willing to accept the following risks associated with a nuclear Iran: (1) the possibility, real but probably not substantial, that Iran will in some fashion use its nuclear capability against the U.S. (2) the real and substantial possibility that Iran will use that capability against Israel, and (3) the near certainty that Iran will successfully use its capability to become the dominant power in the Middle East.

The only alternative to accepting these risks is military action against Iran. [emphasis added]

Brother Meringoff thinks airstrikes would be enough. I think nothing short of a full-scale invasion and regime-change will be sufficient. But either way, we have run out of time and options. "Faster, please" is now "too little, too late."

Iran has been at war with us since 1979. We can no longer afford the luxury of pretending that it can continue to be entirely one-sided. It is far past time to teach the mullahs what total war is all about. Otherwise they will give us and the Israelis "a taste of Armageddon."

UPDATE 3/7: "JASmius Echo Syndrome" continues:

After two years of disastrous dialogue, and more of the same in recent days, we can conclude that no diplomatic initiative can stop Iran from getting the bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency meets again this week to discuss the mullahs' nuclear ambitions, while Russia floats a plan to get Iran to enrich uranium on its soil. But before we got to this point, we had the Europeans in the starring role. The foreign ministers of the leading European Union countries - Britain, France and Germany - did try for years to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, most recently at Friday's meeting in Vienna that ended up in yet another failure. But Iran knew all along that this threesome, formally the "Troika," had no real negotiating authority and would never resort to serious measures....

Europe could have suppressed the Iranian threat if it had convinced the mullahs two years ago that it was willing to contemplate military options. Only Europe lacks core values that it holds sacrosanct and that it's willing to defend at the highest cost. It will continue to operate on the diplomatic field and cling to soft power even though this is the path of certain defeat when confronted with power players burning with geopolitical and religious ambitions.

Thanks to European illusions about soft power, the free world has two options left on Iran: disaster or catastrophe. America and Israel will bleed for Europe's lack of conviction. [emphases added]

I was arguing three years ago that the GWOT could not be won until Syria and Iran were liberated right along with Iraq. The general consensus of my online political debating opponents then was that this was "madness." My reply was, "Which is the madder: waging war on our terms or sitting back, a la Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Eduard Daladier in the late 1930s, and waiting for our declared enemy to attack and destroy us?"

And Hitler didn't have nukes.

Being right in this instance now is akin to misery loving company. And the misery, I fear, is only just beginning.