Hard Starboard

Never has that verse looked better than right now:

Iran has moved significantly closer towards acquiring the ability to make a bomb as the regime claims to have stockpiled 100kg of enriched uranium.

So far, this uranium has only been enriched to the level needed for generating electricity in civilian nuclear power stations.

But if Iran chooses to enrich it to 84% purity, it would reach weapons-grade level and become the essential material for building a bomb.

Iran would need 50kg of weapons-grade uranium in order to make one nuclear weapon of the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

By storing twice this quantity of low-enriched uranium, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime is widening its options. It could choose to enrich the stockpiled uranium to weapons-grade level in a matter of months – perhaps after formally withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and breaking out of all international safeguards....

Mustapha Pourmohammedi, Iran's interior minister, told the official news agency that the moment of maximum international pressure on his country had passed and that Teheran would press ahead with the nuclear programme.

"When the world saw that the nation is pursuing this goal with unity, the world has surrendered. We have passed the dangerous moment," he said.

In other words, a nuclear mullahgarchy, and the nuclear conflagration that comes with it, is now officially inevitable, beyond any possibility of stopping it, including militarily.

Or so the Iranians say. But it seems to me if they have reason to be dishonest about their nuclear program, it is to make it seem less advanced than it truly is, not more. Unlike Saddam Hussein, the mullahs don't have weapons inspectors running all over their country, from which they're having to hide their nuclear program like a ludicrous shell game. And when, conversely, they approach nuclear paydirt, their need for discretion and misdirection will correspondingly wane.

It sounds to me like paydirt has arrived. And, along with it, an escalation in Tehran's bellicose propaganda:

Iraqi President Talabani to visit Tehran, call for U.S.-Iran talks at higher level.

Official Friday sermon again blames U.S. for complicity in Samarra bombing:

“The occupiers and cheated agents should realize that resorting to such wretched acts has led to widespread hatred of the Islamic world against them.”

"Bush should also know that the Iranian nation has all options on the table to confront the United States, and one of these options is slapping the US hard in the mouth."

Larijani accuses the Americans of supplying the Taliban… and accuses U.S. of lying about Iranian interference in Iraq.

IAEA head ElBaradei, overstepping mandate, calls for U.S.-Iran normalization.

Ahmadinejad to U.S. ally Azerbaijan: Iranian power is in “the interest of all peoples in the region.”

Moscow says it sees no Iranian missile threat.

Video of Iran missile launch during war games (go to 0:38; also 3:38).