Without regard to the politics of the case, or even the factual basis for concern, I certainly think that this ought to be be shortlisted as a candidate for best example of understatement in a newspaper headline.

"Despite all the sloppy and inaccurate headlines about Iran "going nuclear," the fact is that all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they "cascade."

The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb, and since its leaders, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, say they do not want an atomic bomb because it is Islamically immoral, you have to wonder if they will ever have a bomb."

And guess who's going to be the ones to step up and contend with this threat of nuclear holocaust?
Yep, your friends, those gutty little Israeli's.
They're the only ones with the balls to stand up and do the right thing.
The world already hates them, so why should they give a fuck what the world thinks? THEY were the ones who eliminated Saddam as a nuclear threat. They can do the same damned thing to the Iranian bomb factory.
Man am i glad I didn't go into politics.

is GWB. Are the Israelis going to take out our nukes? Seriously, are you going to fall for this BS again?

fall for it the first time.

If we can live with North korean nukes, I don't see why Iranian nukes, if/when they come to pass, poses more of a threat. As you note in a post above, it's a far cry from enriching uranium at 3.5 percent as opposed to enriching it to weapons-grade quality, engineering the damn thing, etc...

Reon't get fooled again

Take a  look at this article in TNYTimes.  One of the arthors is William Broad, who's pretty reliable on this broad subject of nukes.

I'm wondering where Iran is getting the  equipment to do all this?

I'm wondering what countries, officially or otherwise, are assisting Iran technically with this?

I'm wondering why this story is being ginned-up just now?  [For example, whatever happened to the NORTH KOREAN nuclear threat?  Did Kim Jong-Il suddenly become a pacifist?] And for what purpose?  And for whose ultimate benefit?

Let the Iranians or whomever else wants to build their bomb. Call their ambassador to the Oval Office and sit him down with the POTUS and the Chief of Staff and calmly inform the ambassador of that country that you can have your bomb but if you ever use it, we have plenty of Trident missile submarines in the world's oceans to reduce every one of your major cities to molten slags of radioactive junk in mere minutes and soon the living will envy the dead. Got that? Good.

when in fact it is often most logical to be illogical, ie., the craziest MFer on the block.

Conflict is essentially a state of mind, very much like a game of chicken, where rationality can be multi-facted and unpredictable.

None of these people are so stupid that they need to be told what you suggest.  The question is one of political will, and no conversation will establish that, only the deed itself.

Ah, deterrence is back.

If that's the case, we don't have to do anything, as the madcap Mohammedan mullahs are no doubt aware of that policy.

But if that's the case, why are our knickers in such a twist?

I'm confused.

the U.S. policy since the beginning of the nuclear age, there have even been movies about it--or have you never seen Dr. Strangelove, War Games, Fail Safe, etc.
The fact is that the current Bush policy is actually giving incentive to Iran to get a nuclear weapon sooner rather than later. After all, Bush invaded Iraq knowing full well that Iraq had no nuclear capability and dropped all the harsh talk over North Korea when it confirmed that it did.

Si, and I've even read the novels upon which 2 of the 3 flics you mentioned were based.

Deterrence/MAD is not a perfect policy.  But it beats hands down a preventive war against Iran based upon fears of a future [Iranian nukes] which is not certain to come to pass.

And I gotta wonder if the accelerated pace of Iran nuke research is not possibly due to their desire to generate a nuclear deterrence against the US?

As for Korea, there we find ourselves not totally isolated from the policies of the neighboring coutries, and more willing to accept the opinions of other parties [Japan, PRC, Russia].  Also, I think, it may be the case tha US decision-makers have concluded that NK is on it's last legs anyway, so the gov't may collapse internally before it's able to develope nukes and deploy them in a weapons mode.

precision guided munitions, and communications warfare.

I have a hard time imagining that PRK or Iran could maintain a delivery system that would be more than an incidental threat to the USA.   It seems that suitcase nukes delivered by suiciders (sic) thru a porous transportation system might be the biggest threat.

PRK seems to depend on a conventional missile delivery system comparable to Saddam's.  This requires a lot of infrastructure and maintenance, and we see how poorly Saddam's worked in Gulf 1, even over a limited range.   Yes, they could nuke a couple cities in an adjacent ally, and it would make sense for us to take out their delivery system in some sort of pre-emptive action, whether it was an embargo denying essential parts, computer hacking, infiltrators, or conventional attack.