This quote defines the situation nicely:

"'Our missiles are now ready to strike at their civilization, and as soon as the instructions arrive from Leader ['Ali Khamenei], we will launch our missiles at their cities and installations. Our motto during the war (in Iraq) was: Karbala, we are coming, Jerusalem, we are coming. And because of Khatami's policies and dialogue between the civilizations, we have been compelled to freeze our plan to liberate the Islamic cities. And now we are [again] about to carry out the program."

Right now this is just foolish rhetoric for Iran's unwashed masses. However the worry I have is if they continue this stupidity for long enough then Joseph Goebbels' dictum becomes operative, i.e. "If a lie is repeated often enough, people will believe it". To make the situation even worse, we see application of propaganda repetition along with religious fanaticism.

The absolute most the Iranians could do with their limited ballistic missile technology is kill several hundred thousand innocent people and then drive the Israelis and/or Americans into an insane rage. Supposably the Israelis have three to four hundred nuclear warheads along with three state-of-the-art Dolphin-class submarines that the German's kindly sold them. Each submarine could carry up to 16 cruise missiles. Those submaries along with the Israeli air force have more than enough strategic fire power to reduce Iran's population by a couple orders-of-magnitude. With the United States, we only need to involve one Ohio class submarine to produce the same outcome (it only takes 20 minutes and then it's all over with zero American casulties).

The Iranians are behaving like a three year old child playing with a live hand grenade. It'll be terrible to watch several million people march off a cliff. I just hope when the time comes, it's the Israelis that get covered with blood and not us.

Gary