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The election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad signals that the mullahs of Theran feel they no longer even have to pretend they are 'reforming' and 'democratizing' the regime. Why do they believe this? The only logical answer is that they have or are very near to having deliverable nuclear weapons.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but it certainly indicates that they believe that nothing can stop them from obtaining them given Europe's dithering venality and the U.S.'s apparent unwillingness to engage the North Koreans unilaterally. And I believe their assessment is correct.

What we face is a nuclear-armed Iran held in check by the same Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine that kept the U.S. and the Soviets from blowing one another up and is, so far, doing the same with respect to Pakistan and India. And we know from experience that this only works when the potential aggressor is convinced (1) that he cannot win such an exchange and remain in good enough condition to exploit it, and (2) that the other party is resolute enough to make it stick. A fanatic or a madman or a catastrophically mistaken intelligence estimate can upset this equilibrium and always could. That was the game we played with the Soviets for half a century.

I am not in a position to estimate accurately the likelihood of success of a pre-emptive strike on Iranian assets but from a lay point of view it seems much less likely than that enjoyed in 1981 by the Israelis against Saddam. But signs that the new Iranian government may actually think it can win a nuclear exchange could well make a pre-emptive strike the most viable of a number of bad options. The closer they get to actual testing of a device the more they really need to keep that in mind.