"Iran threatens US with suicide bombers"

That is the headline from an article in The Jerusalem Post:

Only a few days ahead of the American presidential election, Iranian parliamentary speaker 'Ali Larijani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah 'Ali Khamanai have launched harsh verbal attacks against the United States.

Referring to the US army's attacks in Pakistan and Syria, Larijani said they would not be answered with diplomatic protests.

"The US method and conduct, expressed by this aggression, will only be stopped by a clear-cut and unexpected response, whose grounds were set by the martyr Hussein Fahmida," Larijani said during a parliamentary session on Wednesday.

Fahmida was 13 when he detonated an explosive device he carried on him, destroying an Iraqi tank during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

"America should be aware not to put its huge body on top of the suicide bombers' explosive devices," Larijani said.

At HotAir, Ed Morrissey discusses the legal implications of the Iranian threat:

The threat to use suicide bombers marks a cassus belli, if the US wanted one as a pretext for strikes. Openly threatening attack on a non-belligerent nation gives that country a right to defend itself. Israel didn’t take the bait with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s genocidal lunacy over the last two years, and it would be madness to attack Iran now anyway.

Of course, Iran will argue that after attacking Pakistan and Syria, the US is not non-belligerent and Iran is merely responding with a warning. Just try discussing the right of the US to defend its troops in Iraq before the UN.

In any case, though Morrissey is not suggesting military action--

that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of an Iranian leader standing in its parliament and endorsing terrorism as a state policy. That’s exactly what Larijani did in this statement today, and the US should respond by placing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on the list of terrorist organizations in order to freeze its funds. The Kyl-Lieberman bill would have done that last year, but it was opposed by Barack Obama and most of the other Democrats in the Senate. Larijani’s threat is an open declaration of Iran as a terrorist state, and a lack of response would encourage others to follow suit.

There's Obama's name again. So, how does this latest episode affect his plans to meet personally with Ahmadinejad? It doesn't look good:

On the same day, Khamanai said the differences between Iran and the US were far beyond differences of opinion.

"The Iranian people hate the US… [because of] the various plots the US government has hatched against Iran and the Iranian nation for the past five decades," Khamanai said.

Maybe Obama could start with Venezuela until Iran cools down...

Technorati Tag: Iran and Obama.