Iran will Outsmart West on N. Issue

 Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei pledged that Iran would never yield to Western pressure over its nuclear program, and it would outsmart “drunken and arrogant” Western opponents in the standoff. “The Iranian nation has withstood and it will withstand intimidation. It will never bow to any intimidation in the nuclear issue and in other matters,” the Leader told a group of elite students.

“The Iranian nation resists and will resist bullying and won’t yield to pressure under any condition,” he said, adding, “Iran has never initiated an aggression or a military attack” and “through skillful and wise methods will beat to the ground arrogant and drunken powers.”

Washington accuses Tehran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons – an allegation vehemently denied by the Islamic republic – and has never ruled out taking military action against it.

“Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” Bush said on August 28.

Khamenei slammed Bush’s latest verbal attack, calling it “hateful, arrogant and violent.”

The sharpening rhetoric between the two arch-foes comes amid renewed cooperation between Iran and the UN atomic energy agency to answer outstanding questions on the nature of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

While the Vienna-based watchdog has described the agreement with Tehran as a significant step forward, Washington has expressed serious reservations that it does not go far enough.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, reaffirmed his view that the IAEA deal meant that Iran’s nuclear case was “closed” and there was no danger of it facing military action.

“With the help of God and the resistance of the supreme leader and the nation of Iran, we think that the nuclear case is closed,” Ahmadinejad told a meeting of Non-Aligned Movement countries in Tehran on Monday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already warned that Iran risks being bombed if the nuclear crisis is not resolved. But Ahmadinejad brushed off the comments which he said were due to his French counterpart’s inexperience.