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When I was a kid, I had a dorky friend who had a macho cliché for every occasion. It didn't help his image a bit and it left me with a load of random phraseology floating around in my brain that, if uttered, is guaranteed to make you sound like an awkward, overweight thirteen year-old with your pants pulled up to your incipient man-boobs.

One such phrase was invariably uttered whenever someone almost achieved something but fell a little short. He would say, ponderously, "'Almost' only counts in horse shoes, hand grenades, and atom bombs." It certainly didn't enhance the guy's popularity and I'm pretty sure he grew up to be the main character in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground; that or a leading figure in the tea party movement.

In any event, I was thinking about this phrase the other day in light of the on-going concerns regarding Iran's nuclear program. Because indeed, as President Obama acknowledged in a recent interview with the New York Times's David Sanger, were Iran to become "nuclear capable" it would effectively be the same as actually having produced a weapon. Capability is the line you don't want a proliferator to cross ... and were Iran to nudge across that line, it would likely set in motion a wide ranging chain of events that would almost certainly include: heavy incoming rhetorical fireworks, strategic backtracking by countries who resisted sanctions, tactical consternation from the Israelis as they recognize the world is going to do ... >>>