Tehran on Sunday vowed to keep enriching uranium in the face of a United Nations resolution that required it to suspend its nuclear activities by the end of August. The formal show of defiance by Iran surprised almost no one: The mullahs' previous deadline to suspend enrichment and accept a package of incentives from Western powers was July 12 -- the day Hezbollah militants kidnapped a pair of Israeli soldiers and sparked the war in Lebanon. Many Middle East observers think the timing was no accident; Hezbollah's close ties to Tehran made the kidnapping look, in a sense, like Iran's nose-thumbing answer to the West.

Why is Iran acting so cocky? Has it been winning the war on terrorism? The left-wing German daily Die Tageszeitung thinks so. The paper argues that since late 2001, a major enemy of the mullahs in Tehran named Saddam Hussein has been toppled, along with its enemies on its eastern border, the Taliban. Oil prices have risen, and Iran now wields influence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even the Palestinian territories, where the ruling party, Hamas, takes money from Tehran. "Iran has rejected the latest resolution by the UN Security Council from a position of strength, not pure defiance," the editors write, blaming the mullahs' new power on the West. "Thanks to the aggressive policies of the US and Israel, Iran has become a great regional power." Iran is otherwise unloved by its Arab neighbors, but "in the eyes of millions in the Arab world it counts as the last remaining protective power that can support the displaced and humiliated. This may be the clearest symptom of the absurdity of a policy that relies on strength and violence alone."

The right-leaning Die Welt seems to agree -- not on Iran, but on the policy of violence. Its lead editorial wonders if all-out war in Lebanon hasn't hurt Israel. Soldiers and generals, the paper writes, don't worry about "collateral damage," even if they lead to humanitarian and political catastrophes. Now the destruction in Lebanon -- "TV networks, mobile phone networks, water, electricity, the Beirut airport: this has all been declared 'Hezbollah's infrastructure'" -- threatens to create enemies in Lebanon of both Israel and the United States. The paper notes that the war has unified religious factions in Lebanon under the national label "Lebanese." "This, of course, was the hope of the West before the Cedar Revolution," which drove out Syrian troops last year. "However, the new (Lebanese) identity orients itself against Israel and the US ... Whether this 'collateral damage' can be fixed will depend on how long the war lasts."

The Financial Times Deutschland, meanwhile, worries about something completely different: The credibility of reporting from the Lebanese war. This weekend a scandal erupted  over pictures from a Reuters freelancer named Adnan Hajj, who was accused by some bloggers of "staging" a photo op in the aftermath of Israel's attack on Qana. Now Reuters has fired the freelancer -- not over the Qana photos, but over some manipulated shots of an Israeli jet fighter and smoke over southern Beirut. "The disgraced agency has let go of Hajj and withdrew his nearly 1000 photographs" from its database, writes the Financial Times. The paper also mentions revised death tolls over the last couple of weeks. The number of civilian dead in Qana was 28, for example, not close to 60, according to both the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch. And Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora estimated the number of dead in the village of Hula at 40, when the real figure was closer to 1. "During the 2003 Iraq war almost every report from the battlefield carried a warning," the paper writes, "… that some information came from a warring party and might be propaganda. This caveat hasn't been heard much so far in the war between Israel and Hezbollah." The paper argues that the latest problems "should be an alarm bell for all media to examine their material scrupulously, and put accuracy ahead of speed."