Writing in the NJ Star-Ledger, Juan Cole and co-author Thomas Lippman want us to understand that Iran isn't the threat Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to want us to think they are. The piece is worth reading.

What? Has he gone mad? Is he actually recommending a piece by Juan Cole as being worth reading? Yes, but not because I agree with its recommendations, necessarily. I think it's important to take a step back, test our assumptions, have a reality -check, and just simply take a breath before the logic of war becomes its own rationale -- before the drum-beat of worry and warning become a demand for action that feeds on itself...such things have great power in a democracy, but if it comes untested and unexamined support will evaporate quickly should the going get tough.

Ordinarily Cole's stuff is painfully tendentious tripe, but the tone here is at least readable.

Don't exaggerate Iranian threat

I think those are all good assumptions. Cole and Lippman make two main points -- that the Iranians are rational-actors laboring under the same understandings as the co-authors and that they know that they can neither win in a conventional nor a nuclear conflict. There are a sufficient number of problems with this analysis such that no one's sleep should be helped after reading the piece.

First of all, history is literally overflowing with countries who started conventional conflicts they should have known they would eventually lose. Hitler should have known (and did know in the early days) that taking on the world would end in defeat, and Japan should have known better than to wake the sleeping giant, but whether they look at a map at miscalculate (and take a look at a map of the entire Middle East and see just how tiny little Israel looks, especially with Arab armies as well or better equiped than they were in prior wars), or they decide to start something knowing they can't finish it but hoping to force a peace with more moderate achievements...there are many, many reasons not to feel too overconfident that just because we would ultimately win that therefore we don't need to fear being attacked.

Second, with regard to nuclear warfare...again, I'm not sleeping well. Even if we assume that Ahmadinejad is really putting on an act (Steve Martin used to do a routine where he's say that in order to avoid being mugged, he'd make himself look insane, so before he went out on the street, the first thing he'd do is pee his pants. This is OK in a comedy performance, but somewhat less assuring when adopted as a strategy by a national leader -- and, by the way, I don't believe Ahmadinejad is putting on an act.), and can't convince anyone with their fingers on the right buttons to join him in an overt strike anyway, we still can't be assured because of two words: plausible deniability. Iran is a terror state with a history of working through proxies. There's no guarantee that someone wouldn't get the bright idea of sailing a nuke into an Israeli or American port and setting it off, or handing one off to someone who would.

You could certainly go on and on with playing this out with scenarios that make the Cole/Lippman piece less than assuring.

This is where the Islamic world's embrace of the logic of terrorism -- any means to get what they want, and the culture of death and self-immolation that comes with it -- comes back to bite them. We just can't trust that they'll make the same calculations we would.