It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

Drum is right. Conservative nostalgia for the Cold War and the Soviet Union is sure a nice thing to see for us ol' commies. But what makes Iran, or it's "mullahs" apocalyptic?

Which again raises the issue of motivation. Ahmadinejad and his cohort are apocalyptic jihadi revolutionaries. Shouldn't what they believe be analyzed and factored in as we try to assess the threat that they pose? Or would that offend moderates too much? It seems awfully silly to compare them to the Soviet Union when, with the latter, we had a deterrence policy — Mutually Assured Destruction — that was explicitly based not only on the size of the enemy arsenal but on whether, given his motivations, he was likely to act. Obama appears content to calculate based on the size of the arsenal, period. That's not MAD, but it's madness.

Iran's war with Iraq was, in many respects, apocalyptic in the sense a huge number of Iraqi and Iranian men died. But, frankly, Iran had a huge population that their leaders felt were expendable. Iranian leaders. on the other hand, probably don't think their own power -- or their own lives -- are. Besides, they've got bigger problems than the existence of Israel: food prices.