The Iranian threat

This piece by my friend Doug Bandow might help to put the Iranian threat into some perspective. He reminds us that even if Iran does acquire nuclear weapons -- a possibility most people believe is at least five years down the road (though alarmists have been using the five-years-from-now estimate since about 1995), Iran will still not pose much of a threat to a country with as powerful a military (yes, still powerful despite the damage caused by the Iraq war) as the United States. We keep wanting to make pipsqueak countries into the next Hitler. That very tendency -- to see dangerous giants where a sober analyst sees minor threats that can be handled with intelligent diplomacy -- is one of the many reasons this country is ill-suited to running an empire. It's time to move beyond such dangerous dreams.