This point is implicit in much of the current paranoid saber-rattling over the Middle East. But does John McCain really think that the threat posed by Iran is equal to that the United States faced from the Soviet Union -- the world's greatest land military power, with a massive strategic nuclear capacity that carried on a multi-decade ideological struggle with the US? In his speech this morning, McCain adds all the caveats that Iran is not a superpower. But at bottom he still seems to see that it is a sign of foreign policy naivite to say that the threat we face from Iran today pales in comparison to that we faced from the Soviets.