You'd have thought the reality of Afghanistan and Iraq might act as a break on the instinctive lunge by hawks to compare apples with oranges as they try to gull us into a belief that war is a doddle.
Remember the neo-con parsing of the proposed invasion of Iraq as a ''cakewalk'' - to address the ''mushroom cloud'' that Condoleezza Rice saw in Iraq's non-existent nuclear arsenal and Tony Blair's wild warning that Saddam Hussein could unleash a WMD strike in just 45 minutes?
It's the same with Iran now. We are being asked to pair a best-case scenario of going to war (neat, surgical strikes; no blood on the ground; and little or no Iranian retaliation) with the worst-case scenario of allowing Tehran to go its nuclear way (become a reckless regional actor; would seek menacing alliances with the likes of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela; and would pass nuclear technology to terrorists).
Despite Barack Obama's warning weeks ago that ''now is not the time for bluster,'' the blustering continues apace - in Washington and beyond.
In The New York Times on Wednesday, the Israeli commentator Ari Shavit warns that unless there is a strike against Iran this northern summer - that is, in the next several months - ''Israel will lose the military capability to stop the Shiite bomb''. In a 30-minute lobbying video doing the rounds, the evangelical Christian leader Gary Bauer intones: ''I'll be brutally honest - I don't trust the president …. I think his record on Israel is abysmal.''
