On a day like today, it’s worth going back to the report of the Commission To Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat, chaired by a visionary named Donald Rumsfeld and assisted by fellow far-seeing thinkers Paul Wolfowitz, Jim Woolsey and Steve Cambone. On July 15, 1998, they told Congress about an Iranian missile threat:

Iran is placing extraordinary emphasis on its ballistic missile and WMD development programs. The ballistic missile infrastructure in Iran is now more sophisticated than that of North Korea, and has benefited from broad, essential, long-term assistance from Russia and important assistance from China as well. Iran is making very rapid progress in developing the Shahab-3 MRBM, which like the North Korean No Dong has a range of 1300 km. This missile may be flight tested at any time and deployed soon thereafter.

We judge that Iran now has the technical capability and resources to demonstrate an ICBM-range ballistic missile, similar to the TD-2 (based on scaled-up Scud technology) within five years of a decision to proceed-whether that decision has already been made or is yet to be made.

There ain’t no Iranian ICBM. The measures announced today, as detailed by left-wing radical Bob Gates, deal with the Shahab-3 threat. But notice that the way the Rumsfeld Commission phrased its ICBM language makes it unfalsifiable. If there is no Iranian ICBM, we are always-already just a bit shy of the date, just under five years prior, when the Iranian regime decided to create one. The horror is always-already imminent. There are probably Red Army studies that use similar sorts of reasoning.