Reliably means, recall from the initial article in this series, that a nuclear-armed Iranian government would behave rationally --- in a strictly instrumental way of weighing the benefits and costs of aggressive action --- when it's faced with credible deterrent threats of unacceptable retaliatory damage. In that case, it wouldn't matter if Iran's clerical-fascist leaders were all fanatical religious zealots, some of whom believe --- especially Ahmadinejad --- that their mission in life is to hasten the arrival of the Hidden Imam Messiah's reappearance, followed by the immediate Apocalyptic Showdown with the infidels, nuclear war and all. They would still behave by setting the costs and benefits of aggressive action against one another . . . with instrumental rationality of a careful calculating sort overwhelming their ideological bent, however fervently true-believing they happen to be.

Or so the calculus of deterrence postulates.

Observe, too, that instrumental rationality on the part of the target state isn't the sole pre-requisite of effective deterrence, even if it's the most important. Some of the other conditions were also set out in the initial article, and the last article in this series --- still off in the future some time --- will list them all systematically and then compare them with what we have learned about Iran's political system and diplomacy in the Ahmadinejad era.

As for "deter" Iran from what, the most menacing of its aggressive actions would be a nuclear strike out of the blue against Israel, which Ahmadinejad's vicious Jew-hating rhetoric has hinted at from time to time, or against US bases in the Middle East. That aggressive action can't be dismissed, but it's probably the unlikeliest of threats that a nuclear-armed Iran might pose for us; implementing it would entail sure-fire national suicide for Iran by means of Israeli or American nuclear retaliation, and the likelier threats lie elsewhere. Above all, a nuclear-armed Iran might pursue a series of aggressive foreign and military policies charged with reckless, high-risk gambles of the sort, say, that Hitler or the Japanese militarists tempted fate with at the start of WWII. Such hazardous long-shots, to be precise, like trying . . .

• To dominate the Middle East;

• To multiply Iran's long-standing nurture and support for jihadi terrorist movements like Hezbollah and Hamas in reckless adventurous ways;

• To encourage those terrorists to attack Israel with chemical and biological weapons or maybe with crude radioactive suitcase bombs, and maybe US allies in Europe or elsewhere . . . including the US itself. Hezbollah itself, recall, is a global terrorist movement that has been operating in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Latin America for over two decades now . . . long before anybody ever heard of al Qaeda

• And, not least, to make Iran the benighted, oil-rich head of global jihadi Islamist movements everywhere, whether Shiite or Sunni.

Wait! ---don't the two major groups of Muslims fear and hate one another? Yes; but then inflamed Islamo-fascists are still fascists and Muslims, and both Shiite and Sunni terrorists share frenzied jihadi aims and a common enemy: Jews, Israel, Jew-dominated America, Jew-run globalization, the US's running dog Western allies, Orthodox Russia, hateful Hindu India, pagan Buddhist Thailand, the Christian Philippines, and of course treacherous Muslim collaborators in power and elsewhere.

Those who think that an all-inclusive jihadi alliance is impossible might ponder why the Communist Soviet Union ended up as a key ally in World War II of democratic and capitalist Britain and America. In any case, we have it directly from the top military man in clerical-fascist Iran himself --- General Yahha Rahim Safavi, the Supreme Head of the elite SS-like Islamic Revolutionary Guards -- what Iran's global aspirations are in the Ahmadinejad era: