Navy assumed that ships anchored in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor were safe from torpedo attack even though in 1940, at the Battle of Taranto, the British had made successful shallow-water torpedo attacks against Italian warships in harbor. Even if intelligence services had credited the September 11, 2001 attacks conspirators with the organizational capacity necessary to hijack four airliners simultaneously, no one would have suspected that the hijackers' weapon of choice would be the box cutter. Likewise, the US Navy underestimated the danger of suicide boats in harbor and set rules of engagement that allowed an unidentified boat to sail into the USS Cole without being warned off or fired on. A Burke-class destroyer is one of the most powerful warships ever built, but US security policies did not protect the docked USS Cole. The "other side" does not make decisions as you do Mirror-imaging can be a major problem for policymakers, as well as analysts. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert S. McNamara assumed that Ho Chi Minh would react to situations in the same manner as they would. Similarly, in the run-up to the Gulf War, there was a serious misapprehension independent of politically-motivated intelligence manipulation that Saddam Hussein would view the situation as both Kuwait as the State Department and White House did. Opposing countries are not monolithic, even within their governments. There can be bureaucratic competition, which becomes associated with different ideas. Some dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin, were known for creating internal dissension, so that only the leader was in complete control. A current issue, which analysts understand but politicians may not or may want to exploit by playing on domestic fears, is the actual political and power structure of Iran; one must not equate the power of Iran's president with that of the president of the United States. Opponents are not always rational. They may have a greater risk tolerance than one's own country. Maintaining the illusion of a WMD threat appears to have been one of Saddam Hussein's survival strategies. Returning to the Iranian example, an apparently-irrational statement from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would not carry the weight of a similar statement by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Analysts sometimes assume that the opponent is totally wise and knows all of the other side's weaknesses. Despite that danger, opponents are unlikely to act according to one's best-case scenario; they