Why Iran will not be next

I could be wrong. I was wrong before, boy was I wrong before. Last summer, I thought Iran would be next, I thought the bombs would be falling within weeks. I thought the US would invade Iran. Or Syria. Or both. In 2003 I thought if the US would invade Iraq, it would be a good thing for the Iraqis. Boy was I unillumined and naive back then. And wrong, wrong, wrong.

Right now, we see the same bullshit fabricated intelligence as we have seen in 2003. But do the same means lead to the same ends?

To understand what will happened next, we have to know what happened before. I hope I have learned since then and can make an educated guess now. If I get this wrong, what I say will not have any relation to reality.

So why was Iraq attacked? Some people claim that it was some fuzzy "Old-School US Imperialism ™". Modern US imperialism has different means. Some claim that it was "For Oil". I don't think so, there are other countries with oil, more valuable countries. Why not go for Venezuela or Nigeria?

As I have said before, I think Iraq was attacked because some people wanted to transfer shitloads of tax-money into the accounts of the arms industry and into their own pockets. What better way than to start a war. Not something too big, but something that smolders for a very long time. Just like something we are seeing right now in Iraq. Perfect.

So what's the worst that could happen? Just imagine you have to show some PowerPoint slides to the executive board of some bigshot arms manufacturer in the US the day after an Democratic President has declared to pull out of Iraq and has been greeted by congressmen of both parties as an "American Gandhi". Oops, wrong meeting.

So what would happen if the US invaded Iran. Two things would be possible.

1. The violence would tail off. In which case the president could declare "Job well done" and pull out. It was only Iran behind all that violence (which I don't think)
2. The violence would not tail off. The US military would find itself awfully stretched. It would show that Iran wasn't behind all this insurgency business. The calls to pull out, which are getting louder already without a mess in Iran, would get even louder. It would be suicide for a president not to give up Iraq or Iran or both. "Leave the suckers to themselves" would be the American motto du jour.
   

So, to keep the US military in the mess it is right now, we need a reason, a plausible reason why the US military has to stay in that mess. To achieve this, the people in charge would need a "device" with which they could put pressure on who ever becomes president NOT to pull out. What better device than an Iran that has to be curbed? So, if the US president should think about pulling out, he could be pressured to stay the course or be called a traitor who endangers the US security.

When they have learned one thing from the end of the cold war, it is that not having an enemy, not having something you need protection from, can be a very dangerous thing if you are in the business of selling arms. I guess the war on terror is loosing steam, there is only so far you can go with a phantom terror organization and a phantom terror-leader. So what better than to have Mini-Soviet threat? It worked for over forty years with the Russkies, why not give it a try with the Mullahs now? And if it doesn't work out, there is allways Russia or China to fall back as the enemy du jour. Better prepare them as enemy now.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last Wednesday the United States had to prepare for the possibility of combating major armies and that it also needed significant Special Forces because he did not know what might happen in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China in the future.
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"In principle, as defense minister, I can understand this statement. All sorts of tricks are used to approve the budget," RIA Novosti quoted [Russian defense minister] Ivanov.

As I said before, I could be wrong, but I think what the people currently in charge want is not another war, they want to make sure this war keeps going the way it has been going since the beginning. In my opinion, Iraq has not become another Vietnam for the US because their leaders have made mistakes. Their intention from the first moment was to turn Iraq into another Vietnam.