Let’s settle down and look at this rationally. Iran is not next. It must remain intact. Every good empire needs some solid villains and a lot of chaos and caliphates (oh, I’m not speaking of the Christian caliphate of evangelicals, aka “my beautiful Christians). What’s the reason? The military budget for Iran in was bout $8 billion last year. The US total military allocation Congress made available to spend last fiscal year according to USASpending.gov. No, wait for it. $1.99 Trillion. That’s an incredible amount of money to draw down from. In comparison, the allowable accounting errors mean that at any one time $20 billion dollars is missing or unaccounted for at the Pentagon. Can you honestly think that if we defeated Iran and gave up a juicy villain that hates us, the military contractors and senators would just sit by and let that happen? They would have to create a new one. To put in perspective, Musk’s Space X has an almost $1 Billion contract with the military along—not NASA, not private contractors, not Starlink satellites for rural America. All are nice SpaceX contracts but just the DoD in a billion. Or one eighth of Iran.

So yes, you are completely right. As it turns out I don’t happen to disagree with anything you say. It’s a crazy empire with no equal in history ever. We could fund the rebuilding of Syria without a military invasion. We could lend it a $20 billion dollar interest free loan, kind of like the Marshall Plan in Western Europe after WWII. But where would be the fun in that? (And by fun I mean profitable villain to fear so we can spend more on global defense to profit the contractors.)