Historian David Gibbs is convincing on the reason for the Iranian war

Talking on Neutrality Studies he reminds us that Trump is only following the policy of his predecessors in seeing Iran as an enemy. Why did they?

"And so they [the US] were looking for an enemy and Iran was one of multiple enemies. Russia obviously, China is another enemy, Arab terrorism defined very broadly as an enemy and all of these I think didn't come out of nowhere. I mean obviously there's a psychological need for a bogeyman for a simple explanation for all our problems. I suppose that but I don't like psychological explanations. I think there were material interests here and the material interests were to find some justification for this enormous military the United States had, and it was only slightly downsized after the Cold War, to find a justification for hundreds of overseas bases, again which had no function if the Soviet Union was gone but it needed a function. They had to find a function. There were fleets around the world. There was, you know, the the security apparatus, the CIA and all the other agencies."

Interestingly, he says he refuses to mention the Arab-Israel conflict in his classes for fear of being penalised as a result of complaints by pro-Israel students and the Israel lobby.