You can't keep the US military-industrial-complex running on low-grade terrorism and sporadic international crime. The billions and trillions generated by a high-tech war machine can only be raised from taxpayers if those taxpayers are convinced that they are in mortal danger: that the very existence of America is threatened.
The Vice President, in his recent Newsweek interview, reminded America that we face an "existential threat." Let's take a closer look at how this "threat" was engineered, and how it will be perpetuated indefinitely.
It is widely observed that the Cold War replaced WWII as the justification for running America's defense industries at full blast. The challenge faced by plutocrats in the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) at the end of the Cold War was how to sustain the beast on which their profits depended. The sweeping world domination argument of the PNAC agenda could not be sold readily to the American public, which needed a "threat" to justify huge military outlays.
Then came 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, the MIC believed they had been handed the answer to their great problem. Al Qaeda was a heretofore unknown yet shockingly powerful global terrorist organization. After some quick research and analysis, this optimism was deflated. It turned out that the 9/11 attack was no more than a freakish one-off stunt from a strong cell in a very weak terrorist group. After Al Qaeda was routed in Afghanistan, the MIC understood that this could be a very weak threat, and anxiety returned.
At this moment, a wonderful discovery was made. The power of TV propaganda to synthesize and inflate the "terrorist" threat was far greater than the MIC had believed. TV viewers are easily led to form opinions based on association and juxtaposition, and because TV can magnify any ugly event or possibility into an obsessive phenomenon a single terror attack, properly manipulated, can unhinge the reasoning of most TV viewers. The "terrorist" threat could be stretched and morphed to cover Iraq, Iran, North Korea, even France if necessary. The magic of modern TV propaganda allowed the MIC to synthesize a threat as powerful as the huge nuclear and conventional forces of the USSR.
This tremendous power of threat synthesis explains why Bush will get his war on Iran. He doesn't need to make sense when he has the best propaganda technicians that the MIC can buy. Just as he persuaded half the American public that Saddam was behind 9/11, he can persuade America that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are coming to kill our children. The truth, logic, and probability are all irrelevent. The MIC plutocrats have enough money to convince enough Americans to launch another war.
In summary, if you can hire good TV propaganda technicians, you can synthesize a threat sufficient to justify nearly unlimited US military expenditures. The Democratic-controlled Congress will not reduce military spending, because the "existential threat" meme has been professionally sold to the public. All the discussion in enlightened corners of the Blogosphere is irrelevent; TV propaganda rules, and we are headed into another bloody war.