askchapo

One of the important things to understand re: political class "decisions" is that it is nearly always a de facto collaboration with the ruling class and the state bureaucracy. Even if they don't consult the latter (and they always do), the limits of their actions are set by the latter. The "guardrails" are set by them essentially threatening to destroy "the economy", pull support, assassination, and so on. So every action taken for any substantial period of time happens with the consent of all 3.

But all 3 don't need to have the same motivations. They are all interested in their own outcomes, they only need to see something in it for themselves. And even then each group is subdivided, they only need to predominately see something in it for them.

So as a result, you can see the proximal reason(s) for decisions quite clearly fairly often. Of course they're going to boost cops' funding, for example. They're the state violence beloved by bourgeois interests. They're the state apparatus that feeds the bureaucracy and much of the bureaucracy sees a need to control a population that will be increasingly desperate. Every politician sees police as in their own personal interest, even, thinking they're the only thing between them and assassination (or may literally be their assassins if they don't play ball). The funding going to cops often feeds the MIC, as the "donations" of "excess" coincide with "modernization" pushes, i.e. more procurement.

So, with Iran, the answer is surely "many reasons", many of those you list and others here list are likely true. Iran poses a "threat" due to its long-term intentional isolation by imperialists beginning with its successful attempt at independence from them. The US and its cronies constantly go after such states and it has nothing to do with principals. They go after communists, monarchies, countries de facto run by clergies, and bourgeois democracies alike. That "independence" is always perceived as a threat because what it really entails is a move away from domination by those imperialists when they need to move chips around to maintain their status, and most importantly, ruling class status. A free Iran began mostly as a threat to oil interests, imperialists fought each other over it, from the British to the fledgling imperialist tsars to the US. Without imperialist ownership, profits through exploitation go to Iran, not the imperialists. And oil itself became a means of domination, a monopoly on energy and industrial production that could be turned into a financial weapon, largely by the imperialists. Isolation imposed by the imperialists also meant that Iran needed to maintain militarization and basic sovereignty as they were encircled, so constant action/reaction reinforced the designation of enemy state and the drawing up of plans of military and economic ruin.

The real question is "why now?" and honestly that truly could be that the Rubio faction is going ham and got full of themselves regarding their desire to do smash and grabs and just generally go after its list of enemy (read: independent) states. And Trump is fairly stupid and decrepit on top of all the abhorrent and violent things about him. It really could be a political class blunder, but again, it's all within the guardrails of the ruling class and bureaucracy. Otherwise there would be, at minimum, signs of fracture. The bourgeois press would be running constant attacks on the war, they'd be pushing for ways out, they'd be blaming Trump, etc. Donors would be pulling out. Capital flow would be changing in unique ways. Generally speaking, none of that is happening.