Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 Washington opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George H. W. Bush’s petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein. To avert a similar 90% shrinkage or even 50% cutback at the Cold War’s end, the incipient neocon War Party developed an anti-Iranian doctrine that was explicitly described as a way of keeping defense spending at high Cold War levels.