You are ,wrongly , assuming that ROI should benefit the ordinary people. The taxpayers are paying for everything but get nothing back, just more bills for VA etc. Money is for the military complex and war profiteers to keep . Silly boy.
Yeah, always.... Forgot about the Shah??? Well, a reminder... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh#Plot_to_depose_Mosaddegh Today's Iran is a blowback of the 50s American policy.... "....caused the "blowback" suggested in the pre-coup analysis. The extent of this "blowback," over time, was not completely clear to the CIA, as they had an inaccurate picture of the stability of the Shah's regime. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 caught the CIA and the US very much off guard (as CIA reporting a mere month earlier predicted no imminent insurrectionary turbulence whatsoever for the Shah's regime), and resulted in the overthrow of the Shah (himself a non-democratic ruler) by a fundamentalist, non-democratic faction opposed to the US, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. In retrospect, not only did the CIA and the US underestimate the extent of popular discontent for the Shah, but much of that discontent historically stemmed from the removal of Mosaddegh and the subsequent clientelism of the Shah. The US-backed coup, in effect, had ended Iran's last fully democratic government, and there would be no return of democracy even after the Shah's removal."
Getting Iraq first was a good idea, since they had more weapons to use against Israel. Now we should get Iran. We should be prepared to nuke em for trying to assasinate the Saudi ambassador. God bless Israel.