This dangerous game of brinkmanship and perpetual bickering between America and Iran has been played out for over three decades now. Little seems to change in Washington no matter who is in the White House a Bible-thumping gunslinger with an endless wish list of regime change or a messianic rhetorician, who earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office by promising all sorts of Yes-We-Cans to all sorts of folks.

On the other hand, over the past couple of decades we have heard nearly the same monotonous grandstanding against the “Big Satan” from the ayatollahs, which is now beginning to bore even those who are sympathetic to Tehran and believe that it's being unfairly targeted by the West, just as Iraq had been not long ago.

Every pundit worth his two-bit take has been obsessing over the coming war on Iran for more than a decade now. We in the Gulf have lived with this fear for years now, especially since the Iraq invasion. Indeed, after Iraq, moving next door to Iran wouldn't have been too difficult for the coalition of the willing, if it wasn't for the mess that it unleashed on itself by removing Saddam Hussain.

With the war of words between Washington and Tehran heating up, coupled with the latest - and toughest - Western sanctions against Iran coming into play, that scenario now looks increasingly plausible.

As if defying the war talk, a totally defiant Tehran launched new war games in the Gulf last week. Ten days of exercises saw Tehran shoot off some of those “long-range” missiles that it claims could hit as far as Israel and U.S. military assets in the Middle East, giving the jitters to an already tense region.