The other shoe, when it falls, will sound something like this:

“At least 26 U.S. troops are reported dead after an assault on their small base near the Iranian border this morning, said Gen. David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq. While details are still sketchy at the moment, Gen. Petraeus said it was “almost certain” that the attackers were units of Iran’s elite Qods force, an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“President Bush is now consulting his national security team, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. “When we have all the facts, then the president will decide upon the appropriate response. For now, our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those killed in this horrible sneak attack.”

Administration officials have been warning of possible “revenge attacks” for months after President Bush formally designated the Qods force and the IRGC as terrorist organizations in October. Just last Thursday, Bush cited a “flood” of intelligence reports indicating “an aggressive build-up of Iranian firepower” along key points of the Iran-Iraq border. The president said the intelligence was copious, credible and disturbing: “Our guys tell me their hair is on fire, reading this stuff.”

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute the next day, Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a stern warning to Tehran: “Armed retaliation would be an act of madness on the part of Iran’s tyrannical leaders. But we are dealing with an irrational enemy, so we must be prepared for anything. And let me assure you, and the mullahs: we are prepared.”

Denouncing what he called “a new Pearl Harbor,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., introduced a measure this morning that would grant formal Senate approval to “whatever action the Commander-in-Chief deems necessary to protect our troops, and our nation, from Iranian aggression.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., signaled his support for “something along those lines,” but said he would hold off bringing it to the Senate floor “until we see what the president has to tell us.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that she too would act as soon as the president had made his decision, adding, “Today there are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans united in our grief and our resolve.”

Look for it, get yourself ready — it’s coming.

One might almost suspect that the ex-parrot of Bushist mendacity on Iraq had dutifully calibrated his message to chime with the new chorus of unbridled Iran-bashing rolled out by the administration at the same time, beginning with President Bush’s talk of “World War III” last Wednesday and culminating in Dick Cheney’s libation to Ares on the last Lord’s Day. Blair, as usual, was squeezed in between the two hulking Yanks, gilding their barbaric yawp with his crisp Oxonian tones.

Speaking at the annual Al Smith charity dinner — safely distant from the mother country, where he has become a national embarrassment, never mentioned in polite society — Blair eagerly trafficked in the ludicrous trope that views “Islamic extremism” as one huge, all-powerful, amorphous yet somehow monolithic mass, comprising — as Mitt Romney once put it with blazing ignorance — “Shi’a and Sunni … Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.” In the minds of would-be he-men like Blair and Romney, this amalgamation of conflicting sects and completely disparate groups is a single, mighty Saracen sword aimed at the heart of Western civilization: a threat that must be stopped at all costs — or, rather, at the cost of other people’s blood and treasure.

Blair even went Romney one better in the dumb-and-dumber sweepstakes by stuffing this writhing mass of Islamic serpents into one big Persian basket. After wondering “if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again” — and of course invoking 9/11 over and over (an ancient rhetorical device known as guilianius affectus) — Blair put Iran in the cross hairs as, well, the focus of evil in the modern world. Squeaking at the top of his pip, Blair declared: “This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilizing countries whose people wish to live in peace.”

Think of that: We now have a state — a concrete target — where we can strike all of the strands of Islamic extremism at once, thereby quelling a dire and imminent threat to our very existence. How can we not attack it under such circumstances?

(Meanwhile, we’ll let professor Juan Cole of the University of Reality handle the “stupid things” known as facts: “President Ahmadinejad, whose job is more or less ceremonial, is not the commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces. He has never advocated ‘genocide,’ and his expressed wish that the ‘occupation regime over Jerusalem’ (i.e., the Israeli government) eventually vanish has been mistranslated. As for the rest, the candidates simply assume that Iran has a nuclear weapons research program, which has not been proven. It certainly does not have a nuclear weapon at present, and the National Intelligence Estimate indicates that if it were trying to get one, it would take until at least 2016 — and then only if the international environment were conducive to the needed high-tech imports. (Ahmadinejad, by the way, will not be in power in 2016.) Also, someone really needs to let the Republicans know that Iran is Shiite, meaning it abhors Sunni fundamentalists and rejects the caliphate.”)

But Blair wasn’t through wagging the Iran war dog. He went on to say that there was no point in trying to reason with this state-centered “global ideology” because it has already “made the choice” for relentless war on a global scale:

“There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone. I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone. They have made their choice and leave us with only one to make — to be forced into retreat or to exhibit even greater determination and belief in standing up for our values than they do in standing up for theirs.”

In other words, since “they” — the dark evil ones now fully represented by the state of Iran — have decided for war, then we — oh-so-reluctantly, of course, more in sorrow than in anger — must give it to them with both barrels. In any case, there is no question of ever “leaving them alone.” How can we? They’ve got “our” oil! And the constant botheration of volatile lands is a prerequisite of the war-profiteering industry, which Blair, again aping his American masters, favored so lovingly during his headship of Her Majesty’s Government.

Blair’s insistence that “Islamic extremism” represents a world-conquering, civilization-ending threat is one of the most pernicious fallacies in the bucket of “terror war” tripe. But one can see why it attracts lightweights and dim bulbs such as Blair and Bush. It makes them seem important, world-historical figures struggling to save humanity from colossal enemies, like Churchill and Roosevelt come again. Obviously, this silly game of pretend is much more fun than what the reality of the “terrorist threat” actually called for: calm, efficient managers of a long, difficult, unglamorous law enforcement process aimed at a few criminal organizations. But instead, the Anglo-American tripe merchants have waged aggressive war, radicalized once-quiescent multitudes, gutted the liberties of their own peoples and transformed a few violent cranks into figures of global significance.

So when Blair says that Islam is … but, really, what’s the point of going on in this way, of treating Blair’s arguments as if they had any intrinsic meaning at all, however misguided? The charges that Blair (and Bush and Dick Cheney) have laid out in recent days are not meant to be understood intellectually; they are designed to infect the listener and reader with certain emotions — fear, anger, self-righteousness, loyalty to our protectors and obedience to their authority — that will ease the accrual of power to the state and the advancement of otherwise unpalatable polices. 



As for the words themselves, they are lies. Just as Bush lied about eliminating torture from his gulag (as the New York Times revealed this month; for more, see Glenn Greenwald here and this guy as well), Blair — who lied for years about his government’s role in abetting Bush’s torture-and-kidnap schemes — lied to the audience at the Al Smith dinner. As Anonymous Liberal amply demonstrated in these pages a couple of days ago, there is no logical consistency whatsoever to be found in the scattershot barrage of charges about Iran being fired by the Bush gang and their outriders ( e.g., Blair, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and the vast horde of armchair militarists baying for Persian blood in the right-wing echo chamber of blogs, mags and groupthink tanks).

All politicians lie, of course — yes, Virginia, all of them — so there’s no big shock here. Mostly they lie to serve themselves (and their bounteous patrons). But they also lie because they believe that people can’t handle the truth — or, perhaps more accurately, that people would rather not hear the truth. They don’t want to hear what Alan Greenspan revealed this month: the self-evident truth that the United States invaded Iraq in order to gain domination over its vast oil reserves. As Jim Holt put it in a recent article in the London Review of Books:

“Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, U.S. forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the U.S. invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.”

Or as I put it in a post on Holt’s article, the Bush gang is “now set to reap a windfall of up to $30 trillion that will maintain the American elite’s whip-hand over the world for generations to come. And all it cost was a measly $1 trillion in taxpayer money, a few thousand pieces of lower-class cannon fodder from the U.S. military — and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq: an excellent return on investment for Bush-Cheney Inc. and their cronies.”

The war against Iran will be a further investment, securing not only the Iraqi acquisition but adding considerably to the dominated reserves. (And don’t forget that war — any war — enriches another key constituency of the political class: the weapons and “military servicing” industries. Indeed, the military-industrial complex is now so predominant that war and threats of war are indispensable engines for economic growth. The whole system, as it is now constituted, would simply collapse if the militarist shark didn’t keep moving and feeding.)

And the Bushists would say (if you were allowed to pierce the veil of their various, conflicting lies) that all of this is necessary — all this death, all this ruin, all this rapine of foreign lands and hardening repression at home — to keep Americans living high on the hog, devouring a vastly disproportionate share of the world’s resources. This is not a very heroic notion, of course, especially for a people told every day of their lives that they are the most special, God-blessed human beings who ever walked the face of the earth. Far better to be lied to, and told that the terror war is a noble crusade for freedom for the oppressed and security for our children. (even if the Iraq part has been “mismanaged”; but we can fix that, and do the next one “right”). “We’re doing all this for them,” Dick Cheney might say, waving his hand at the window toward the rabble passing by below. “We’re taking on the burden of this bloodshed and toil and lies because they want us to — and they damn sure don’t want to hear about it.”

There is much truth in this, as far as it goes; but it hides an even deeper lie. For as we all know, more and more Americans are not living high on the hog. Their cities are crumbling, their public services and healthcare are diminishing (or being sold off to indifferent profit gougers), their jobs are being lost or left in constant peril; most of them are just one serious illness or accident or personal catastrophe away from lifelong penury. They are no longer reaping the benefits of the long, long march of militarism and empire that has found its culmination in the “war on terror.” So where are those benefits going?

Here we come to the dark heart of the enterprise, the stinking truth that festers beneath the mountainous compost heap of lies: All of this death, ruin, rapine and repression is being carried out solely for the benefit of its perpetrators, and their cronies, and their fawning courtiers. It is being carried out to augment the power and privilege of a relatively small, deeply entrenched elite. The fact is, there is more than enough wealth in the United States, more than enough resources — natural, intellectual, institutional, infrastructural — to deal with the difficult changes that would be required to wean the nation off its insatiable addiction to oil and its corrosive dependence on war and produce sufficient prosperity in a transformed, more localized economy. The elite represented and embodied by Bush and Cheney (and courtiers like Blair) isn’t seeking domination of the world’s oil and armed hegemony over geopolitical affairs because there are no other choices to ensure the people’s security and prosperity. Indeed, as the historical record of the past seven years has shown, the elite’s policies have produced the opposite effect. No, they are pursuing these policies, waging these wars — and fomenting new ones — to gorge themselves and no one else.

Remember this truth — try to catch the stench of it — the next time one of these lying perps dresses up in a thousand-dollar suit to sell you a brand-new war.

Leaving aside the undigested lump of pure propaganda spewed up by the reporter — “al-Qaeda” has not been the sole or even the main target of the “offensives” launched into civilian areas — the military stats reveal the growing centrality of airstrikes in Iraq. What’s more, these figures do not include attacks by helicopter gunships, whose fearsome destructive power rivals that of any bomb or missile.

The results of this deliberate strategy have been entirely predictable and deeply horrific: Innocent civilians chewed to pieces by blast force and metal. Innocent civilians dispossessed of homes, cars, goods, all means of survival. Innocent civilians turned into bitter enemies of the United States, as they bury their young, their old, their most beloved ones.

Listen to the Iraqis themselves speaking from the ground zero of their reality. From the Washington Post:

“Iraqis voiced outrage Friday over a U.S. military airstrike that killed an estimated 15 civilians — nine children and six women, one of the highest reported civilian death tolls from an American bombing in months. The bombing occurred Thursday evening after U.S. troops raided a suspected leadership meeting of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq that was taking place south of Lake Tharthar, near the city of Samarra in western Iraq …

“‘This could have been done through the infantry,’ said Ibrahim al-Khamas, a Samarra city council member. ‘But the American Army prefers the easiest solution, which is the air bombardment … This airstrike was excessive, as usual, which led to the fall of civilians. People here are now carrying great hatred against the Americans after the raid. This airstrike turned their Eid to grief’ …

“Mohammed al-Samarrae, 34, said his pregnant cousin was killed in the bombing. He expressed a mix of dismay at her death and the weariness of life after more than four years of war. ‘Where can anybody be safe from Bush’s democracy?’ he asked. ‘Whenever we want to open a new chapter with the Americans, to forget the past and try all over again, they drag us into violence, weapons and fighting again. And to sympathize with al-Qaeda against them. All because of their inconsideration for our blood.’”

(Here’s a report on several more similar incidents earlier this month. And for a richly detailed dissection of the latest airstrike mulching — including how it was thoroughly airbrushed by the headlines in the “homeland” — see this post from Winter Patriot.)

As I’ve noted elsewhere, this rising mound of innocent dead is the inevitable consequence of trying to maintain the occupation and control of another country while minimizing impolitic losses to one’s ground forces. And there would actually be even more of this under the nonwithdrawal “withdrawal” plans of the leading Democrats, all of which call for retaining some sort of “residual” force in Iraq. The only way to protect such a diminished, isolated but still very present and provocative force is through the increased use of airpower. So once again, we see the bipartisan nature of the ongoing war crime in Iraq.

What we are also seeing with this strategy is, to put it plainly, an attempt to terrorize a civilian population into submission. Let’s strip away all the political gamesmanship and partisan point scoring that encrusts the Beltway debate — that hideous masque of red death, where fine-dining blowhards prate and prance to the music of keening mothers and dying soldiers. Let’s break down the on-message jargon and lumps of propaganda into the base elements of truth. For what the air campaign, and the “offensives into neighborhoods,” are really saying is brutally frank:

“We invaded your country under knowingly false pretenses, fixing the intelligence around the policy, because our leaders, who were in possession of vast amounts of intelligence that undermined or refuted their stated casus belli, couldn’t reveal their true, long-held intentions. (‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,’ Alan Greenspan says.) We destroyed your infrastructure, we destroyed your society, we destroyed your history, we enthroned extremist militias to rule over you, we tortured your sons and fathers in the same hellhole that Saddam used, we killed a million of your people and drove millions more from their homes. And we intend to stay here for as long as we like, in the vast ‘enduring bases’ we are building on your land. Now if you don’t accept this, if you keep shooting at us and trying to make us leave, then we will go on bombing your families in their homes, we will go on killing your women and children, until you stop.”

The military tactic of close air support in a firefight is not the issue here. The issue is why the U.S. military is engaged in this Iraqi urban warfare, with its inevitable killing of civilians, in the first place. And the reason is that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts have made the deliberate, conscious decision to engage in state terrorism in order to advance foreign policy and energy objectives they held long before 9/11 “changed the world.”

That is the true context, and content, of the war. Anyone who supports its continuation — under any auspices, in any form, for any amount of time longer than it takes to remove all the troops quickly and safely — is advocating the perpetuation of state terror in the name of the American people.

You’d think even a prating blowhard could see the danger of that. But no doubt the masque will go on and on.

The prospect of a Democratic victory in 2006 was for many people the last, flickering hope that the degradation of the republic could be arrested and reversed within the ordinary bounds of the political system. This was always a fantasy, given the strong bipartisan nature and decades-long cultivation of greed, arrogance and militarism that has now come to its fullest bloom in the Bush administration. But desperation can crack the shell of the most hardened cynic, and no doubt there were few who did not harbor somewhere deep inside at least a small grain of hope against hope that a slap-down at the polls would give the Bush gang pause and confound its worst depredations.

One year on, we can all see how the Democrats have made a mockery of those dreams. Their epic levels of unpopularity are richly deserved. At every step they evoke the remarks of the emperor Tiberius, who, after yet another round of groveling acquiescence from the once-powerful Roman Senate, dismissed them with muttered contempt: “Men fit to be slaves.” The record of the present Congress provides copious and irrefutable evidence for this judgment.

After 10 full months of Democratic command in the legislative branch — 10 full months under the “liberal,” “progressive,” “antiwar” Democratic leadership — where are we? The Iraq war, far from being ended or even curtailed, was instead escalated by Bush in the face of popular discontent and establishment unease: the first, and most egregious, Democratic surrender. Bush’s illegal spying on Americans was not only not punished, it was formally legitimized by Congress, whose Democratic leaders are now hastening to give their telecom paymasters retroactive immunity for taking part in what they knew to be a massive criminal operation, as Glenn Greenwald has often noted here. The Military Commissions Act — which eviscerated 900 years of habeas corpus, as even Arlen Specter admitted (before slavishly voting for the bill anyway) — remains on the books, unshaken by the Democrats, despite all the cornpone about “restoring the Constitution” they’ve dished out for the rubes back home.

And now we stand on the brink of another senseless, useless, baseless war, this time with Iran — a conflict that, as Juan Cole pointed out on Salon recently, is likely to make the belching hell of Iraq look like a church picnic. Dick Cheney’s bellicose outburst Sunday in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies — a reprise of many similar war dances he performed in the run-up to the unprovoked invasion of Iraq — takes us one step closer to this new crime. But Cheney’s assertions of Persian perfidy — all of them unsubstantiated, and in the case of the nuclear program, refuted by the IAEA — were simply the culmination of a remarkable bipartisan campaign of demonization in which the Democrats have actually taken the public lead, repeatedly castigating the administration for not being “tough enough” on Iran, and repeatedly vowing that “all options are on the table” against the mad mullahs: strong words indeed from the only nation on earth that has ever exercised the “nuclear option” against another country.

(And no one has limned the moral insanity of the new war fever with more power and urgency and eloquence than Arthur Silber. He has demolished the bogus arguments, exposed the true context and fatal delusions of the “debate” and proposed practical solutions to try to head off the coming disaster. Check out his work for a most unsentimental education about the realities of our time.)

The Democrats have already overwhelmingly — and officially — accepted the administration’s arguments for war against Iran. The first on-the-record embrace came in June, on a 97-0 Senate vote in favor of a saber-rattling resolution from Fightin’ Joe Lieberman. As I noted at the time:

“The bipartisan Senate resolution … affirmed as official fact all of the specious, unproven, ever-changing allegations of direct Iranian involvement in attacks on the American forces now occupying Iraq. The Senators appear to have relied heavily on the recent New York Times story by Michael Gordon that stovepiped unchallenged Pentagon spin directly onto the paper’s front page. As Firedoglake points out, John McCain cited the heavily criticized story on the Senate floor as he cast his vote.”

It goes without saying that all of this is a nightmarish replay of the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq: The New York Times funneling false flag stories from Bush insiders. Warmongers citing the New York Times stories as “proof” justifying any and all action to “defend the homeland.” Credulous and craven Democratic politicians swallowing the Bush line hook and sinker.

To be sure, stout-hearted Dem tribunes like Dick Durbin insisted that their support for declaring that Iran is “committing acts of war” against the United States should not be taken as an “authorization of military action.” This is shaky-knees mendacity at its finest. Having officially affirmed that Iran is waging war on American forces, how can you then deny the president when he asks (if he asks) for authorization to “defend our troops”? Answer: You can’t. And you know it.

But even this was not enough. A few weeks later, there was a new resolution, carefully calibrated to mesh with the all-out propaganda blitz surrounding the appearance of Gen. David Petraeus on Fox News in September. (He also put in an appearance on Capitol Hill, it seems.) Once again, the majority of Senate Democrats voted with the monolithic Republicans for yet another Lieberman-sponsored measure, which effectively if not formally authorized military action against Iran by declaring the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization” and tying it to attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.

Even the clueless Joe Biden — last seen marshaling a measure advocating the partition of Iraq (also known as the “Ethnic Cleansing Act of 2007″) — gets it. He told George Stephanopoulos Sunday that Bush will seize on the resolutions exactly as predicted: “The president’s going to stand there and say … ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as the United States Congress voted, they said these guys are terrorists. I moved against them to save American lives.’”

But Bush is not the only president — or potential president — who might seize on the Senate votes. Last week — just a few days before Cheney’s speech — Hillary Clinton weighed in with a “major policy article” in Foreign Affairs that regurgitated the administration’s unproven allegations against Iran as indisputable fact. This too is ominous stuff, coming from a strong front-runner who not only is leading in the opinion polls but is also way out in front among an elite constituency whose support is much more important and decisive than that of the hapless hoi polloi: arms dealers. Clinton has surpassed all candidates — including the hyper-hawkish Republican hopefuls — in garnering cash payments from the American weapons industry, the Independent reports. Obviously, these masters of war are not expecting any drop-off in profits if Clinton takes the helm.

And indeed, beyond her “all options” thundering at Iran, Clinton has vowed to do the one thing guaranteed to breed more war, more ruin, more suffering, more “collateral damage,” more terrorist blowback: keeping American forces in Iraq, come hell or high water. Clinton’s “withdrawal” plan calls for retaining an unspecified number of “specialized units” in Iraq to “fight terrorism,” train Iraqi forces and protect other American troops carrying out unspecified activities. Is it any wonder that she’s the apple of Lockheed Martin’s eye?

But in fact, the “antiwar” plans of the other “liberal” candidates — the “serious” ones, that is — are remarkably similar. In other words, the Democrats are promising a permanent (or in the current weasel-word jargon, “enduring”) U.S. military presence in Iraq — which of course has been one of the primary war aims of the Bush administration all along (even before it took office). Credible analysis shows that up to a million people or more have been slaughtered in this ghastly enterprise — and still the Democrats will not act to end it or, God forbid, try to remove its perpetrators from office. Instead they will keep the red wheel of death rolling toward the ever-vanishing horizon.

So this is where we’ve come to, one year after the people spoke at the ballot box, fighting through government propaganda, media distortions, pundit scorn, terrorist scares — and the Karl Rove vote-skewing, vote-suppressing, vote-stealing machine — to deliver a strong call for a new direction, for an end to war and torture and tyranny and corruption and lies. They believed — perhaps for the last time — that their vote might make a difference, that the “consent of the governed” might still retain some meaning.

So they turned to the only serious alternative the system provided: the Democrats. And this is what they got: more war, more torture, more tyranny, more corruption, more lies.

What should the people believe now? What should they hope for from the system now? And what new nightmares await them in the second year of this perverse union between a power-drunk president and a cowardly, corrupted, complicit “opposition”?