This is not to say that the Cheney/Bush junta is right in their story about our wounded innocence; at least not in the way they mean it. It is because we, the voting public, have been so skillfully disconnected and disenfranchised from democratic governance that our opinions, though we predicted the entire Iraq disaster in painful detail long before the invasion, do not matter where national policies are made and put into action.
We cannot stop the war any more than we started it. Cheney and Bush and their backers did that, despite the very best efforts of wiser heads. They did this by staging a successful coup, taking over the real power of the government when the Supreme Court declared Bush the President of the United States despite obvious and blatent election fraud and a clear Democratic victory.
After that successful coup they were free to produce one fait accomplis after another, presenting the democratic institutions that still seemed to exist with a series of lesser-of-two-evils choices that ratcheted us deeper and deeper into a perpetual war of imperial conquest and a ruined economy. Congress still thinks it is Congress; Wall Street still pretends to be Wall Street; and the people can think and say whatever they like: it's a Free Country.
I am among those who believe the attack by the US on Iran will be nuclear. It it is not, any attack would seem rather pointless in view of the threats Cheney and others have issued, but if it is, it will be designed to return the word "deterrent," which John Bolton has been saying doesn't work anymore, to the language of nuclear bullying so familiar to the old cronies of the Junta.
Despite low poll numbers and the steady stream of departing cronies for more family time, and even some rumors that Dick Cheney is resigning over the botched cruise missile theft inside job, the military is really out there, really ready to trash Iran. As Plesch and Butcher put it, "US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets within Iran in a few hours. US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.
The troubling part in all this is that that Dick Cheney's finger on the button. Until he is impeached and removed, or to take the optimistic view, replaced in a Presidential election, the world trembles in terror that he'll actually do it.
