That’s IT. Now, we know: Our enemies are Al Qaeda and Iran. Somehow, we all suspected the facts would come oozing out of the woodwork someday. And finally… the truth. Boy, oh, boy! Those dang Persians.

Oh… and Al Qaeda. …The ones that… uh… flew the planes into the buildings. …Killed our countrymen while we watched in real time. …Right...

Them, too.

Before we sip again the rivers of forgetfulness, we should remember that throughout the uneasy first few months of this year anyone paying a smidgen of attention began to get somewhat fidgety at all the signposts popping up and pointing to impending war with Iran. Petraeus and the Green Zone tribunes starting blaming Iran for spiking violence in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities; Iran’s Republican Guards were declared a terror group (if even ONE of ‘em slips across the border to buy a donut, his Gitmo ticket’s punched); and, finally, Adm. Fallon, one of the few honest figures in the whole mess, signed off into retirement. Previously, he’d warned an attack on Iran wouldn’t happen “on his watch.”

So now Bush is hammering the idea that Iran is one of America’s greatest threats. But despite the fulminations of recent months and his most recent remarks, American war fever has iced over. He appears to be the last person in this country to get it: Nobody’s going to bite this Administration’s bait anymore. We’ve been punked just too many times.

But we also know public opinion doesn’t matter fresh, sticky squat. If this Administration wants to drench in blood another Mideastern country, it will do so with or without Americans’ support. As Vice President Cheney succinctly put it, “So what?”

Stopping such a demented project won’t take courage or integrity; we know those characteristics are as rare in Washington as anthrax investigations. It will take Republican Fear. The congressional GOP delegation, with tacit or carnate support of Republican governors and state hacks as well as the national party apparatus, will have to sit down with George; they’ll have to remind him that, even though he’s a lame duck, their political futures are still on the line. They'll cajole. Maybe threaten. Whatever it takes: blackmail, maybe mumbled references to "Grassy Knoll crews". Whatever.

Republicans risk a Hoover-style ass-kicking this November. They’re stuck with a candidate who’s economic grounding stopped with abacus technology; McCain feels the best way to deal with our stealth recession is import more cheap labor and export more American jobs to Bhowani Junction. With a voting-booth handicap that profound, the albatross of the war will only get heavier by spreading its carnage throughout the region.

Forget about the Democrats. They’re as sewn up as the GOP by the lobbies driving this war. No… It’s up to the fearful to scare off Bush.

Well... at least they didn’t say we’ve turned the corner in Iraq. We’ve turned so many corners there it’s obvious we’re turning the SAME corners – which means we’re going in circles.

That's always troublesome.

For Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, the latest round before Congress must be a comedown from the softball fest in September. Their hemming and hawing seemed to irritate even Republican stalwarts like Lugar, and this time around, their anti-answers were as welcome as a smoldering fart at a perfume counter.

From their testimony, what is amazing is the apparent restructuring of our main enemies in Iraq (there are so many). Now, according to the Pet-Crocker team, those dread foes are Iran, Syria and... whew!... Lebanon's Hezbollah. If we pick up our current events books, lick our thumbs and flip a few pages, we see promptly that these enemies are also - tah-TAH! - Israel's main enemies.

OK. Well... at least we know what track we're on. Although buried in their chronic obfuscation, Petraeus and Crocker indicated where the new thrust is headed: We're going to take out all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East. Simple! That's gotta be great news for our brave little ally, who got seriously - and unexpectedly - bitch-slapped when it tried another Litani River sweep two years ago.

Unfortunately, it isn't great news for the United States. These countries and militias have not presented any threat to this country historically, despite all the fairy tales. There must be a limit to how much blood and treasure we're willing to throw away in adventures that mean nothing to the security of this country, and benefit either domestic economic elites, or foreign countries.

Isn’t it odd that the Iraq War is always blamed on American vengefulness post-9/11? Seems to me, the passions of Joe and Joanne America had cooled along with the Trade Center girders by the time Saddam was toppled 18 months later. It’s not as if throngs of raving Americans filled the streets demanding the vicious princes of Baghdad be brought to their knees. The war notice was as much a surprise to folks here as it must have been to Iraqis. Up to that moment, everyone expected the weapons inspections/Saddam defiance square dance to shuffle along until the beleaguered denizens of the Fertile Crescent were forced to accept more and more humiliating sanctions. Then… BOOM!... get outta town Hussein. And take your cotton-pickin', owl-hoot sons with you.

We can now be pretty damn sure the actual, shock-and-awe Iraq War wasn't the product of vengeful Americans. It was a coldly planned and cynically calculated act of strategic belligerence that was in the works long before Atta and his upper-middle class fanatics climbed aboard the airliners.

Although the New York attack was hijacked and used as the war's trigger, the Pearl Harbor that finally detonated direct, violent action on the hapless Iraqis, supporting "evidence" in Saddam's indictment was pretty screwy, and even to committed true-believers the whole scheme stank to high heaven. Nevertheless, with the help of a stumblebum, lap-doggie national media, the casus belli was impelled along by a myriad of shady characters, clumsy forgeries and bald-faced lies. One of the most direct acts of evil in the casebook, and the one which outwardly appeared as work of the CBW-obsessed Saddam, was the anthrax letter attacks in the weeks following 9/11.

None other than Fox News ran some coverage of the strangely forgotten, extavagantly ignored atocity's resurfacing last week. After pursuing one innocent suspect and convicting another, by proxy, in the press, it seems the Department of Justice has announced it's narrowed the list on the potential killers. It's here:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342852,00.html

And a website tracing a carefully studied blow-by-blow of the case is here:

http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/#comments

One other thing about the Feith interview on "60 Minutes": Why does  the mainstream media never - ever - see fit to bust these jackasses when they're obviously lying through their teeth.

To gallingly adhere to the same old, tired lie the Bush Administration has trotted out everytime the topic of Saddam's toppling has come up over the past five years is unastonishing. But to endure the media sitting by and let a Feith, or a Wolfowitz - or a Rumsfeld - prattle it out again and again, now five years after the pin was pulled, is disgusting.

If they're not going to sit down and answer some tough, honest questions (from tough, honest interviewers), then don't give them a forum at all.

"The President decided that the threats from the Saddam Hussein regime were so great that if we had left him in power, we would be fighting him down the road, at a time and place of his choosing."
The Administration knew that the intense bombing campaign of 1991 had destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, and that draconian sanctions in the 12 years since had rendered Iraq (in the words of American general) a “pre-industrial” state. After years of internationally based inspections turned up no evidence of programs in nuclear or chemical/biological weapons, Bush could be pretty sure there was no danger of mushroom clouds pluming over this country’s cities, or citizens dropping in death swoons from deliberate anthrax infection from Baghdad.
The Bush Administration, and his civilian Pentagon flunkies like Feith, invented an alternate reality to station an occupation/pacification force in the middle of the Middle East – under the pretext of national security. This would forever guarantee our domination of oil resources under Arabian sands, and underwrite the regional hegemony of our brave little ally, Israel.
No one but the most blinkered dolt could believe the Administration was unaware the results would be years of insurrection and bloodshed. But, after all, the war would put Iraqi lives on the altar, and American sacrifices would not intrude on the threshold of this new, ruling elite. Their sons and daughters would not pay the ultimate price in this hideous obscenity. They had to have known that once the fragile terrazzo planter of Iraq was broken, it would perforce be ours forever – lock, stock and Crate and Barrel. Once in, we’re trapped; there is no easy out. That was no unforeseen circumstance. That was part of the plan.
Why does CBS news allow this traitorous son of a bitch one more 20 minutes in the sun?

The Administration knew that the intense bombing campaign of 1991 had destroyed

This is how Douglas Feith defended the decision to go to war:

"The President decided that the threats from the Saddam Hussein regime were so great that if we had left him in power, we would be fighting him down the road, at a time and place of his choosing."