There are, in the woods, rumors of war growing ever louder.

Or - more accurately - rumors of more war.

- Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that sending a second U.S. aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf could serve as a "reminder" to Iran, but it's not – strangely - an escalation of force. Evidently, the Iranians must be reminded constantly of how very peeved we are. Of course, for the defense budget, these are very expensive Post-Its.

- Israeli cabinet minister Shaul Mofaz could have the technology to enrich bomb-grade uranium “ within a year.” Yawn. Well… yeah, sure. To hell with the NIE and its shabby doubts about Iranian nuke technology. Wherever there’s a wisp of smoke in the Middle East, we can always count on Israel to squirt some lighter fluid in that direction.

- The Pentagon, with characteristic counter-intuition, is again accusing Iran of supporting with weapons and know-how… the Taliban. Hmm. Bush’s brass seem to be stumble-bumming in that old Shiite/Sunni gopher hole, again. There’s a difference, guys: They HATE each other. Aw… forget it…

- Finally, capping the Administration’s whirlwind campaign to stir up Iran War fever, the State Department has put that country on the top of its “state sponsors of terrorism” list. I guess our support in Iran’s backyard of the bizarre, bloodthirsty (and very Marxist) Mujahadeen-e-Khalq isn’t “state-sponsored terrorism”; it’s just kind of a… pen-pal relationship with a misunderstood bunch o’ rollicking rakes.

Oh, boy - will anything deliver us from this hoodlum chief? A lot can happen between here and mid-January, when the son of a bitch and his pack of jackals leave town. He seems hell-bent on expanding the Mideast carnage before finally quitting the White House, and there’s nothing between him and more bloodshed except our silly, avarice-challenged Congress.

So, we can rely on body counts spiking, the shattered and crazed coming home in higher and higher numbers. The Veterans Administration will have its hands full, and that’s pretty cold comfort: Up to now, the VA has seemed content to care for our wounded veterans’ many needs with all the tender ministry Wal-Mart employs reshuffling its discount CD bins.

The overall disposable commodity in our imperial project are our soldiers themselves, the ones this country sends to face the fire – the actual, hot-metal “blow-back” from grandiose geopolitical ambition. Over the past few years, the VA has been rocked by one scandal after another, including its inability to secure veterans’ personal records, revelations that historic Walter Reed hospital had gone to seed, cover-ups of illnesses caused by depleted uranium ammunition, and outright deceptive reporting of appointment wait times and patient care. Also, the beleaguered office evidently has a troublesome habit of skewing clinical data to indicated more favorable results. One of the most reprehensible charges is that the VA overstated the availability of post-traumatic stress disorder treatment, one of the most debilitating plagues of the Iraq/Afghan War.

The only conclusion to this degradation of veterans’ care is that the VA was mandated – from higher-ups – to meet their mission objectives on the cheap. What are the standards of any military that so devalues the care of those broken and hobbled by their service to this country? And what can be the brief for an Administration that squanders so many billions of dollars among its greasy “friends” at home and abroad, yet yanks tight the purse strings on medical care for servicemen?

The price of such gob-spit under-appreciation is already becoming manifest: Figures uncovered from yet another VA scandal indicate attempted suicides among Gulf War veterans tally an astounding 12,000 a year. In countenancing this, at least the VA is consistent in its shifty approach: E-mails that surfaced late last month from the VA mental health director suggested covering up the numbers, and earlier reports put the 2007 attempted suicide total at 790, a whopping undercount.

A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times a recent Rand Corp. study – “the latest and most comprehensive study of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars” - has concluded that nearly 1 in every 5 veterans is suffering from depression or stress disorders and that many are not getting adequate care. That means an estimated 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are battling depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

More than half of these veterans, according to the Rand study are “slipping through the cracks in the bureaucratic system, going without necessary treatment… mental disorders are more prevalent and lasting than previously known, surfacing belatedly and lingering after troops have been discharged.”

And there is evidence that some of our wounded warriors are bringing the battlefield home. A CommonDreams.org study, admittedly compiled from news reports, indicates that returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan are responsible for 120 murders. This report from earlier this year, at http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/14/6364/, and other sources examining the phenomenon indicate the Gulf War vets’ unique torments may track back to the Pentagon’s “stop-loss” system that maroons troops on the front line for much longer than American soldiers in past wars.

And that could lay another trip-mine for the returning vets: An anti-war backlash that would blame and ostracize the soldiers themselves for the wars’ horrors. Thirty years ago, Vietnam veterans came back from the war to discover that, for many in this country, they had become animate synonyms for “psycho” and “baby killer.” Profound class differences between those who were detoured to war, and those privileged to stay behind, provided a rare glimpse of the vast distance between rungs of the American economic ladder; everything from guilt to ethnic detachment fed inclinations to turn Vietnam vets into emotional punching bags, scapegoats for deep national disgrace.

Already in the blogosphere, Timothy McVeigh’s name has been mentioned as a catchword for all the contemplated dangers of postwar fallout, as if this mass-killing veteran of the first Gulf War is a template for all the returning solders. Maybe we can take some comfort in the fact there simply aren’t enough federal buildings for ALL the veterans to bomb. Remember, that total who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan is 1.7 million men and women; with a number like that, 120 capital crimes, while tragic, add up to a lopsidedly unbalanced equation to connote any real and present danger.

But, oh, yes, by all means let’s demonize the GIs actually fighting the war. Meanwhile, the real villains are far away, brunching on rare fowl and swapping tales about battles which for them are abstractions, board games. Bleeding? Dying? That’s for the voiceless, reality-based peasants. In their remote, rarified world, polite war draftsmen remain, expensive tailoring and all, cheerfully unsullied and chronically unsated.

How many Iraq War veterans will turn into Timothy McVeigh? If we’re lucky, none. How many dog-catchers will become serial killers? How many day traders will shoot up their own offices before, thankfully, blowing their own heads off? War and modern life don’t inoculate killers with their demented bloodlust, they incubate what’s already there. Yeah… McVeigh came back “changed.” Before, he was always such a quiet boy…

Let’s step back and NOT blame this horror on those least likely to defend themselves. And hanging our bottom-rung warriors with suspicions of blood-drenched tomorrows does just that.
That’s just too crummy a thing to do – even for well-educated, post-modern Americans.

This country seems to require perennially a few good men and women to be all they can be – and throw their lives away.

…For nothing.

Now that both the Senate and the IAEA have rip-sawed its delayed release of Syrian "nuclear reactor" evidence, the White House is pushing the flimsy excuse that it postponed declassification because it feared the information would heighten tensions between that country and Israel.

Huh?

Heighten tensions? The two countries aren't exactly kissy-cozy: Israel, after all, bombed a site on Syrian soil; now, we realize that territorial integrity has a more fluid definition in the Mideast than... well, anywhere not in Israel's immediate environs. But, REALLY! How much more hostile can they get - short of busting off a cruise missile under the hams of Bashar al-Assad?

And the United States itself has slung Syria against the wall quite a bit lately, even accusing it of masterminding the assassinations of Lebanese officials Rafiq Hariri and Pierre Gemayel. There's no love lost among any of the principals, and if dumping high-explosives on a Syrian military site (regardless of nuclear ingredient) wasn't an agressive act worthy of war, grainy phonecam shots and sucker spiels certainly aren't.

It's notable that everything went slack on this story over the weekend. The cable news networks, so noted for lap-dogging every tawdry half-truth and fabrication spat out by the Administration, let the story fade from jackhammer headline status to mere asides wrapping hourly updates to... almost no mention, at all. The unsettling similarity between the Syrian "evidence" and the phony Iraq casebook - satellite photos, hysterical White House claims - must have attracted some alarmed attention. Amid the ritual bedlam late last week, the only missing elements were Colin Powell and a Pottery Barn presentation to the UN; maybe all that pimping finally drew some sharp email/phone traffic to our news giants.

We can always hope...

But there's little reason to assume the Syrian case has gone cold. Not yet. The real concern behind the timing of the "reactor" evidence release is that it coincides with the ascension of Gen. Petraeus to full theater commander and the increasing number of Tonkin Gulf-style "incidents" off the Iranian coast that portend a critical expansion of the White House/neoconservative Mideast Project: all-out war with Iran and/or Syria. These two states are the last legitimate challenges to American/Israeli hegemony in the region, and as so have been on the chopping block from some time.

Also, the contemptuous shabbiness of the most recent "explanations"  appear to bear the arrogant stamp of the Vice President's office. Cheney evidently believes that he can toss out any sop and it will be lapped up by the peasants. Much of the naked aggression branding current American policy traces back to Cheney's office, and if warfare spreads he'll probably be the one in a fire helmet, holding a gasoline can.

Since America didn't clammer with demands to bring the heathen Syrians to their knees, insider mouthpieces are in changeup mode, proposing the Syrian File release was designed to engineer negotiating leverage with... North Korea! Accumulating points in the ongoing, six-nation talks with the Remote Realm is wise, but trying to pin both that country and Syria to the wall with the same shaft is a little too neat. And tricky.

That's another Cheney hallmark. Nothing clever or crafy, you understand - doesn't have to be. He has the power of the zombie press in his hip pocket, and the fifth estate can, in its current emasculated state, be counted on to regurgitate Administration press releases word for word.

But tricky... very tricky.