Speaking of criminality

So the Democratic Congress -- those Lions of Legislature, those Kings of Quorum -- explicitly rejected, twice, legally-binding measures designed to constrain the White House's ability to start a war with Iran. The other foot has now been dropped, as the State Department now moves to designate a part of the Iranian military "an international terrorist organization." As Will Bunch points out, this now puts the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the same category as Al Qaeda or the Taliban and, hey presto!, gives the White House sufficient authority, absent Congressional action, to launch a war on Iran. Whee.

I would be looking for personnel changes in the Department of Defense for the next few months or so if I were you. We've been told before that the Army and Marines are vehemently opposed to any action against Iran, so if we see a resignation or two I wouldn't be surprised. Bush reportedly believes only he can save the US -- or Iran, it's not clear his delusions can be separated -- from the threat of, um, Iran. In this he's got a close ally in Cheney, who clearly never saw a Muslim nation that coudln't use a few more kilotons of high explosive.

We also know that the US government had, in secret, begun bombing the Iraqi military 6 months before the war "began" in March of 2003 -- US Air Force and Royal Air Force planes had been bombing Iraq regularly since 1991, but more than doubled the rate of bombings beginning in September of 2002, before Congress had voted to give him any such authority.

There's a real chance, therefore, that the war with Iran has already begun in some form. Secret bombings, secret ops, something like OPLAN 34A from Vietnam. We'll be told "they shot first", but it will in all likelihood be a lie. And then the US will be at war with more than 100 million Muslims, on a battlefield stretching from the western border of Iraq to the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Does that sound like a good time to anybody else?