Once more to the battlements we are marched. Once more our passions are inflamed by rumor, innuendo and lies.

Sunni insurgents supported by Saudi oil money are responsible for some 90% of US casualties, but our president, the ethical infant, points to Iran.

And once more the Main Stream Media idly mumbles the infant’s mantra, as he sets the dogs of war nipping at our heels.

Prediction: This nation will go to war with Iran, and it will do so with the full consent of Congress.

Oh, we will not preemptively attack. No. Instead, we will respond to an Iranian provocation which is all but inevitable. Why? Because the infant is making it so.

Look at the by now familiar pattern.

First, the administration has begun to "catapult the propaganda" making the case that Iran is an "evildoer" equipping our enemies with armor-piercing weapons.

The MSM has scarcely mentioned that the anti-tank shells offered as "proof" of Iran’s intent have English lettering on them, or that the shaped charges the anonymous administration briefers put on display are an old technology that’s been around since the turn of last century, easily made by hand and used in World War II and by the IRA.

Second, Bush has parked two aircraft carrier groups within striking distance of Iran, even as he seeks once more to whip up a jingoistic frenzy here at home. A carrier group is a formidable force. Even one has enough fire power to turn Iran into a pile of rubble. Two could turn it into molten glass.

And according to some sources, a third may be on the way.

It gets worse. Last month, the US attacked an Iranian consulate in the Iraqi town of Irbil and seized five Iranian diplomats as well as computers and other property. What makes the US claims of espionage questionable is the fact that Irbil is in Kurdish controlled territory, and the consulate was set up with the full knowledge of the Kurdish government. Kurdish territory would be an odd place for Iran to locate a spy network, as it is relatively peaceful, the Kurds have been tolerant of Shiites, supportive of the US, and Irbil is far from the centers of US activity.

So this is the situation. Bush is escalating his saber-rattling; a nuclear force capable of annihilating Iran three times over is hovering within striking distance of Tehran; Iran is flanked by tens of thousands of US troops to the North in Afghanistan and nearly 150,000 US troops to the south and west in Iraq; and the US is committing provocative acts against Iranian citizens and property.

Imagine the US with foreign troops on our Canadian and Mexican borders, a massive naval presence on our coasts, and the seizure of a US consulate in Mexico, and you get a picture of just how trigger happy Iran’s President Ahmadinejad must be.

It’s only a matter of time before an extremely nervous and politically vulnerable Ahmadinejad pulls his twitching trigger finger – whether by mistake, or out of fear, or out of political calculation in order to shore up his flagging support at home. Which is exactly the response Bush is working to provoke. And once he does, Bush will let lose the apocalypse, in the name of "protecting our men and women in harm’s way."

Far fetched? Not really.

Bush considered just such a ploy in order to launch his Iraq war. In his book, Lawless World, author Phillipe Sands outlines a conversation between Blair and Bush in which Bush proposes painting UN markings on a US U-2 spy plane and flying it over Iraq in hopes that Hussein would attempt to shoot it down, and provide him with his excuse to launch his war. The conversation took place just five days before Powell’s now infamous UN speech, and Bush suggested it when several people present in the meeting were concerned that there was not enough real evidence to convince the Security Council that Hussein was hiding WMDs. Had Powell’s speech not been as effective as it was, can anyone now doubt that some young U-2 pilot would have been sent to face death to give Bush his war?

Take no comfort in the administration’s claims that it is not seeking war with Iran. Remember Bush’s fatuous denials about war in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, even as troops, materials and weapons pored into Kuwait? Remember the press’s silence? And Congress’s.

And when Iran’s president Ahmadinejad does slip up and provide Bush with his casus belli for this latest war will anyone have the courage to oppose the ethical infant this time?

Will anyone point out that this whole sad sequence was set in place by Bush, in yet another of his marches of folly?

Certainly not the MSM who are more interested in maintaining "balance" than uncovering and reporting truth.

Certainly not the Congress – many of whom can’t choke out an admission that they were wrong on Iraq to this day, even after all that’s happened.

Certainly not the people, who seem all too ready to be herded, sheep-like, into an Orwellian world of perpetual war against ill-defined enemies shrouded in the veils of our own fear and ignorance.

Who, then, will risk the wrath of an inflamed public whipped into a frothing frenzy by this hate-mongering ethical infant as he calls for Iranian scalps? Who will plead for sanity? Who will halt this second descent into utter madness?

No one.

Just as with Iraq, the silence of otherwise good men and women will become the greater evil, and the cradle of civilization will become civilization’s sepulcher, and its rivers and sands will run redder yet with the blood of the young and the innocent, the old and the infirm.

And when the inevitable result happens – when US troops are no longer merely caught in a crossfire between two warring factions, but instead become the primary target of both – how many Mea Culpas will we have to endure?

And will those Mea Culpas bring back the dead?

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