"THAT'S HOW LONG YOU'VE GOT TO LIVE...AND IT ISN'T LONG, MY PRETTIES"

"The degree to which this President continues to take steps to go to war against Iran without consulting with the full Congress is the degree to which he is increasingly putting himself in jeopardy of an impeachment proceeding."

"The President is mischaracterizing U.S. action vis à vis Iran. In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in offensive and provocative acts against Iran."

"The President's strategy, by portraying our involvement as only being on the defensive, is laying out the groundwork for him to attack Iran and bypass authorization by Congress." --Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Rawstory

I saw a movie yesterday, "Pan's Labyrinth", set in General Franco's Spain (circa 1944) which was suffused with the dark energy of civil brutality, the outcome of a fascist ascendancy, filled with torture and extra-judicial murder that had become casual. The world is still under the thumb of people who bow to authority without questioning its orders or motives.

Our President who spoke so brazenly in pursuit of his lawless wiretapping a year ago is exactly the same man he was then, although now he dons another mask for his latest State of the Union speech, and his temporary lack of swagger becomes a useful tactic, as he methodically rolls out the war machine and sets his sights on Iran. The aggression is unthinkable. It is incalculable. It proceeds with malice aforethought. It is all cold-blooded murder, all meticulous and monstrous treason; and it would be the legacy Mr. Bush seems to covet, a set piece among the greatest crimes of history.

President Bush has expanded the Occupation of Iraq and his war in ways which are not immediately apparent. The writer, Jeremy Scahill, explained in a Democracy Now interview that Bush has widened the war with Blackwater fighters and other mercenary soldiers in Iraq. The deaths of these hired soldiers are not in the more accessible public records.

"...we should be counting the deaths of Blackwater soldiers in the total troop count."..."one of the ways we have found to discover the deaths of the number of contractors that have been killed is actually through the Department of Labor, because the government has a federal insurance scheme that's been set up"..."and it's insurance provided to contractors who service the US military abroad. And so, as of late last year, more than 600 families of contractors in Iraq had filed for those benefits."

"--and these are just US contractors that have rights to federal benefits inside of the United States. Remember it's not just Americans that make up the majority of these [100,000 contractors] that are operating in Iraq right now, 48,000 of whom are mercenaries, according to the GAO. So I don't think it's possible to put a fine point on the number of troops killed, because the Bush administration has found a backdoor way to engage in an undeclared expansion of the occupation by deploying these private armies."

State terror and violence are being placed in tandem with mercenary terror and violence. An ever-widening sphere of destruction and carnage is being allowed. The provocations against Iran have already been initiated. The war against Iran is already in motion. Like the Schlieffen Plan that took years of German preparation before World War I, this present war was well prepared in advance. And what we see is an agenda, a momentum toward a set of objectives.

Seymour Hersh and other investigative reporters have warned us of the relentless war aims of this administration. We can expect a ramped up series of skirmishes accompanied by bellicose statements from Bush's White House, increasing in frequency as the date set for the attack on Iran approaches. So many of us wonder whether the showdown with Congress that seems inevitable, will fall apart as a capitulation to Bush/Cheney's sadistic progress of brutality and ambition--or if on the other hand--courage might prevail in Congress. Bush will try to present his expanded war as part of his idealism, and as an inevitability; but Pelosi and the Democrats (and some Republicans) are not so stupid or naive as to fall for it, or allow it to stand.

Congress must come to see that "unitary executive" powers and Bush's War represent a concerted assault on America's democratic institutions, harming our law and reason and decency, in ways that a foreign enemy could not.