Afghanistan and Iraq are going so well, we might as well start another.

But how will our dear leaders in the White House pick a fight with Iran without Congressional approval?

It's easy - they just pretend Congress has already given approval!

Today, the White House has solved that pesky problem in one fell swoop. By explicitly linking the Iranian elite guard into the post 9/11 "global war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's lawyers would certainly now argue that any military strike on Iran is now covered by the October 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq, as part of their overly sweeping response to the 2001 attacks.

If you wonder why I gave up on linking to Reality Based News back in March, it's because this crap gets worse and worse every day.

Their machinations are so transparently obvious that even the dumbest soul-rocker in Delmar can figure it out, and yet these clowns in the media and in the halls of Congress continue to let them get away with it. No one confronts, and when they come close to confronting, they never ask the right questions. To say it's frustrating is the understatement of the century.

(A good example of not confronting even when confronting: the stunning revelation that the White House will be writing General Petraeus' September progress report was in the - wait for it - 26th paragraph of that Los Angeles Times article. Talk about burying the lede. Jesus.)

Here's the one question I want answered:

Why do they want this so bad?

It's obviously not the so-called War on Terror - because if they were really fighting a War on Terror, they would have done things much differently. Like, um, going after al Qaeda instead of going after someone that they pretended was directly affiliated with al Qaeda while leaving the real al Qaeda to flourish in places where they were and to take root in the very places they weren't.

The way they've waged these wars is al Qaeda's dream. It's terrorism fertilizer. Either they're just that dumb or it's definitely not about the War on Terror.

Or both.

So what is it? Oil? Money? Halliburton? The Carlyle Group? Is it that simple? And if that's really what it's all about, if it's big money and big business pulling the strings, then just how bad does it have to get before you tell the people with the vested interest in these wars (paraphrasing the Vice President) to go screw themselves?

Why would they want another disaster this badly?

It's the same question I asked myself when they went into Iraq - a time when, despite the photo-ops of Kabul and Karzai, the Afghanistan conflict was far from resolved, even crumbling.

Why would they want another disaster this badly?

At the time, I told myself: They must know something I don't know.

Sure, Colin Powell convinced a lot of people that Iraq had WMDs, but the trifling mobile labs in his presentation to the U.N. were what finally convinced me that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Even the dumbest soul rocker in Delmar could see that if a Winnebago of Mass Destruction was the scariest thing he had to offer, there wasn't much to be scared of.

But still: They must know something I don't know.

After all, as Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney had been the most vocal defender of the decision not to march into Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Getting rid of Saddam would be the easy part. But how could it not dissolve into civil war in the aftermath? How many soldiers to die, how many civilians to die, how many years of U.S. occupation would it take before we could leave?

"Quagmire," he said.

Quagmire.

Why would they want another disaster this badly?

They must know something I don't know.

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