"Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang." --Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

[Iran will react to a bombing attack by the Bush-Cheney administration] �by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for 20 years.� -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Jimmy Carter

"Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, [Ariel] Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel's security problems." --Robert (Bob) Novak, veteran American reporter

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." --Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chairman 1987-2006

"There are people in Washington . . . who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they�re looking for 10, 20, 50 years into the future . . . the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq." -- Jimmy Carter, former American President (February 3, 2006)

How do you get out of a hole?

First of all, you stop digging. This is the simple lesson that the Bush-Cheney White House has so much trouble understanding. For Bush and his neocon crowd, they are militarily occupying Iraq and they intend to remain there, no matter what. It doesn't matter that this immoral and illegal occupation has caused the death of more than one million Iraqis and killed more than 3,000 American soldiers. And now, they want to escalate the Iraq war into a wider Middle East conflict involving Iran, thus making sure the United States will be involved militarily in that region of the globe for the next 20 years.

In 2002, immoral neocon officials in the Defense Department considered Iraq to be a "low-hanging fruit," ripe for picking for its huge oil reserves, for the opportunity to displace French and Chinese oil companies, for increasing Israel's security, for moving American military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq and for pleasing politically the end-times religious right in the U.S. -- thus killing five birds with one stone. According to former CIA Director George Tenet -- and this has been confirmed by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and many other insiders -- the very idea of taking control militarily of Iraq was improvised and was unjustified because "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."

Nevertheless, the Bush-Cheney-Libby-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle team, and their allies at the American Enterprise Institute and at the neocon Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), thought it was a win-win situation. They had decided they wanted a war under the clouds of 9/11, and nothing -- truth, morality, reason or facts -- could deter them from it. They were ready to lie a thousand times to achieve their goal. And they got it. But now the apprentice sorcerers do not know how to stop the infernal machine of destruction they have set in motion. They only know how to push forward and make a larger mess of it.

That type of improvisation and political wickedness is all too well confirmed by newly released transcripts of talks George W. Bush had with then-Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, in February 22, 2003, a few weeks before the onset of the March 20, 2003, Iraq war. In these transcripts, it is shown that Bush had a criminal intent to launch a war of aggression against Iraq, no matter what, and that he turned down every Iraqi offer that would have avoided a murderous war that has killed more than one million people so far. This includes Saddam Hussein's offer to go into exile, and for Iraq to hold free and internationally-supervised elections as well as allowing armed foreign troops to conduct unfettered inspections for weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush-Cheney regime of neocons wanted war, and nothing could stop them. They wanted, above all, to put their hands on Iraq's oil wealth. This is a prime example of historical grand theft, political wickedness and moral bankruptcy. Thus, this war has nothing to do with the morality of the "Just War" theory. In fact, it violates all the canons of a just and unavoidable war.

Confronted with the abysmal cowardliness, moral corruption and incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration, Americans, on the whole, are more intelligent and more moral than their current leaders, and a large majority of them (63 percent) think it's time for the United States to stop occupying illegally the country of Iraq and to stop murdering its citizens. Moreover, a good majority of them (54 percent) reject the blanket Bush-Cheney policy of aggression abroad, under the pretext of "preventive war".

Similarly, the U.S. Congress, the only government branch empowered by the U.S. Constitution to declare war, is officially on record as being against maintaining American troops in Iraq. First, the House of Representatives, on July 12, passed a bill, by a vote of 223 to 201, to withdraw American combat troops from Iraq by next April 1st. Second, in a July 18 vote, a majority of U.S. Senators voted 52 to 47 to bring home most American combat troupes from Iraq by May 1, 2008. So, both the American people and the American Congress want this war to end, and soon.

But the truth is that Bush II does not give a hoot about American democratic opinion, as he openly demonstrated recently. And, he does not much care for the U.S. Congress either, or the courts for that matter. In fact, Bush has a deeply ingrained tendency to disregard the truth, the law and the U.S. Constitution.

In Iraq, the Bush-Cheney regime is still building "enduring" military bases in order to occupy Iraq militarily for decades to come. They even talk openly about the half-century American military presence in South Korea, as if this were a useful analogy.

At the end of the day, as Bush has said: "I do not need to explain". As the British magazine The Economist has warned, the world should beware of a president "who has little left to lose," the more so if he has hardly any moral principle and is indifferent to the opinions of the majority of Americans.

It is doubtful that a George W. Bush in denial and his delusional neocon advisors for permanent war will ever listen to reason and morality. To the contrary, the lame-duck president is still firing anybody who does not agree with him, while listening to chief neocon Dick Cheney. The American people see that, and that is why nearly half of them want President George W. Bush to face impeachment, while about 54 percent of American adults now want the US House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney, because he is seen as the chief spreader of lies to launch the illegal Iraq war. As of now, there are 21 members of Congress who support the articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney contained in bill H Res 333.

If and when American troops leave Iraq, there will be fewer deaths because there will be fewer killers, both official soldiers and mercenaries.

The latest victim of Bush's pigheaded approach to foreign policy is General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Having started a war of aggression on his own, against the advice of most thinking people within the military, political, legal and intelligence communities, and having placed himself squarely against international law, George W. Bush is reduced to shifting the blame for his failures to others. Bush is afraid of having honest people around him, especially a man of the caliber of General Pace, who is a moral man. General Pace, in the spirit of the Nuremberg Charter, has publicly said, �It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral� (Feb. 17, 2006). And since General Pace thinks it is immoral to be the first to use nuclear weapons, one wonders if Bush has fired General Pace because he intends to use nuclear weapons in the coming months.

The U.S. Congress should wake up before it is too late. When armaments are in the hands of immoral people, the danger is high that a nuclear war could be launched. Indeed, people in power who have no morality and no judgment can be expected to do anything, including killing millions of people, to save face.

In the book "The New American Empire," I asked this fundamental question: Why is the Bush-Cheney administration so bent on using lies and distortions in order to justify a war whose end result would be predictably to eliminate from power the Iraqi Sunnis in favor of Shi'ites allied with Shi'ite Iran, thus automatically making Iran the dominant power in that unstable region? One has to remember that Sunnis make up 85 percent of all Muslims around the world and are dominant in the Arab world.

Now that they have realized their error in creating a Shia-dominated Iraq, the neocons behind the Bush-Cheney team want them to up the ante and to attack Iran, thus turning the Middle East into an even larger murder scene than it is now.

The American people have never received an answer to that simple question. That is why they are so dissatisfied with George W. Bush, but also with the Republicans and the pro-war neocon Democrats in Congress. This indicates that there is a huge void of leadership in the United States today. On this score, the most moral Democratic 2008 candidate for president is, by far, former Senator Mike Gravel from Alaska. The very fact that the corporate media boycott him should be a good indication that this man stands on the side of the people.

According to polls, Americans are very dissatisfied with both major political parties because of their inability or their unwillingness to reflect the wishes of the people and to stop the immoral and illegal occupation of Iraq. In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track, but nothing is being done about it. In fact, average Americans are losing hope that they will ever be heard by the Washington, D.C., political nomenklatura that runs the government while paying scant attention to the people.