So, just how much are the American people supposed to take? Here we've got a president who lied us into making war on Iraq and who, despite a new National Intelligence Estimate(NIE), is stubbornly trying to lie us into another war against Iran.

President Bush today is telling Iran to "come clean" when he's nose deep in what comes out of the hind end of a Texas Longhorn.

Our commander-in-chief is so fanatical for war against Iran that, as investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote earlier this year in The New Yorker, there's a special planning group under the Joint Chiefs of Staff organized to plot one. Hersh quotes a former intelligence official stating the group is "charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented upon orders from the President, within 24 hours."

So it's clear why Bush pushed Congress last September for his warmongering Iran resolution that Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.), former Secretary of the Navy, labeled "a de facto authorization for use of military force against Iran." Bush is rarin' to attack! The wonder is why the Senate would give this liar anything but the boot?

Despite the new NIE estimate, Bush continues to insist Iran is the warmonger. This only further strengthens the case for impeachment against him and for criminal prosecution of those responsible for Iraq war, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleezza ("Mushroom Cloud") Rice.

As John Prados points out in his book "Hoodwinked" (The New Press), Vice President Richard Cheney also "played a key role in getting Iraq to the top of the Bush agenda and keeping it there...and falsely implicated Iraq in Al Qaeda terrorism," and much, much more. Maybe we need a refresher course in Bush's lies.

As Prados recalled: "An alleged chemical storage area at one facility turned out to be an Olympic-size swimming pool, a production plant had actually been a distillery making whiskey, another chemical storage site was a plant making car license plates, a cache of documents on chemical weapons a graduate student's master's thesis."

The WMD lie was so preposterous, the "Weekly World News" joked in its August 19, 2003, issue that Saddam had smuggled 3,600 killer dinosaur eggs into the U.S. that would hatch to turn America into a new "Jurassic Park."

To date, Bush's war has cost the American people 4,000 lives and 30,000 wounded and a trillion dollars of wasted tax dollars. And it has cost the people of Iraq a million killed, perhaps another million wounded, untold billions in destroyed property and commerce, four million driven from their homes, and two million forced to quit the country!

The UN calls this exodus a "humanitarian crisis" but believe me, those are just words unless it is your family, your children, and your loved ones driven into the streets! Unless it is you that gets the call to come down to the morgue to identify a body thought to be your kid. And what for? What did the people of Iraq ever do to us?

Still worse, commander-in-chief Bush has allowed the Pentagon to fire irradiated ammunition (banned by the Geneva Convention) all over Iraq as though it is some kind of paintball playland, radiation that is likely causing cancers, radiation that will poison that unfortunate country perhaps for thousands of years to come--- a crime against humanity.

Are we, the people, so blind, have we so lost our moral perspective, that we will believe a president when he tells us that Iran, a country with an annual military budget of 5 billion bucks, poses a threat to USofA with our total military spending of $800 billion? That Iran, which doesn't have the beginning of a nuclear bomb, poses a threat to this country with our arsenal of 10,000 tethered nukes at the fingertips of (shudder) you-know-who? That Iran is raring to take on our missile-armed frigates and aircraft carriers, ships at this very moment plowing the waters of the Persian Gulf off the Iranian coast with enough atomic punch to destroy the planet?

Well, millions of us believed Bush when he and his top aides told us Iraq had "horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." Shakespeare's Puck must have foreseen Americans were coming when he cried, "What fools these mortals be."

Just before this nation was born, one observer said the British Crown dispatched its Redcoats to invade the colonies because "their crime was property."

Today, it may be seen the "crime" of Iran, like Iraq, is oil and our very own King George has his eye on it. The former Texas oil man in the Oval Office and his former oil man vice president have led us into a war for oil, creating a destabilization in the market that has doubled the price of oil to $3.20 a gallon since they took office and showered oil companies ExxonMobil and the others with fabulous profits. That's the bottom line.

Americans are paying for this war with their taxes and they're paying for it at the pumps and in their home heating bills and in higher prices for food at the supermarkets.

So, I repeat, just how much are the American people supposed to take? At least, out of pity for the agony of the people of Iraq, the public must urge Congress impeach and prosecute President Bush. Bluntly, we've got to stop him before he kills more.

_______



About author Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who has worked for major American newspapers and magazines as well as international wire services. To comment on this article or arrange for speaking engagements: Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who has worked for major American newspapers and magazines as well as international wire services. To comment on this article or arrange for speaking engagements: sherwoodr1@yahoo.com