The end of the Cold War saw the beginnings of the foolish Project for a New American Century (PNAC). If you've ever read their garbage, you know they have delusions of scholarship about international geopolitics. Their analyses are grandiose, the product of school-boy-juvenile, polymorphous-perverse thinking, and not academic, reality-based observations. They are independent from oil interests, which nevertheless glom onto them for their own convergent reasons and consistent with the phenomenon of Groupthink.

I once inquired, over the air, as to what lines of communication were opened after the end of the Iran-Iraq war with those two countries, and a writer being interviewed at the time answered that there had been none. This perplexed me, not only because of concerns about Iran and their craziness (post-1953), but because of Iraq's proxy role as the U.S. Contra* in the middle east and in general as a secular bulwark against Iran and countries awfully similar to it in their dearth of secularism and women's rights. Iraq, along with its willingness to do business, should have been out of the running as a target.

Nevertheless, in 1989 a small article appeared in a prominent newsmagazine that focused on an interview with an unnamed Pentagon official. He was asked about what the new mission of the military would be in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the loss of the Soviet Union as an overarching enemy. He answered in a way one might expect a researcher to answer. They had been looking at some countries and their level of weaponry and Iraq looked like a good replacement enemy. No mention of where its weapons had come from.

In other words, they had crunched their numbers and shuffled their papers and come to a conclusion worthy of an MBA and were now getting ready to "sell" the new enemy as their new replacement mission. That was the depth of their understanding. I showed the article to my WWII vet friend who had lived all over the world during his business career. The crux of the discussion was this: they are looking to just replace one enemy with a new one, a complete misinterpretation of why the world needed a breakthrough in the Cold War. They were painting a circle around Iraq. Some incident would occur that would enable the White House to pursue a hot war against Iraq.

This meant that the end of the Cold War would be followed NOT by the ability of the U.S. to pursue its principles in the context of a civilian set of real politicks, but instead to break free from those principles ALL TOGETHER - to break out of the American straightjacket called the Constitution ALL TOGETHER. Iraq was "chosen" because to them it looked like it would make a good public enemy. From there they pursued fantasies of childhood dreams... fantasies you and I safely played out as boys and girls with the board game "Risk." Not them. THEY were going to become actual emperors of the Middle East and thus the world.

We can analyze them best as criminals: People with no talent for influencing the sustenance and maintenance of productive relationships in the normal, nonviolent ways. In the jealous minds of these chickenhawks, the Cold War was really a first-degree HOT war, and now they were free to have their Unilateral Hot War to claim the spoils of their ice cream war.** These are the dregs of any civilization.

Iraq and the United States were now targeted for destruction.

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* In 1979, two events augured future plans: the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. Proxies were mounted to address both.

** This is the reality of our situation in 2008. The last time the nation replaced the "bad cop" with the "good cop" (1992), we spent eight years watching a president peeled layer by layer until the bad cops managed to return to the scene of their crimes and plunder the treasury AGAIN. All of this was easily predictable politically or even just by our mothers' teaching, "if you don't hold people accountable for their crimes....."

Cleaning up others' messes and moving on without accountability has worked out well, hasn't it? We went from billions lost in false S&L profits and over 100,000 killed in a manipulated war... to trillions plundered in "myriad" ways, nearly a million dead, and four million refugees.

Back then the buried story was illegal slant-drilling into Iraq ("drinking the milkshake"), even though that crime will get you shot in Texas. We went from a VP turned president who ignored all the warnings about S&L fraud (even from prominent Republicans) to "All right, you've covered your ass, now" as the presidential response to the latest warning of a pending terrorist attack. Loyalty and due diligence are simply not recognized as duties by this board of directors.

Mother, help us. Father, help us.

Editor's note: The Vichy regime in France willfully collaborated with Nazi Germany.