The United States is going to attack another sovereign nation without provocation and for reasons of empire so shameful and indefensible they can’t be shared with the American people.

Everything you will see, read, and hear by way of U.S. mass media about the new war against Iran will be a lie.

There was a time, one must explain to the young in my country, when the U.S. did not attack other nations just because we felt like it. Maybe we were restrained by the existence of the Soviet Union as a counterbalance. Maybe we were restrained by our own checkered history or some adherence to principle, or because that sort of thing was a violation of international law and we claimed to believe in international law.

Those times are gone. My country now attacks and/or invades any country it wants to, on any flimsy pretext it chooses to invent, and most Americans are so brainwashed, lazy, or merely bonehead-stupid that the government keeps getting away with it.

The reason advanced for invading Iraq, the mythical weapons of mass destruction we knew weren’t there, was nonetheless trumpeted by the television networks as gospel and echoed in the columns of newspapers such as The New York Times.

The reason for Afghanistan, which most Americans still believe, was supposedly about Al Qaeda and the World Trade Center attacks, but Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is barely present in Afghanistan; it’s the Taliban, formerly a U.S. ally, which threatens the government of the drug pushers America backs.

America the liberator is so hated that when the last U.S. troops were withdrawn over the Iraq border to Kuwait the Iraqis celebrated wildly in the streets.

America the protector is so distrusted that the Afghan government now demands that we turn over control of the infamous Bagram Air base, where CIA and other U.S. personnel have tortured thousands.

The reasons for bombing Libya were flagrantly false –– as much of the world knew –– but the American media bought them and, therefore, so did the American public.

Now we are getting ready to blow up Iran and its people, despite the fact that it is far closer to democracy than is Saudi Arabia, our dear reactionary friend and ally, and offers no real threat to anyone, despite the lies of the U.S. government, its Secretary of State, and the crazier elements of the Israeli government which, no doubt, has helped precipitate the latest situation.

In a show of belligerence, the U.S. military is holding joint ‘training exercises’ with Israel, the largest such ever held. Just a coincidence, says the U.S. State Department.

America has wanted to attack Iran for a long time and has been looking for a pretext. Unfortunately, the United Nations was no help because its investigative commission kept issuing reports denying the presence of nuclear materials or the means to develop same. For twelve years, the U.S. has waited patiently for the commission to need a new director. When the job opened up, the Obama administration lobbied heavily for the appointment of its personal choice, someone who had already pledged to be of greater assistance to the U.S. than had been his predecessor.

The so-called U.N. Report on which America now rattles its sabers and moves ships into position to threaten more blood is actually comprised of the same long-ago discredited documents previous iterations of the Committee had seen and discarded. No matter. Truth is not the point. In the words of the infamous Downing Street Memo, the ‘intelligence is being fixed around it.’ We just needed a cover story the President could recite, standing in front of a phalanx of enormous American flags.

In fact, the probability is that no such nuclear weapons program actually exists in Iran. We know this because we have for many years employed sophisticated spy apparatus, both personal and mechanical, to monitor that nation’s behavior. Included in the equipment is a device which tracks the presence and path of nuclear material by reading any levels of extant radiation.

Based on invented stories, the United States has begun to impose increasingly punitive sanctions against Iran. The latest is the shutting off of its oil exportation scheduled by June. This, as Ron Paul had the guts to tell an L.A. Times reporter last week, is an act of war.

Iran will have no alternative but to do as it is now threatening, interdict oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. When that happens, America will then scream about it and launch an attack, probably with the assistance of Israel. It is a crisis manufactured by the United States out of whole cloth, but it will be made to seem otherwise.

U.S. media already enjoys painting the Iranian leader as a lunatic, perhaps forgetting that its own leaders have a worse record when it comes to spilling blood.

The President rarely even asks permission from Congress, and Congress rarely raises any objections anyhow. We are sending drone aircraft to assassinate people in other countries on a regular basis and few are objecting. We use spy planes over other countries and get angry when any are shot down.

The arrogance of America is breathtaking. Like Rome, it just takes what it wants. Like Hitler’s Germany, it invades on any pretext at all and invents hostile acts to which it then ‘responds.’ It acts as though the rest of the world belongs to it.

Lately one hears the noxious term ‘American exceptionalism.’ It is a phrase used much as Hitler’s storm troopers and propagandists used the term ‘master race,’ and with the same purpose. If the empire’s citizens are indeed superior in some way, exempted from ordinary standards of conduct because they are better, then the rules its leaders have been breaking with increasing impunity, the rules of civilized nations, may be said not to apply to it.

It is not a war crime when America fires remote-controlled missiles at carelessly chosen targets because, after all, America is special. It is not murder when people are chosen by America’s State Department and placed on death lists for assassination because America is special.

The foreign policy of the United States over the past eleven years can reasonably be described as vicious, systematic killing in the service of corporations and the international banking industry. That’s why it attacked Iraq, why it invaded Afghanistan, why it strikes Pakistan with missiles, why it flooded Libya with CIA personnel and mercenaries to invent a ‘popular uprising’ which could then be backed by NATO bombings. That’s why it’s screwing around with most of the countries in Africa and why it’s gearing up to attack Iran.

2012 is an election year. America will be voting for candidates for President. But only two known candidates are standing against the destruction of the Constitution and the mass murder of people around the world, and they are so marginalized that one, Ron Paul, is made a target of bad jokes inside the G.O.P., and the other, Rocky Anderson, can’t get his new party on the ballot and is being completely ignored by the media.

Meanwhile, apparently, all other candidates are taken seriously just because they peddle the same insane policies as the current President, regardless of their clear incompetence, lack of qualifications, and general stupidity.

The Democrats point to idiots like Romney, Gingrich and, God help us all, Rick Santorum, and say we’ve got to work hard to re-elect Barack Obama because look at the other guys!

Every night since Obama’s inauguration three years ago, there have been innocent children screaming in terror under American bombs. Sorry, Democratic Party, you will not be getting my support this year and maybe never again. I’m checking out of the whorehouse.