I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil. —Ala Greenspan

For years now, those of us who dared state the obvious — that Bush/Cheney’s obsession with Iraq was all about oil — have been dismissed as left-wing cranks, or worse, as terror-loving traitors.

I doubt that this admission from the former high priest of American capitalism will make a difference. He’s just one of a long line of truth-telling former Bush-abettors.

Still, it’s an important statement, and not just the oil part: our decision to destroy a sovereign nation that did us no harm and push the world to the brink of apocalypse just so we could service our oil addiction is just one of a very long list of hard American truths shrouded in political denial.

The first step in waking from denial is the recognition of how deeply and dangerously asleep we’ve been.

Been on a mini-vacation, getting back just in time for the long-heralded Petraeus report, wisely scheduled for the 6th anniversary of 9/11.

Five minutes into the General’s “testimony” it was apparent that, like Colin Powell’s infamous U.N. testimony, we were getting another load of Bushit. Though I’m no longer surprised by anything this administration does, it’s still dismaying to watch the Democrats just take it.

Not to mention the media dutifully reporting it all, as if it bore any relation at all to the truth. Tom Engelhardt best sums up my feelings:

To grasp the Petraeus moment, you really have to re-imagine official Washington as a set of drunks behind the wheels of so many SUVs tearing down a well-populated city avenue — and all of them are on their cell phones. They hardly notice the bodies bouncing off the fenders. For them, the world is Washington-centered; all interests that matter are American ones. Nothing else exists, not really. Think of this as a form of imperial autism and the Petraeus moment as the way in which the White House and official Washington have, for a brief time, blotted out the world.

Consider it a stark view into the next 16 months of American politics while we wait for President Kick-Ass to lame-out. Nothing will change, certainly not improve, and all of it will be dumped into the laps of the lucky winners of the 2008 elections.

Incredibly, it’s happening again. As if Iraq never happened, as if the innumerable lessons from that national shame and continuing horror never happened. As if the ‘06 election slapdown and clear annunciation of the people’s will never happened.

Incredibly, the same cast of chickenhawk fools and lazy legislators who brought us Iraq are now dragging the country into an even bigger pile of bushit. Incredibly, the media awaits their next sage utterances on the “progress” in Iraq and the need to bomb the hell out of Iran as if they had a shred of credibility remaining.

Incredibly, there’s nothing that we can do to stop it. Democrats either believe the war-think rhetoric about Iran’s evil intentions — why, someday they might be as aggressively violent as us! — or they see more Bush-Cheney-war as good election politics. In any case, Dems are desperate to avoid looking soft on terror, so how can they say no to the indiscriminate bombing of a bunch of Muslims, or Arabs, or whatever the hell they are over there?

As the actually sage Chris Hedges puts it, we will soon be bombing Iran because we’ve lost all capacity for the empathetic communication that international diplomacy requires:

But we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect. We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasn’t worked well in Iraq. It hasn’t worked well in Afghanistan. And it won’t work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.