After a short break, the apology for peace continues. As a nation, we are at a turning point – a place where we can either back off and be reasonable, or do something really stupid that will get a lot more of our faithful soldiers killed.

We have turned Iraq into an open wound, bleeding out across the Middle East. The countries that border Iraq – like Syria and Saudi Arabia – have taken on hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees fleeing from the terror caused by the War on Terror. News service Middle East Online numbers Iraqi refugees in Syria at 600,000.

I say “we,” but nobody reading this column right now is solely responsible. There is one person who bears a great deal of responsibility, though he’ll never face any judgment for his crimes.

His name is John Hannah, the assistant to the vice president for National Security Affairs, and his handiwork has put more than 3,000 American soldiers on the ground, and killed or displaced what has to be at least a million Iraqis.

Hannah worked in the Clinton administration, and now continues his service to our government by working as a top aide of Vice President Dick Cheney. He’s done a lot of filthy things – many speculate that he was involved in leaking the name of a CIA agent to the press – but the worst of his offenses came right after 9/11. According to an Oct. 20, 2005, Washington Post article, it was then that Hannah worked on what was called the “White House Iraq Group,” a team dedicated to finding intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

We have since found that there are no WMDs in Iraq, that every original reason for our invasion of it was unwarranted and fabricated to fatten our own oil reserves and the wallets of corporations like Halliburton. On this point, Hannah was either willfully deceptive or grossly incompetent.

After handily engineering the three-and-a-half-year, 3,000-life, and innumerable-refugee horror show that is present day Iraq, Hannah is flapping his mouth off about its neighbor, Iran.

A Feb. 11 Washington Post article quotes an ambassador as saying that Hannah remarked that 2007 was “the year of Iran” and that there was a high possibility of a U.S. attack.

Washington has told Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that it will impose sanctions on his country if they don’t back off their nuclear enrichment plans – the U.S. Navy has dispatched more battleships to the Persian Gulf – Iranian intelligence members can be treated as “enemy combatants” when they get captured by U.S. soldiers. For all the administration is saying that we aren’t going to war with Iran and don’t want to start a conflict, we’re acting very confrontational.

This is precisely how things were back in 2002 and 2003 leading up to the Iraq War. Back then, everybody was all for going to war with Iraq with paper-thin justification provided by Hannah and other liars like him.

Males: Have your deferment papers ready. Start figuring out ways to get 4F-ed now. Let your wayward friends know they should avoid armed forces recruiters. Plan on studying abroad and maybe not coming back. 140,000 troops plus 25,000-100,000 private mercenaries can’t get the job done in Iraq, a country of 26 million people. Iran has a population of 68 million and a more organized government, and John Hannah is determined to send you over there.

Information on John Hannah’s illustrious career courtesy of The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and whitehouse.gov.