There were some things far more frightening this week than Halloween's small ghouls and goblins — and the scariest of all is the Bush administration's seemingly inexorable march toward military confrontation with Iran.

What ARE they smoking back there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? The very idea is dumb as a fencepost and best left to the biggest pied piper of what passes for neo-conservative thought, Norman Podhoretz. Yet both President George W. Bush and his able assistant, Vice President Darth Cheney, are marching to that tune and humming along lustily.

There is no crisis here, and no earthly reason to manufacture one on short notice, except for the fact that in under 15 months the Bush administration will pass ignominiously into history. Then a new chief executive can begin dealing with two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a national debt nearing $10 trillion, a terrorist threat to America only made stronger by eight years of Bush and Cheney, and a national economy trembling on the brink of recession. » read more

Although they seem to have faded out of the headlines and been put on the back burner by the politicians in the nation’s capital in recent weeks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on, whether we're paying attention or not.

This week, we had a new estimate that those wars ultimately may cost the American taxpayer a whopping $2.7 trillion, all of it added onto a national debt that already tops $9 trillion. That’s a tidy sum for a foreign adventure whose architects thought would be over in six months and mostly paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.

Also this week, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, hit the road to talk to the Army captains and majors who, along with the lieutenants, sergeants and enlisted soldiers, bear the brunt of repeated combat tours in the mountains of Afghanistan and the sands of Iraq. » read more