Conflagration: Check.

By way of Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque (Ninth Circle: The Widening Gyre of Iraq's Death Spiral), I was referred to the single most comprehensive, foreboding, ominous article I have ever encountered detailing what The United States has spawned in the Middle East. Nir Rosen's latest dispatch, No Going Back, is a devastating, heartbreaking, infuriating assessment of the geopolitical mayhem wrought by America's latest ongoing vanity project. Anyone willing to look past the next U.S. election can see what is coming, and it is likely uglier than even the most pessimistic among us previously imagined.

The American invasion and occupation of what used to be Iraq (as a nation state, it no longer exists) will reverberate throughout the world until the sun throws its last spark. Any Americans - conservative, liberal and every point in between - entertaining fantasies wherein they are miraculously insulated from these reverberations are completely and utterly bankrupt of reason. At one time, we called this debilitating condition insanity. Now it is called normalcy.

I strongly urge you to take the time to read it in its entirety.

(Note: I'm working on a very tight deadline and may not be posting for a day or two.)