WARS - For Votes![col. writ. 3/7/12] © '12 Mumia Abu-JamalIt isn't enough that Capitol Hill is chock-full of shameless political whores--oopsl, excuse me, I meant 'sluts'-- who are for sale to the highest bidder. To be honest, that's simply the nature of U.S. politics--nakedly so, after the Supreme Court's Citizens United case. But how polls are salivating to sound the most martial on the issue of Iran is another matter. Politicians--most who've never even had a fist-fight--are promising carpet-bombing of a country that has never attacked this one, just a few months after a decade of war that has left the U.S. Army in tatters, its veterans shattered in mind and body, and America's image abroad worse than at any time since the Vietnam debacle.If the carnage of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, it's that wars are easy to start; but damnably hard to end. Iraq, once the pearl of Middle East secular achievement, has become a charnel house of disaster, desolation and death. And as for Iran acquiring nuclear capability, the U.S. supported such a program when the nation was under the megalomaniacal rule of the Shah. If it is interested today, it has every reason to be so, after seeing .the American Imperial rape of its next-door neighbor--Iraq. And why can Israel have hundreds of nukes, while Iran can't have one? Which country has been more war-like, and more invasive in the region--Iran or Israel? But, politicians--of both major political parties--are on the take. They lust after lobbies like whores after wallets. 'War?' 'How much?' As the schools slide into decay; as bridges fall; as the remains of Iraq veterans get tossed out like garbage, every major U.S. politician rattles more sabers of war. This is an empire gone mad.