Bush ready to declare war. Considerable evidence of the requisite military buildup…

…including the building up of strategic oil reserves in the US to insulate the economy against an expected hike in oil prices that would follow the opening of hostilities.

Discreet inquiries have also been made about the availability of the oil tankers that would be needed to transport aviation and other fuel to the Gulf for use by US forces.

In a further indication that America is readying itself for war, large numbers of US Army military trucks have undergone rapid servicing by the Oshkosh Truck Corporation and have been seen being delivered by rail back to their bases painted in tan desert camouflage.

(British PM Tony) Blair yesterday faced new demands from all sides to publish the now notorious dossier of information on Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical armoury that he has been promising to unveil since spring… The long delay in publication has prompted suspicions that the dossier, which relies heavily on satellite pictures, is embarrassingly thin. Guardian UK

In bombing and invading Iraq, the US will abandon its age-old practice of no first strike. Of course, since the Bush team has kept up the unceasing, absurd rhetoric about there being a War on Terrorism® against a global threat (and of Iraqi complicity with al Qaeda, even though doubted by both the FBI and CIA in a rare showing of agreement… LA Times), they have a ready-made case that this is not a preemptive strike but rather a reactive one. And, of course, we do have a time-honored tradition of taking down regimes we find unfriendly with covert action. Doing it overtly — look at the military appropriation Bush asked for (and received almost everything he had asked for) last month — of course instead justifies a massive shot in the arm for the failing economy that is otherwise likely to be Bush’s lasting historical legacy, and a giveaway to boot to some of the Administration’s military-contractor best friends… and to the coffin-makers as well.

And the fact that no one is immune from danger of a first strike from the World’s Only Superpower® (and World’s Primary Rogue State) will probably stimulate, not discourage, the development of weapons of mass destruction with hoped-for deterrent value by all the other rogue states.

But real benefit to long-range US security doesn’t matter, as long as the image is right and the voters can finally see Bush as having some success. In the face of a double dip recession and his failure to otherwise deliver on his grandiose WoT® “vision”, and especially if he can finish Daddy’s War for him (with an administration made up largely of his Daddy’s old warhorses), it is (as the most hackneyed line in the media speculation about this war goes) not a question of if but only of when…