The Quagmire Chronicles — Frank Miller

The United States'' first venture into a phantasy future as the world''s first self-proclaimed hegemon began in March, 2003. Launching a war that had no germ of justification, and ignoring the jihadists who had attacked the homeland on 9/11, American troops following orders completed the conquest of Victim No. 1 in little more than a month.

As many authorities agree, and as The Quagmire Chronicles makes clear, the Iraq war was the wrong conflict in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expanding steadily, it became an incubus on not only the United States but the entire Muslim world. By itself the war created a new terror organization/network and a new threat. The insurgency that America had spawned and maintained turned Iraq into a Vietnam-style quagmire.

Inevitably, the Iraq adventure has acted like the quagmire it is. The Washington cabal that perpetrated it has spent more than a billion dollars weekly, watched the struggle turn into a bloodbath, floated pipe-dreams in which a democratic Iraq converts its authoritarian neighbors into freedom-loving, liberal states.

Perhaps worst, the war provided cover for the Bush cabal to move the United States toward the status of a dysfunctional two-class society. The rule of law and individual rights fell victim increasingly to the fabricated exigencies of the flagrantly misnamed war on terror.

Saddled with a government that frivolously launches a war that it can neither win nor leave, what does the United States do? Fated to watch as the nation''s future is eroded by the canker of a misbegotten conflict, where can the common people, the working people, the thinking people turn? Condemned to listen to the inanities of an arrogant governing cabal that sees itself as the answer to the world''s ills, how do Americans fight back?

The answer must come from the ballot box. But the cabal''s relentless and conscienceless manipulations of elections have compromised even that potential solution--and by 2010 may well have proved it yet again.

The details, the scenarios themselves, lie written in the events--and the stars--of today. Read The Quagmire Chronicles to find out how it could happen.

Find out too how long the fiasco might go on, and whether the preemptive war will continue to surface daily as a bloody exercise in hubris, one that is perpetuated for patently quixotic reasons.

Here is one expert''s view, reported from the ficto-historical perspective of 2010. Start reading The Quagmire Chronicles today, while its sometimes stunning conclusions are warm off the presses.