This is not the sort of thing you see in a confident, brave, and civilized nation, it's the sort of stuff you'd expect to see toward the end. It's the stuff of craven war-mongers, of dishonest cowards, of a totally deranged and very dangerous media. The signs are everywhere; imperial decline is set to accelerate rapidly in the coming years...

Expect more of all the above as the U.S. empire enters its most devastating phase of collapse. Think about what it might mean for you and your family and prepare accordingly.

Follow Michael Krieger @LibertyBlitz You think Tillerson and Mattis are bad? Wait until Cotton and Haley are in charge. Empire destroying wars are coming. 12:14 PM - Oct 10, 2017

President Trump is expected to overrule his top national security advisers and decline to certify the Iran nuclear agreement, according to people who have been briefed on the matter, a decision that would reopen a volatile political debate on Iran but is likely to leave in place the landmark deal negotiated by the Obama administration.

By declining to certify Iran's compliance, Mr. Trump would essentially kick it to Congress to decide whether to reimpose punitive economic sanctions. Even among Republicans, there appears to be little appetite to do that, at least for now.

Congress will have to decide whether to reimpose sanctions, which could sink the deal, or use the prospect of that to force Iran - and the other parties to the deal - back to the negotiating table to make changes in the agreement.

That is the approach favored by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who has emerged as a leading hard-liner on Iran and is working closely with the White House to devise its strategy. On Thursday, Mr. Cotton met with Mr. Trump to discuss Iran and other issues.

"Congress and the president, working together, should lay out how the deal must change and, if it doesn't, the consequences Iran will face," Mr. Cotton said in a speech on Tuesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. Reimposing sanctions, he said, would be a "backward-looking step."

The deal is also contentious inside the administration. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have both urged Mr. Trump not to back out of it, in part because that would free Iran to begin producing uranium and reprocessing plutonium immediately, not after 13 years, as is stipulated in the agreement.

But Mr. Trump, after twice certifying the deal, has warned his aides that he would not do so again. As a result, the administration is looking for ways to claim Iran is in violation of the "spirit" of the accord, even if it has complied with inspection criteria. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that Iran was in compliance; when it has found minor violations, they have been quickly fixed.

This is a moment of truth for President Trump's national security team. He is set to overrule both his secretaries of State and Defense on the Iran nuclear deal this week, declaring it no longer in the U.S. "national interest" in explicit contradiction to their public position. And if they don't like it, Senator Tom Cotton says, then they should get out.

Cotton, who has personally advised Trump in recent days about the new Iran strategy he is set to release this week, stopped short of saying either embattled Secretary of State Rex Tillerson or Defense Secretary Jim Mattis should in fact resign. But his comments were nonetheless a striking acknowledgement of the giant rift that has opened up in the midst of the Trump team over foreign policy.

The interview with Cotton took place before this latest explosive twist, but even then it was clear a new rift of significance was opening up inside the Republican foreign policy world. I spoke with Cotton Thursday, the day after Tillerson's unusual press conference to deny press reports he was considering quitting, and just a couple hours after Cotton was summoned to the White House for a private Oval Office meeting with Trump to discuss the Iran strategy. In the interview, Cotton did not really try to paper over the rift or offer the usual assurances that it would all be papered over. Instead, when I asked him directly whether there would be resignations, Cotton did not say there wouldn't be, only that he did not believe they were "imminent."

Because Cotton today is one of the few Senate Republicans who pay close attention to foreign policy who is still out there making Corker's initial case for engagement with Trump, and he insists it's paying off with substantive shifts in Trump's thinking on subjects as varied as how to deal with Russia and the continuation of the war in Afghanistan.

Until now, Trump has shied away from outright confrontation with the experienced hands he's hired to oversee his national security policy. But the Iran deal now seems to have finally forced a public rupture.

Cotton, who has repeatedly consulted with Trump and other top White House officials in recent days, appears to be on the winning side, pushing Trump to adopt the formula his administration has now settled on of refusing to re-certify the Iran deal to Congress but holding off - for now - asking Congress to blow it up by imposing new sanctions. Iran "is on the president's mind right now, probably more than anything," Cotton says, and he says he believes Trump will take the step of not certifying as a way to send "a very important signal to Congress and to our E.U. plus three partners and to Iran that this president is not going to abide by a disastrous nuclear deal."

Cotton gave a lengthy address at the Council on Foreign Relations the same day as Mattis' testimony taking the opposite view - and a link to it was soon tweeted out approvingly by an Iran deal hardliner inside the administration, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

- Major General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935)

When I look at Trump's commentary and tweets in aggregate one thing becomes crystal clear. Trump is trying to redefine America and what it means to be a patriot in superficial and jingoistic terms. He's essentially grooming his supporters into thinking that worshipping a piece of fabric is what separates those who love this country from those who hate it and want to destroy it. By making this about a symbol as opposed to the ideas that this symbol represents, he allows his supporters to feel they are a part of "taking America back" while not even remotely comprehending what the country is actually all about. It's like losing weight while eating whatever you want, all you have to do is vomit afterwards. Trump is essentially conditioning his supporters to follow him as he regurgitates all over the Constitution, because as long as they stay true to a piece of fabric or song, they honor the country. Patriotism made easy.

Which is why what Trump did here is the most dangerous thing he's done since becoming President. He's using an issue that existed and was already divisive as a way to redefine what patriotism means in America. It's no longer about free speech, the right to privacy and the rest of it, but rather patriotism now revolves around a song and a flag. A societal embrace of this sort of fake patriotism is how horrible things happen, and I hope most Trump voters are wise enough to see this.

I was on the investigative team at the New York Times during the lead-up to the Iraq War. I was based in Paris and covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East. Lewis Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and maybe somebody in an intelligence agency, would confirm whatever story the administration was attempting to pitch. Journalistic rules at the Times say you can't go with a one-source story. But if you have three or four supposedly independent sources confirming the same narrative, then you can go with it, which is how they did it. The paper did not break any rules taught at Columbia journalism school, but everything they wrote was a lie.

The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported....' It gave these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced.

How is all this going to play out? Obviously nobody really knows, but I do think we've entered a new period in American history. I think it's basically a crossing of the Rubicon moment for the American empire. Personally, I don't expect a strong and visible military response from Russia in the near-term. I don't think Putin wants to give the U.S. media and newly minted neocon Donald Trump an excuse to do anything truly crazy, which they can blame on Russia in the court of public opinion. I think Putin is too smart for that. Rather, what I think he'll do is make all sorts of moves behind the scenes to weaken America's economic power, while at the same time engaging in minor provocations to tempt the imbeciles in charge of U.S. foreign policy to make further mistakes abroad, to which they'll emphatically oblige.

In other words, Russia will attempt to make the U.S. extend itself further in a region where no real success is possible, at the same time that the American economy deteriorates further. Recall that the current very weak economic "recovery" has been going on for nearly a decade. This cycle is very long in the tooth, and all Russia really needs to do is sit back, make some moves behind the scenes and allow the U.S. to collapse upon itself in its hubris and stupidity. This is precisely what I think is going to happen.