I'm going to repost something here that I posted in Atrios' message board about Syria. It's in response to this:

I believe the next conflict with Syria will be sold to us along the lines of: "We are going to attack Syria cos they have WMD, Osama and Saddam - who are plotting a new terrorist attack against our country"

These supposed WMDs have become quite the MacGuffin, haven't they?

One slight problem, though. The (very) thin justification that Bush and Co. had for invading Iraq... the broken resolutions... simply don't apply here. If the U.S. invades Syria, it will be flagrantly in violation of international law in a way that hasn't been seen since the Soviets rolled the tanks into Czechoslovakia. WMDs are *not* enough reason to invade, after all: if they were, then the United States itself would be a perfectly valid target. Assisting Iraq isn't enough, either, as the United States was the aggressor here.

Then again, at this point, the only thing that matters is keeping the American public onside, and as long as we keep getting this flood of 9/11 namedropping and "you aren't anti-american, are you?" McCarthyism, I don't see what can be done here.

You want to know what's really scary? Even if the United States isn't fascist (and it isn't), I can easily see the behavior mentioned above used to justify a fascist regime as "democracy doesn't work... the U.S. proves it". Were Putin interested, Russia could start going down this path really, really soon. Fascism in Russia is marginal now, but it was during the Weimar republic, too.