Last week, the Democratically controlled U.S. Congress was caught red-handed aiding and abetting the Cheney-Bush drumbeat for war in Iran — just as they helped the administration in its run-up to the war in Iraq when Republicans controlled both houses.

On Tuesday, the House voted 397 to 16 to endorse the Cheney cabal’s assertion that the Iranian military’s Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. In a 76-22 vote on Wednesday, the Senate agreed to similar language.

On Saturday, the Iranian parliament countered with an in-kind declaration that elite U.S. institutions to be terrorist organizations, a move that was backed by Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday:

Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in his weekly brief that he agreed with the symbolic resolution passed by Iran’s hardline parliament Saturday, which condemned the two American institutions for its actions in Japan in World War II, as well as more recently in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The label of terrorist is suitable for the military and security forces of the United States,” he said.

Seymour Hersh reported last week in the New Yorker that the administration has shifted the rationale for war because the public was not buying an earlier assertion it floated that Iran’s deployment of nuclear weapons was imminent.

Now Bush and Cheney are trying to convince Americans that Iran is responsible for the violence in Iraq because Iranian Shias are supplying weapons to Iraqi Shia insurgents in their civil war against Sunnis. This is ironic, of course, because it is the United States who invaded and is occupying Iraq — and because U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is also supplying weapons to Sunni insurgents in the sectarian civil war.

By voting for the Cheney-Bush designation of the Iranian military’s elite guard as a terrorist organization, Democrats in Congress have given the administration their tacit approval to escalate the U.S. war in the Middle East.