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Sell Iraq

Like a Sufi whirler, things come around again, and again. Back in 2004 I said that the better strategy in Iraq would be to buy the whole country, because in the long run it would be less costly in both dollars and human lives. And it would be the peculiarly American thing to do. Well, this past week the Congressional Budget Office got out its big calculator and came up with a price tag of $25 billion per year for a projected half-century of US military presence in Iraq, if the South Korean model is any guide to how long we can expect to be there.¹

So do the math. At 167,975 square miles, that makes 107,504,000 acres in Iraq. Fifty years times $25 billion comes out to $62.5 trillion dollars—and this doesn't even include the half trillion dollars (12 billion dollars a month) we have already spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That tallies up to a humongous $581,374 per acre.

That's some pricey real estate, especially in this spiraling market. I rest my case.

1.  "Long-term US Iraq bill to be 25 billion dollars: Congress," AFP/Yahoo! News, September 20, 2007. Article is archived at Truthout.org.

Oops! They Started It!

In a telephone call with Raw Story today and in an article in Salon, foreign-policy strategist Steve Clemons says that President Bush is not going to bomb Iran—unless there should happen to be an "accidental" incident. That would be "accidental" as in pretext, as in the Gulf of Tonkin, the USS Maine, the Lusitania ....

Immediately Dick Cheney made plans to stand in the bushes at the border with Iran and glare at Ahmadinejad:

More satire featuring the Cheney-Bush presidency.

Labels: Satire

Godzilla Is US

I certainly won't be surprised if Alan Greenspan begins rephrasing his claim that the Iraq war was really for oil. That was the pronouncement today from the most important economist and policy-maker in recent US history. On the other side is the belief that we are in Iraq to save the Middle East from itself. Here's a representative claim from Cox Newspaper columnist Tom Teepen on Friday:

I appreciate Teepen's balance here, but he's been drinking the White House Kool-Aid. At this point in history we don't really know why the US invaded Iraq, because the answer is sitting as a fetid mass on the floor in the conference room with two renowned liars, Bush and Cheney. So we shouldn't listen uncritically when the President says, as he did on Thursday:

I mean, we can certainly all agree with his conclusions:

But that doesn't mean we should also accept how he gets there.²

As for the Cheney-Bush-Petraeus assessment, what is this but a kind of "preemptive victory"? Ignoring the secret statistics they use to get to their conclusions, and ignoring the GAO Report in which the Iraqi government "did not meet 11 of its 18 benchmarks,"³ what they've done is to borrow from an imagined future to make a pretty present. As Ed Henry said on CNN on Friday:

In the meantime, we are responsible for 1,220,580 Iraq civilian deaths since the invasion in 2003,⁵ and this will not be changed by more street protests in Washington, DC.⁶ Until the US economy shrinks to the point where Americans become inconvenienced by our investment in the Middle East, we will let the Godzilla monster keep roaring and stomping and smashing up other countries.

1.  Address by the President to the Nation on the Way Forward in Iraq, September 13, 2007.
2.  As in: "If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply. Iraq could face a humanitarian nightmare. Democracy movements would be violently reversed. We would leave our children to face a far more dangerous world. And as we saw on September the 11th, 2001, those dangers can reach our cities and kill our people." I have to say that his short military-style haircut made him look crisp and commander-in-chief-like, but I still had to gag when he sneaked in the word "emboldened" in his speech. You get the same thing from the President's Radio Address yesterday.
3.  See GAO Report Summary. Report in PDF format: Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Government Has Not Met Most Legislative, Security, and Economic Benchmarks GAO-07-1230T, September 7, 2007.
4.  See CNN Transcript for Friday, September 14, 2007. Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars has the relevant video segment.
5.  See the recent Opinion Business Research Report.
6.  "Thousands March to Capitol to Protest Iraq War," Washington Post, September 16, 2007.