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10/05/2004: "So What has Bush Bought Us With Our $200,000,000,000 and 1,000 Deaths?"

Let’s look at the Iraq invasion from the Iraqi point of view. Like our President, I have an MBA, and at B-school I was taught to consider the customer’s perspective when evaluating an investment. And Iraqis are certainly customers. For us to achieve “mission accomplished” they have to “buy into” our invasion enough to stop rabid attacks on Americans, anyone who looks like they might be an American, anyone who works for an American, anyone close to an American they can blow up…you get the picture. The Bush Administration apparently believes that the Iraqis will, any day now, be appreciating the investment we’ve made with big bucks and American lives. Indeed, the Bushies expected American soldiers to be welcomed as liberators when we arrived a year and a half ago (how time flies!) Considering that big expectation gap, the Administration clearly needs to do a better job of getting into the Iraqi mindset. So let’s help them out. I got an insight into this the other day when listening to one of the correspondents who has been in Iraq for over a dozen years, dating back to before the first invasion. He pointed out that every single Iraqi he knows (and it’s his business to know as many as possible) has had at least one close relative killed due to American intervention in Iraq. Sometimes the fatality occurred during Desert Storm, sometimes during Enduring Freedom, and sometimes during the chaos that’s occurred due to the power vacuum the invasion created. In any case, those relatives are just as dead. Now consider how you would feel about an infidel foreign power that killed your draftee son, father, brother, or uncle. Then consider that the country is an NRA dream – a landscape awash with ready availability of personal-use lethal weaponry. What are the implications for “mission accomplished?” Well, those dead Iraqi relatives aren’t coming back anytime soon, and it will be a long time before those weapons have been either confiscated or, more likely, used against one of the people categories listed above. Not a pretty picture. Here’s my prediction: we’ll stage a turnover of “security” to Iraqis (just like we did with Vietnamization) and then bug out, leaving this oil-rich country to civil war. The only difference in the end result between the candidates will be how much money and lives go down the drain before we declare Iraqification to be successful. Think that’s too pessimistic? Then convince me that you’d buy a product from a company that killed your brother.