A Failure of Imagination

I checked out this link today to see what the cost of the War in Iraq has become www.costofwar.com. The number when I checked was roughly $277 billion. To give some needed perspective, there are according to the CIA factbook, roughly 27 million Iraquis. This means that our government has now spent over $10,000 for every man woman and child in Iraq.

But wait. That is not all. Our problem with Iraq was not with every member of the population. Our problem was not with Kurdistan. The Kurds love us and they are roughly 20% of the Iraqi population. Our problem was not with women (50% of the population) or children (39.7% of the population). This eliminates all but 6.5 million Iraquis. These are the guys that we had a big problem with - not all of them of course, but most of them. Their behavior needed to be modified. They were making bad choices. They had a very bad leader. These men needed to make much better choices. Because they sit on an ocean of oil, their bad choices could seriously impact us. They could contribute to a future where our country is cut off from oil and our economy screeches to a halt, and the whole country suddenly looks like the New Orleans Superdome.

So our leaders decided to force them to make better choices, militarily. In so doing, Bush et al has spent $43,000 on each of these guys. There have been almost 2,400 American lives lost. There have been approximately 45,000-50,000 Iraqis killed, about 10,000 of whom were military.

Now whether or not you agreed with the need to force regime change in Iraq, does this seem like a sensible use of all that money? I mean, my job is not to think of stuff like this but why not put that money into say, building roads and bridges and schools and hospitals for the Kurds, for example. I mean, what would the rest of Iraq have done if they saw their northern neighbors go from herding goats to driving Jaguars. I'd have to think that a lot of them would say, "We need to rethink this whole Death to America thing. Being a friend to America seems to have nice benefits."

I'm sure there were people in the Pentagon that were paid to think up clever ways to affect change in Iraq. I'm sure they had great ideas that made my pour-money-on-the-Kurds idea look really absurd. But we'll never know what those ideas were. They are all moot now. They were made impotent by our leader when he told us that we had no time. He told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they intended to use them against us. No time meant no choice but war. If they had found WMDs in Iraq, I don't know how I would feel about George Bush. But knowing that was all a lie, I really have a hard time with the guy. I used to love politics. I used to love watching Meet the Press and Face the Nation and This Week with Cokie Roberts (just kidding about the last one). Now I can't even turn that stuff on without seriously wanting to throw a brick through my TV. January 2009 can't get here fast enough.