Well, that depends on the question, doesn’t it?
If the question is “how can the west and the Arab world co-exist with minimal suicide bombings?”, then war is not the answer. If the question is “how can the White House take hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and hand it over to their business partners -- and get away with it?”, then war is the answer.
Once you consider that the function and purpose of this war has always, only, and ever been a strategy for looting the US Treasury, you almost begin to admire the brazen audacity of it. Those who call the Iraq war a blundering quagmire are totally missing the point. It is, perhaps, the most brilliantly conceived, impeccably executed, and astonishingly successful criminal conspiracy of modern times. At the very least, it is a money-laundering operation on a scale and scope that makes everything the mafia has ever done look like juvenile delinquency.
The pipelines were going to flow, one way or another -- a guaranteed win-win situation. Rose petals in Baghdad greeting Operation Iraqi Freedom? No? Too bad. It would have been Wal-marts, Burger Kings and oil contracts all around. Instead, our soldiers are mired in an intractable insurgency and a sectarian bloodbath. Jackpot! Six years of two billion dollar a week profit taking, with no end in sight.
Are the architects of this enterprise worried they might one day find themselves strung up by their heels like Mussolini? Not likely. Their worst critics in the mainstream media might go so far as to call them bungling trigger-happy cowboy ideologues, but you have to look deep left before you find anyone seriously accusing them of being treasonous profiteers. In Washington, impeachment is “off the table”.
It’s the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Nobody can quite wrap their mind around the notion that this administration knew exactly what they were doing and achieved exactly what they set out to do – make their clients and investors rich.
It’s hard to grasp that when they say “things are going well in Iraq” -- that’s not spin, that’s an understatement. Check Halliburton’s quarterly earnings. Things are going extremely well in Iraq.
And they’ll get away with it. After January 2009, while the new administration takes the heat for whatever unfolds in the Middle East, they’ll lay low, count their money, analyze the wiretapped data, start planning some moves. Once the memories of these years have faded, maybe once the budget is balanced, maybe even a surplus built up, they’ll come back and steal it again. That’s just what rapacious greedheads do. And you can’t argue with success.
Can anything be done? Sure.
Option One: Well, of course…get involved. Much of the infrastructure of American democracy is still intact. We can still write, speak, organize, campaign. And, allegedly, vote. Check candidates voting records, check their contributors. Ignore appeals to emotion and remember the words of Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Vote out those who fail, watch the performance of those you vote in. Repeat as needed.
Option Two: An All New Season of American Idol begins January 2008 on FOX. Check local listings.
It was a year of worst-case scenarios, diminished expectations, celebrity train wrecks, and the ironic triumph of church over state in the midst of what Rolling Stone called the “GOP's Best Gay Sex Year Ever."
