My new theory on the war in Iraq

Could Rumsfeld and Cheney and the other war hawks really have got it so wrong about Iraq? All we read in the paper, online and on TV is how bad the war is going. What a mess it has been. How Bush’s boys were fools to go into Iraq against the advice of the experts and how things have blown up in their faces and turned into a big mess.

But what if the brains behind the war are secretly happy. What if things have worked out pretty much how they and their other experts planned?

Lets look at the facts. The big defense and construction companies that make money out of war are raking it in because Iraq is a big country and there is plenty of war to go round. The oil companies and other big business vultures are in there carving up the spoils. I’m sure corporations take a much more long-term view than us mere mortals. Sure it might not be as cost effective to remove oil from Iraq right now and there could be the annoying fact of having to replace equipment and men who keep getting blown up the insurgents. But in the long term things will work themselves out and then the oil companies will be ready to pump. In the meantime, the war in Iraq is helping to push up oil prices around the rest of the world. Good news if you’re in oil.

And what is the cost? You wont hear the companies that supply all the equipment to the US army complaining. Or the contractors, or the politicians who rely on cash from the companies that supply all the equipment to the US Army. You wont hear a peep from the thousands and thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. And our leaders in the west know that their voters are delightfully oblivious to large-scale deaths when they are dark skinned foreigners far away.

So that leaves us with the deaths of a few thousand US troops. I heard Michael Moore say on CNN that it is estimated that 18000 Americans die a year as a result of not having life insurance. Does that put the number of US war dead in Iraq in perspective for you? If US leaders are prepared to live with 18000 innocent dead at home a year, what is three and a half thousand over 4 years. I bet the men behind the invasion of the Iraq are rapt with such a low casualty count. Unluckily for them the US public’s tolerance for the death of their own boys doing democracy’s dirty deeds on foreign shores is a lot lower than it was back in the days of Vietnam. Rumy and Cheney know that eventually public opinion will force them out of Iraq ‘officially’. The trick is to hang in there as long as they can. And that’s not hard. The beauty of American democracy is that its leaders can pretty much do what they want. For example. They invade a country using false evidence of WOMD knowing the truth will come out eventually. But so what. It was too late by then and they knew no one would be organized enough to do anything about it. Even with the public finally awake to the big con and overwhelmingly against the war, the men running the oval office know they can just box on doing what they want.

But eventually noise control will get its shit together and drive over to Bush’s place to confiscate his sound system and shut the party down. The press and the Democrats will high five because the government has listened to the will of the people and withdrawn from Iraq. Thing is Bush’s boys wont care because they know the truth. What’s left behind is the15 square mile Balad Air Base and the $592 million dollar US embassy in Baghdad. Officially the US might be out of Iraq but unofficially the men who planned it in the first place are there to stay, to reap the rewards for themselves and the men that suggested they get in there. And I think they’ll sit round the table and congratulate themselves on a job well done.