The War in Iraq

The War in Iraq is officially over today. Thank goodness. There are a number of regrets associated with this little skirmish. The first one I notice is that Iraq is a proper name and therefore unusable in Scrabble or that other word game that got Alec Baldwin kicked off a plane last week. It would be really nice if there were more words with "q" that didn't require a "u". Of course, my cousins and sisters would know them before me and I'd actually lose out in the long run.

The second thing is that we prefer to call it the "War in Iraq", rather than the "Iraq War". There's an extra word in there which seems useless unless you believe that it is actually the "Oil War" and it is important to know that this part of the Oil War is being fought in Iraq.

But maybe the biggest regret is the amount of money spent and how poorly it was spent. The war in Iraq cost 800 billion dollars. That's a lot of money and maybe the cause of the current recession. You just can't spend that amount of money blowing things up and not see an impact. That's 800 billion dollars/32 million Iraqis = 25,000 dollars/person. The Iraqi gdp = $82 billion which puts the per capita income around $2500. That's ten years of income for every man woman and child in the country of Iraq. The real tragedy is that so many people died or were maimed and injured. With that kind of money, it's hard to imagine that it couldn't have been spent better. We could have walked in and said, "Look Sadam, here's a bunch of billions. Go have yourself a great life." We could have said to the insurgents, "Here's ten years salary, go have a coffee and chill for ten years. We'll take care of stuff for you." We could have bribed the crap out of everybody and made it a real happy place. We could have even built a mosque or five, planted some grass and trees, and given everybody an iPhone and an iPad with cell phone and internet accounts. We could have built a few Disney Lands. It's mighty damn hard to imagine any way that money could have been thrown away more efficiently than we did it in Iraq. And with 32,000 injured veterans, we're going to be paying for this war for a long time with more than just money. I don't know if I should be more ashamed of my country for its moral failure or for its stupid inefficiency.

I'm a fan of Barack's. He's doing all he can. He's gotten us out of Iraq, he was in charge when Bin Laden was taken out, and I hope he's gonna soon realize the futility of trying to do anything in Afghanistan. When we quit expending so much American capital on stupid missions, we're also gonna see the economy get better.

Well, that's all for now.

Added note: I got a comment that suggested that I was in Iraq. I wasn't. Also, I just missed Vietnam.