Our New Foreign Policy: Cold. Hard. Cash.

It has often occurred to me that if we had known, in advance, how much the current misadventures in Iraq would cost us, just in terms of straight-up money spent (ignoring, for the sake of argument, the cost in human lives, national and military morale, the opportunity costs of having all of our military forces tied up there, not to mention the opportunity costs of increasing the amount of hatred towards and decreasing the reputation of the US around the world) then we could have had much better results by simply showering that much money on Iraq.

To wit, the population of Iraq in July was about 27 million people. I think it's a conservative estimate to say that we will spend 1 trillion dollars by the time we get out of there. 1 trillion by 27 million is $37,000 per person.

What if we had offered Saddam Hussein 1 billion dollars, straight up, to retire to someplace warm and sunny with white, sandy beaches? And then offered every man, woman, and child, say, $10,000 as a lump-sum payment contingent on, I don't know, some sort of good behavior clause. We could have saved a lot of money, bought off a shit-ton more good will than we have there right now, plus saved so many uselessly-lost lives.

But Matt points out one major reason why that may not have been a very good idea. Specifically, in a society full of old hatreds and divided secular groups, simply handing out cash and money and training to a bunch of people who would like to use them to kill each other probably won't increase safety and security.

Which, mostly, leads me back to the end decision that going into Iraq was such a horrible idea that there really was absolutely no way that we could have ended up anywhere other than where we have. Especially true with the chuckleheads that were making the decisions at the time, but the more time goes on, the more convinced I become that Matt is right and the so-called 'incompetence dodge' is just a cover-your-ass excuse for people who were flat-out wrong.