Five years and counting

If Chancellor Cheney, Kaiser George II, and the anointed successor Citizen McCain have their way, the Amerikan war machine has only begun its long military occupation of Iraq. At the present rate of 4,000 dead in five years since the beginning of this war of choice, we can expect the human cost to the empire to be about 800 per year for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years.

In terms of the profits made by the corporate entities directly or indirectly involved in extracting wealth from this imperial enterprise, those might be acceptable losses. It's a volunteer army, after all, and the training and educational benefits promised with enlistment carry a certain risk of becoming cannon fodder. As the recruiting posters don't say, Uncle Sam wants YOU to see the world, visit exotic places, learn valuable technical skills, blow things up, kill the bad and expendable foreign people, and come home in a bag.

I think it was an article by Ben Stein in the New York Times last Sunday that said of the impending recession, triggered by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles: if you want to know the cause, just find out who made money on it. Like other cataclysms, many lost money and some lost a bundle, because someone else made an even bigger bundle.

If that political-economic logic can be applied to this war, many people are losing something and some people are losing everything, because someone else has hit the financial motherlode in Iraq. For them, the so-called surge really is working, and it is on their behalf that the war continues.