You're On Your Own

"Progress" is now being clarified: We've reached a point where we can tell the Iraqis, despite the savage destruction we rained down on their country and the insurgency we caused has perpetuated, you're on your own.

Apparently we aren't getting enough of the oil wealth the White House promised us three years ago. Not enough flowers were thrown under our tank treads and not enough soldiers were kissed (or more) by almond-eyed, black haired women in veils. Instead of exported oil wealth flowing into American SUVs, the Iraqis are now having to import oil despite their vast reserves. We've donated $21 billion to Halliburton and others in this failed reconstruction effort, another tribute to the incompetence of the Bush administration.

We leave the Iraqis with an insurgency, a destroyed infrastructure, an oil economy that can't be sustained and a load of half-assed American projects half completed for the Iraqis to tear down. They generate less electricity now than before the war and that isn't because the up to 100,000 casualties requiring less energy. It's because War CEO Bush screwed up the reconstruction of Iraq as badly as he screwed up the few companies he tried to run and for the same reason: As long as he had the power, as long has he had competent men bowing to him, as long as his comfortable lifestyle wasn't compromised he didn't want to be bothered with the details. He wanted to follow in his buddy Ken Lay's steps, build a company from nothing based on nothing with no accountability. That killed the Bush companies and sports teams and it has killed his reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Iraq needs an estimated $100 billion to rebuild. That's about 1.7 billion barrels at today's prices assuming all sixty dollars of the price goes back to Iraq. They'd better get pumping. We seem to be pulling out, at least financially. All this while our own ambassador reports that more Iraqis are dying from Iraqi militias than from terrorists. That sounds like civil war to me, even though we're not lining up armies to face one another. That isn't the kind of civil war we'll have in Iraq. It will be a slow burn, a few dozen casualties here, a few more dozen there. There may even be a national unity government but that won't stop the killing. It will be years, even decades, before the killing there stops, long after an American president has realized what our current one won't admit: The war in Iraq wasn't worth it. Not even for 1.7 billion barrels of oil.