War

So I’m watching my country lurch mindlessly into a war that I’m told we’re definitely going to win. Not only win: we’re going to bring peace to the entire Middle East, and democracy to its oppressed peoples.

Because here’s what’s going to happen: after we’ve finished bombing Baghdad back to the stone age and blasting its infrastructure into dust and burying its people under the rubble of their miserable, embargo-fueled existence; after we’ve installed our military government and started the process of simultaneously uniting the fragmented pieces of the Iraqi populace and shoving Western-style democracy down their throats; after we station our soldiers at Iraqi oilfields to protect our new investment and begin the process of bringing in American companies and awarding them lucrative contracts to rebuild everything we’ve just destroyed; after we do all that, Iran is going to glance westward, and see the dictatorship we’ve set up to supplant the dictatorship we’ve just dislodged, and watch Kurds and Turks carving each other up in the North, and Shiites massing against us in the south, and the tattered remainders of the Baathist minority being butchered by the people they have oppressed for so long in the middle; and they’re going to think, all those Mullahs and despots and bureaucratic stewards of that two-decade-old Iranian religious autocracy, they’ll think: “Hey, that’s a good idea! Let’s try democracy for while!”