As mentioned yesterday, regular maintenace is necessary to keep up on the friendly agreements we all like to benefit from. I think the saying goes: Fredom isn’t free.
Unfortunately, lots of people at the top don’t want to think about it. It’s more interesting to be the first to the top of the mountain, not the sherpa keeping food stocked at base camp. For a more precise cost to such obtuse thinking look no further than the US invasion of Iraq.
Mark Danner writes:
Three years and eight months after the Irag war began, the secretary of defense and his allies see in Irag not one war but two. One is the Real Irag War – the “outright success” that only very few would deny, the war in which American forces were “greeted as liberators,” according to the famous prediction of Vice President Dick Cheney, which he doggedly insists was in fact proved true: “true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly.” It is “within this context” that the former secretary of defense and the vice president see America’s current war in Iraq as in fact comprising a brief, dramatic, and “enormously successful” war of a few weeks’ duration leading to a decisive victory, and then . .. what? Well, whatever we are in now: a Phase Two, a “postwar phase” (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) that has lasted three and a half years and continues. In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase, 2,700 Americans have died – and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized – unplanned.
Iraq-The War of the Imagination
Men of action like actionable things. Keeping up the place isn’t a thing. But it’s costly: 2700 lives if someone is counting. Whether housekeepers or peacekeepers, gardeners ot garrison- name these jobs and give them their value.
Home Economics 