Was ‘Victory’ in Iraq ‘Easy’?

John McCain’s latest version of the ‘victory in Iraq’ leads him to believe it was ‘easy’. If, for just a moment, we neophytes who are not privy to the inner workings of the political mind high on the prospect of winning an election can tweak reality enough to see the world from his perspective, from his exalted position high in the clouds, way above our mortal heads, then we could possibly see how his interpretation of ‘easy’ might work.

From John McCain’s altered perspective the easy part was convincing a naïve and gullible Congress that war was the only response to a recalcitrant Saddam Hussein who had placed himself beyond the reaches of diplomacy and was bent on striking out against the mighty, self-righteous empire of the United States of America with his very well hidden arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (So well hidden, in fact, that no one has ever found them). And with Congress easily wrapped around George’s finger, the next phase of his plan was even easier.

George and the neocons were then able to award Cheney’s Haliburton and all of their buddies lucrative contracts to ‘rebuild’ Iraq. This allowed them all to ‘easily’ extract untold millions of dollars from the U.S. government under contracts without the pressure of actually hiring qualified workers or meeting deadlines or performing quality work. KBR was able to use a shell company to prevent paying taxes.

They were also able to easily award contracts to military suppliers for all of the war miscellany.

They were able to easily hire contractors to do all of the security work for diplomatic personnel and for trucking supplies around the country. These contractors are the recipients of ‘tens of billions of dollars’ of U.S. taxpayers money and apparently are allowed free reign over how they carry out their duties.

And of course they were easily able to put Saddam to death on trumped up charges in order to more easily take over Iraq.

It was also easy to create a new government bureaucracy called Homeland Security to more easily control the American public and keep track of our comings and goings, all based on perceived terrorist threat.

So, I suppose if John McCain can find a way to ignore the ‘unfortunate side effects’ of war, such as:

the over 4,500 U.S. troops callously sent to their deaths,
and the tens of thousands of U.S. military whose physical and psychological injuries have changed their lives forever,
and the thousands of Iraq veterans who have committed suicide since returning home,
and the countless families adversely affected by how their fathers, brothers and sons nightmares are affecting their lives,
and the millions of innocent Iraqi citizens who lost their lives,
and the damage done to U.S. relations with foreign nations over the execution of this illegal war,
and the further erosion of trust between American citizens and the their leaders over spying on us,

all so George’s buddies could get richer, then yeah, this was an ‘easy victory’.