Yes, yes, but what about the results?
Okay, so Bush is Evil.
Iraq was about the oil. Or about delivering beatings to poor brown people. Or maybe it was just stupid. Whatever. I'll accept any claim you might make about Iraq. Heck, let's even allow that maybe--just maybe!--9/11 was engineered by Evil Zionazi Neocons as an excuse to put U.S. troops in Iraq to make it easier to nuke Iran's peaceful uranium processing facilities.
I'll grant you anything.
But let me ask you a question or two.
Who is doing more to rebuild Iraq today, private and federal U.S. agencies, or the "insurgents"?
I mean, we all know that Halliburton is horribly corrupt and is skimming a huge percentage of the reconstruction budget to line their own evil pockets. But it's still less than half the budget. What's happening to the rest of the reconstruction budget? It's being used for reconstruction.
Meanwhile, what's the insurgency doing? Blowing up things--often things that have been reconstructed, or are in the middle of the reconstruction process. And what's worse, they're blowing up people. Not just evil occupation troops and greedy private contractors and brutal mercenaries, either. They're blowing up civilians. Churchgoers (well, mosque-goers). Children.
They blew up the U.N. building, and took special pride in killing the top U.N. reconstruction official and driving the U.N. out of the country entirely.
Doesn't it seem , by any objective measure, that right now today Halliburton--in all its greed and incompetence--is doing more for the people of Iraq than the insurgency is?
We hear that Iran and Syria are enabling the free flow of insurgents into Iraq. What are those insurgents bringing? Disaster recovery experts? Aid workers? Food and medicine? Schoolteachers? Diplomats? Project coordinators? Laborers? Construction materials? What, exactly, are they doing to help build a better tomorrow for anybody? What are they offering, besides death and destruction?
By all means, let us explore the shortcomings of our government and it's contractors. But don't you dare tell me that Halliburton, in all its disglory, isn't the best thing going in Iraq today, and is making a positive change while the opposition faction runs around killing people and destroying infrastructure.
It's sad, but if the insurgents were actually a reconstruction agency, and were twice as corrupt and incompetent as Halliburton, they'd still be doing infinitely more good in the world than they're doing right now--which is no good at all, and quite a lot of bad.
Everybody seems to think that the worst problem facing us today is a corrupt and incompetent Halliburton. We should be so lucky. I'd rather have an imperfect reconstruction contractor than a perfect insurgency. Which one are you working to get rid of?
Not that I actually believe all the horror stories about American ugliness. I'm just saying that even if those stories were true, the plain fact is that the U.S. doing more for Iraq today than all of its opponents put together. Even if you believe that the Bush Administration is acting out of greed and ignorance, it's clear that their greed and ignorance is having a significant positive side effect in Iraq. Meanwhile, the insurgency that claims to care so much about the wellbeing of their fellow arabs does nothing but kill them and destroy their country.
I ask you again: of all the troubles facing Iraq today, which one is your priority?