Simplified pencil-sharpener: Open window (A) and fly kite (B). String (C) lifts small door (D) allowing moths (E) to escape and eat red flannel shirt (F). As weight of shirt becomes less, shoe (G) steps on switch (H) which heats electric iron (I) and burns hole in pants (J). Smoke (K) enters hole in tree (L), smoking out opossum (M) which jumps into basket (N), pulling rope (O) and lifting cage (P), allowing woodpecker (Q) to chew wood from pencil (R), exposing lead. Emergency knife (S) is always handy in case opossum or the woodpecker gets sick and can't work.
A few years ago I wrote an article about the Medicare prescription drug plan that required a much simpler solution than our Congress and our President gave us. The same comparison can be made about the solution for the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. And Rube Goldberg would understand how overly complicated our institutions of government make things unnecessarily.
I have often thought of the great Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg. Goldberg (1883-1970) was a beloved national figure as well as an often-quoted radio and television personality during his 60-year professional career. Through his "inventions," Rube Goldberg showed difficult ways to achieve results that should be easy. His cartoons were "...symbols of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results." Rube believed that there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way. He also noted that a surprising number of people opted to do things the hard way. So allow me to connect how our leaders' actions regarding the withdrawal of troops from Iraq clearly manifest Rube Goldberg's observations.
The military has given us 3 options to the problem: go big, go long, and withdraw now. This is what we have paid the military strategists to tell us? Go big is impossible because we do not have the troops or the will. Go long is a lingering death solution only to save face before we withdraw. And withdraw now will give us the same result as go long in terms of Iraq's civil war. Given these 3 options the average idiot would say: 1) Plan A is impossible and plans B) and C) would probably have the same result with plan B) causing more death and destruction to our troops and Iraq and costing hundreds of billions of dollars more of our treasury. One of the idiots who likes plan A) is John McCain who is rationalizing our military fiasco in the same way that he rationalized our defeat in Viet Nam. We had over 500,000 troops in Viet Nam at one time and bombed the country more than the combined bombing in WW II. Yet McCain and others blamed the Viet Nam fiasco on the politicians and the American peoples' lack of will. It was again the same tired Cold War argument for our defeat in Viet Nam and the stalemate in Korea.
The big difference between those military incursions and Iraq has all to do with oil and little to do with democracy. The United States is the only country that uses its incredibly expensive military to oversee and protect the U.S. global corporate interests. The neo-con plan called PNAC is a euphemism for creating so-called friendly democracies in the Middle East to protect our oil interests in that area and to use Israel as our surrogate army. In that respect, Israel has made a great deal of foreign policy mistakes based upon the outdated premise that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Both Democrats and Republicans have now turned to the Lee Hamilton bi-partisan commission approach similar to the 911 Commission. The only difference this time is that the chairman of this commission is James Baker, the guy who stole the 2000 election for Bush. He was the direct cause of the problem in that he was responsible for Bush being in office illegally and stealing the election of 2000. I think that we can all agree that had all the votes been counted in Florida in 2000, the Iraq problem would not exist today. In addition, our dependence on oil for which Baker has a vested interest, is the main cause of the problem which for financial reasons, Baker has a conflict of interest.
The Democrats who are generally spineless and also part of that same complicated mess we call government have also been looking to the Baker Commission as an excuse for them not taking bold and courageous action. Instead, the Dems are walking away from the problem in an attitude that smacks of politics. Their strategy seems to be that Bush and the Republican former majority created the problem and lets let them pay the political price for that by waiting for another useless report from the Baker Commission. But, that is not what the American people voted for. They want action and they want it now. To defer this plan to a Commission of the "good old boys" who see things from a rear view mirror is not the answer. People are dying uselessly and we all want action now. So here is my simpler plan for the withdrawal of our troops:
1.Build one or more military bases at or near the oil fields to protect them from any harm and deploy some of our troops there with adequate air cover and protection of their flanks. We already have a military base in a hostile country, Cuba. The Cubans have never tried to seize that base in over 46 years.
2.Deploy the rest of the troops to nearby friendly countries.
3.Negotiate with Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others in the area.
4.Persuade Israel to participate in real negotiations with the Palestinians.
5.Subsidize all industries with billions of dollars to develop alternative energy transformation. Taking the economics out of oil production would be the most useful expenditure in the fight against terrorism and literally make the Middle East far less strategic. (This one will take real courage but, had we applied what we have spent on Iraq to alternative energy technology, we would have been far better off.).
In the fall of 2002, anyone with political savvy should have known that the build-up to war against Iraq was misguided and was foolish in light of the fact that Iraq was not a threat and was the only antagonist against Iran, a country that was far more dangerous to us. That is why we armed Iraq to the hilt in the 1980s as a counterbalance to the Islamic radicals in Iran. At a time in early 2003 when the Iranian people were looking for a more democratic government, Bush and Congress aided and abetted by many Democrats put the blinders on and cheered mightily as Bush called Iran a part of the "Axis of Evil." Many of them knew better and capitulated to the political climate at the time. What a monumental blunder for our country and the rest of the world. Anyone who voted for that war should have the good conscience to apologize to the nation and say: Never again! Are you listening Rube?