Operation: Golden Shower

Cross posted at Unscrewing the Inscrutable

A supporter of the Bush Administration's War in Iraq explained to me that our real goal in Iraq is no longer concerns over WMD's, the removal of Saddam Hussein, and was never about oil (Man I almost cracked up when I read that one), it's about getting the Arab world to embrace democracy and be so impressed with our Nation Building skills that they can't help but 'like us'. This is my response:

That's The Plan? Our Plan is basically to get Iraqi's and subsequently many Arabs to 'like us'? The Plan is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, invading them, blowing the crap out of them, terrorizing the survivors, stealing the oil, and ignoring their issues. IOW, by pissing them off so bad they're willing to kill anyone who evens talks to us, we're going to get them to 'like us'?

(pounds head on keyboard) O-K; as long as we're in the land of neocon surreality , as long as we're working with one hundred billion dollars .. not to honk my own horn, but I believe I've come up with an alternative plan to get the Iraqi's to love us.

My Plan by DarkSyde (Note-I originally posted on this on Pharyngula)

Operation: Golden Shower, which doesn't get a single person killed. Instead of spending 100 billion for the privilege of being shot at and hated, we pull every GI out of Iraq except for pilots and crew of a small fleet of cheap propellor driven planes.

The Plan: Since Baghdad is the key to Iraq, all we have to really worry about is getting the Iraqi's in Baghdad to 'like us'. So every day we take about twenty planes and circle all over Baghdad with sacks of money and throw it out the window uniformly. We can use mostly one dollar bills, because that's enough for an Iraqi to live on for a few days, but mix in a few tens or twenties or even hundreds, just to add some excitement and fun. We can make it more fun by using the Cracker Jack marketing method of including some prizes with the money. Something like "This coupon entitles the bearer to a new US manufactured SUV or a four year degree at a major US University courtesy of the American Taxpayer."

With our savings from the pullout we can afford 100 billion over the next several years. So we can throw out enough money for each family, on average, to receive maybe 30,000 dollars for the operating life time of Heavenly Shower. (That's One Hundred Billion dollars divided by three million families.) Or enough for them to live on for as long as twenty years, easy. And they still get to keep earning their income doing whatever they do. We can start with 100 million dollars a day. So we're talking about 3 billion a month, considerably less than the 5-7 billion a month we're spending now.

Now I absolutely assure you this will engender immediate love for America at the community level in the target city. I promise you that if a plane went over my house everyday and dropped sacks of money to my community we'd all appreciate them very, very, much. And true, my plan may not be as sexy and gory as the present plan proposed by the strategic geniuses at the helm in Iraq, but it's no more costly huh? In fact it's cheaper! And not one person gets killed. And, it's a sure thing.

Insurgents? Well, we can play faves here. If you folks in southeast Sadr City have been burning some American flags and chanting some anti-American slogans, there will be no soup for you! Play ball and you get sacks of money thrown at you from the sky. Don't play ball and no money from the sky. Can you imagine what the community would do to anyone who even suggested cutting off that flow of cold hard cash? Jebus they'd string them up! No more insurgency. Nor would I suspect the Iraqis would want to share this bounty with outsiders, so no more Arab terrorists from other countries. They'd be lynched or run out on a rail. End of that problem.

They say money can't buy love, but if we throw out sacks of money to the Iraqi people it will be Valentine's Day 365 days a year in Baghdad. The best part is the Iraqis would start loving us right away. My God the Iraqi's will be naming their kids after us! They'll be shouting the virtues of America from the rooftops. They'll build statues of us. And the economy, well I mean talk about Supply Side Economics! This is not a fiscal stimulus, this is a fiscal orgasm. It's like an anti-tax. Reagan could come back to life from this kind of thing. It would explode into almost instant prosperity taking away even more terrorist ammunition and giving them a shot at a real self sufficient modern nation. The money would stream to outlying provinces and work it's way into the local economies throughout the region. And although the Iraqi's would be free to choose whom they wish to help rebuild the infrastructure and get the oil a'flowin, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if American firms, from the country who is showering the populace with currency, were given special consideration. The beauty of that is we would be getting some of our investment back in the form of jobs, the kind where no one wants to ram your convoy or work site with a suicide car bomb. And the Iraqi's would be paying for it with their 'own' money.

Some may say 'm a dreamer .... but I'm not the only one... Call me a dreamer, but call me inventive as well. For in Operation Golden Shower no one gets hurt, no US APC's roll through Baghdad streets, no contractors from the US or anywhere else to be captured. No Iraqi's detained or abused. No IED's. No friendly fire incidents. No dead children. No deaths at all on either side, not one. No letters to families, no painful recuperation in the VA, and we will be the most popular country in the history of planet earth.

What Would Jesus Do? Think of the Biblical metaphor here: Manna from Heaven. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if large segments of the population converted to Christianity. But regardless, as far as getting them to 'like us', it's an absolute lock. We might well end up being the first Nation awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty soon I bet there would be a line a mile long outside the halls of power in Washington full of theocrats, petty oligarchs, and third world dictators demanding, to know why they haven't been targeted for invasion. Heck our allies might even want to get in on this gravy train and start throwing sacks of British pounds, French Francs, and shiny new Euro's, out of planes also. This thing could really catch on. Pretty soon someone might even think 'outside the box' and start throwing sacks of money to the Palestinians ...

So to summarize you get:

1. Immediate, unconditional love shown by the Iraqi people to the US

2. No insurgents

3. No outside Arab terrorists

4. No deaths of US service people or Iraqis

5. The respect of the World

6. Huge tax savings

Crazy huh? It's not real conservative is it to toss the GDP of California down the toilet to get someone to 'like us'? But if that's what we're going to do, if we're going to shoot hundreds of billions out of money cannons in Iraq like this for these lofty noble goals, let's at least do so with some nuance and precision. If our solution is to throw money at the problem, let's throw some f*cking money at the problem and stop dicking around about it. If we're planning on investing one hundreds billion dollars in getting the Iraqi's to 'like us', how about instead of using the money for bombs and prisons and tanks and body armor, we just give them the goddamn money?

Operation Golden Shower may not make a lot of sense, but it makes more sense than spending the same amount of money blowing the crap out of them and terrorizing the lucky survivors. That is, if our goal is to get them to 'like us'.