A Farewell to Ereck Plancher

Okay, aside from the emotional and spiritual aspects of the Ereck Plancher situation that are beyond price, and the challenge of putting money value on the life of a human being, he was was worth ten million. I’ll give you that. Wide receivers are hard to come by in a recession. UCF knew or should have known he was at risk for serious health problems. But at that rate, let’s see. We squandered about 5,000 American lives in Iraq if you only count fatalities, and the truth is that we spent a lot more money getting them going than we spent preparing Ereck Plancher for higher education and athletic greatness, but ten million is a nice round number, lots of zeros. (If it bothers you to think of them as squandered, just explain to me what exactly we accomplished there, please. I wish someone would, someone with something like normal human sensibilities, meaning not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.) The U.S. knew or should have known invasion of Iraq was a risk of fatal injuries. At ten million a pop, that’s (10 X 5,000) million = 50,000 million, or fifty billion, right? My eyes sort of glaze over in the billions, so you have to check my numbers.

Then there are the 75,000 Iraqi collateral civilian deaths. Iraqis aren’t worth as much as Americans, of course, which explains why so many had to be eliminated, and 75,000 is vaguely in the realm of the requisite ten-to-one ratio that we approved for Viet-Nam with a comfortable margin, so for the sake of convenience, let’s do something crazy to humor my challenged arithmetic and assume (at least for financial purposes) that Iraqis are worth as much as aspiring American athletes. 75,000 Iraqi fatalities at ten million each is (10 X 75,000) million = 750,000 million, or 750 billion, right?

You know and I know there is no validity in making our military and those Iraqi civilians equal in value to college football players. The military chose to get involved, and the Iraqis had no choice, therefore, they have no legal recourse and no practical monetary value, but I’m just sort of wondering. You know what I mean? The odd thing is that the total comes out to about what has been spent on “operations” in Iraq so far.

Maybe that’s a good place to stop in more ways than one, so we don’t have to look at it too closely.

Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy

NObamable

You might think from the title that this would be a complaint about the award to President Obama, but actually, no. That's just a little wordplay to get the opposition all excited.

Remember Croatia and Serbia? Does anybody remember Croatia and Serbia? There was, like, this war with guns and violence and killing and atrocities, and it was getting genocidal and threatening to be regional, and Silly Bill sent over the U.S. Airforce, and they bombed the hoorah out of Serb military installations and production facilities, until the Serbs ran out of stuff to blow stuff up, and they made a separate country for Croatia, and now they don’t necessarily like each other or even get along, but at least they don’t kill each other so much? Remember that?

The problem was, obviously, that we were just too clinical about the whole thing. We sent in aircraft to cut off the means of waging war, and it worked. The number of Americans who died as a direct consequence of combat was what? Under a hundred? What kind of intervention is that? You can’t have a war without killing people. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s contrary to the whole concept of war.

And so, what kind of political capital do you accumulate by ending wars without adding bloodshed? Answer: not much. The Army wasn’t happy about it. Veterans weren’t happy about it. Patriotic political organizations weren’t happy about it. Conservative politicians weren’t happy about it. They didn’t want it to work, and the absolute worst thing about it was that it worked. Well, so they didn’t waste any time whacking Clinton down to size. They had trouble making the Bosnian strategic success into a bad thing, but Silly Bill cut his own throat, so to speak, for them by the mistake of participating in a questionable personal relationship, and even worse, thinking it might not be that big of a deal. Politically, you may be able to survive not killing people, but you sure aren’t going to get away with any personal indiscretions. That, my friends, would be grounds for impeachment.

Thus the foundation was built for the advent of George Bush, who in the aftermath of 9/11 quickly demonstrated that he could have only one hope of ever achieving anything like presidential stature, and that was to take responsibility for the decision to sacrifice American lives in the execution of a Great Cause. What the Great Cause would be remains somewhat unclear, but we escalated the killing straightaway, and the place of George Bush in history was thereby assured.

Why we betrayed the rebels and accepted Hussein’s repression of the Shiia after the Gulf War in the first place remains another mystery. Apparently the simple expedient of neutralizing his helicopters and tanks would have been sufficient to achieve regime change, but maybe the question of internal instability somehow initially justified the need to intervene only in a direct and comprehensive way. For reasons that remain mostly incomprehensible, however, Hussein was allowed to continue his repressive policies, which somehow eventually became part of the justification for the Heroic invasion by George Bush. Five thousand American casualties later, the coalition of token participation has achieved little assured result other than unresolvable conflict and international skepticism accompanied by an economic collapse aggravated by the continual diversion of attention elsewhere, and Bush slipped away into history to write his memoirs, his war predictably unconcluded, a presidential stature of mythic proportions undoubtedly under construction. That is, if anybody remembers he was ever president, or wants to. It was Bush that was President, right? Not Karl Rove?

This is the preposterous situation, going back at least to the first Gulf War, into which Barack Obama enters as successor to George Bush. My concern for Obama has always been taking over a no-win situation that the conservatives were only too happy to relinquish, so they could blame it on someone else. Just as obviously, they wasted no time jumping on that bandwagon. Witness Hannity and Beck. If anything, their real consternation, once again, is the all too apparent danger that Obama might at least move toward some kind of international consensus. Even the mere prospect of achieving progress in the global resolution of conflict is just too much for his opponents.

And you are still clueless enough to wonder why the man deserves a Nobel Peace Prize? You should work for Fox News.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy