Cactus Tries Out a New Role: Pie in the Sky Bleeding Heart

After the WMD argument fell apart, the next one that GW’s apologists came up with was that it would create a lot of good will in the Middle East. Perhaps you remember how it was going to lead to a flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Of course, the whole “do it because its the right thing to do” argument never caught on, otherwise, the folks peddling it would have had to support going into places like Zimbabwe, where the suffering is actually worse but the overthrow of the SOB causing it is a lot easier.

But still, I was thinking that when I read this post. The author notes that according Joe Stiglitz, one minute of war in Iraq costs $380,000. He also notes that according to the UN’s World Food, Program, it costs as little as 19 cents a day to feed a child. He does a bit of arithmetic, and concludes that “[o]ne day of war in Iraq would feed 8,000,000 children for a year.”

Now, maybe the figures are wrong somewhere… say one day of war in Iraq would feed 1,000,000 children for a year. Regular readers know I’m not the bleeding heart pie in the sky type, but let me try that role on this one time. How much goodwill toward Americans could be created if we concluded that GW is too incompetent to be trusted to do anything other than make it worse, we call it a day in Iraq and donated six month’s worth of the cost of keeping this mess going to a good cause?