They keep referring to the Iraq situation as “a war”.  The fact is we are not at war,  we never were at war.  What we did was the equivalent of an invasion of a foreign country.  We invaded their land without provocation and on the pretences of completely false information gathered by piss poor intelligence.  Mel Brooks should make a comedy on the crappy White House Intelligence that the Bush administration endorsed.  Maybe he could call it “The Iraqians are coming! The Iraqians are coming!”

To this day we all call the Iraqi situation a "war".  Yet it is not a war—it’s an occupation.  When we finally pull our troops out, we’ll be pulling out of an occupation, not a war.  We’ll be leaving basically with our tails betwixt our legs.  We got our butts kicked.  A trillion dollars has been wasted on the combined military maneuvers in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s sickening and unforgivable.

What did these loose screws in the White House and the Pentagon hope to accomplish, anyway?  The three greatest conquerors of all time by land mass acquired are Genghis Kahn, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon.  Genghis Kahn took basically twice the land mass that Alexander the Great took.  These were the days when the lives of soldiers and sailors were far less valued.  These were times when life expectancy was far less.  These were times when arms and mobilization cost nothing compared to what it costs today to arm and mobilize our modern armies. The days of conqueror are long gone.

We should have learned this in Korea, but we didn’t.  Vietnam proved to the entire world that the will of the people of their country could overcome nearly anything.  They built tunnels and lived in them like gophers; they sacrificed their own lives to take the lives of their enemies and they never gave up.  They fought for their families, their homes and their beliefs.  It should have been learned then what it would take to occupy even the smallest of countries--just onecountry. We should have learned to respect the land of others but we did not. Yeah, it was easy back in the days when it was rifles and pistols versus tomahawks and bows and arrows.   The Russians found out how hard it was to invade another human being’s land when they invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979.  It took nine grueling, bloody years for them to figure out its impossibility, but they did.  I think.

We didn’t, though. No, we've got too much Hollywood in us.  We still think we have this invincible army that never loses and is unmatched by any other.  I remember watching the news when we invaded Iraq for the second time and they gave an estimate of 26 billion dollars as the amount it would cost U.S. tax payers just to mobilize our military and get to Iraq.  Just to get there! This is an alarming number.   As fore mentioned I read an article on MSNBC that this occupation along with our futile efforts in Afghanistan will probably cost in excess of a trillion dollars when it’s all said and done; that’s $1,000,000,000,000.  And if you didn’t read my article on how much a trillion dollars is, know that a trillion one dollar bills connected end to end could stretch from the Earth to the sun with a couple of million miles to spare; over 92,000,000 million miles of one dollar bills.  These numbers alone should have provided the top thinkers in the White House with a strong clue as to what such an outing would cost us, not to mention the innocent lives that have been lost on both sides.  But that light bulb would not light over any of their heads.  What can one expect?  Low currents cannot light bulbs.

The fact of the matter is, it is just plain impossible in today’s modern era for a country to take another country by means of conventional warfare.  It simply costs too much. Even if the attacking force occupies the defending country, the defending people will never give up.  Why should they?  Would we?  A better plan would have been to spend a small fraction of the amount we spent on this occupation and put a price on the heads of the terrorist leaders we seek.  For example, Saddam Hussein was eventually ratted off because he had a 25 million dollar price on his head, dead or alive. Wouldn’t it have been much easier to put a billion dollars on Hussein's and Bin Laden's heads and wait for someone to bring him in?  We would have only needed a small force to make the arrest.  If we would have only spent a couple of billion dollars on them, we would have saved 998 billion dollars. That’s astronomical.  The government could have gave split all that money up and sent it out to us deserving Americans.  We could have all gone to Disney World.  Most importantly, we would be minus tens of thousands grieving family members and friends who have lost loved ones in these years long military malpractices.

In the end, we lost control of this occupation not because our soldiers and sailors weren’t good enough, not because we didn’t send enough troops (we would have needed more money to do this), not because of lack of support on the home front.  We lost this campaign because of the fools who held the reigns to this ridiculous invasion and occupation and of the short-sightedness of those who planned the invasion and because everybody watches Hollywood movies too much.  Apparently they didn’t watch Platoon or All Quiet on the Western Front.

Today our country is a wreck. We've blown so much money on this war it has seized up an already crippled economy.  We have put such a strain on our country, one has to wonder how much more we can take?  Don't think for a second that all the leaders of all countries haven't taken note of this.  You can bet that Kim Jong-il, North Korea's tyrannical leader and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have both recognized that our government couldn't finance a girl scout troop to invade either one of these dangerous countries.

Khan, Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Charlemagne, Caesar, Grant, Lee, Patton, MacArthur, say good-bye to them--we will never see the likes of them again.  The time for conquering ended with the end of World War II.  It only took us took us nearly 70 years to figure this out.

You may think that this is a plea to end the bloodshed in these two countries.  It is not.  The lives lost, the money so needlessly wasted has already taken its toll.  This is instead a plea to everyone in the world to finally understand that the time for war and bloodshed is over. No one country can control another country ever again.  And that's the way it should be.

Signed, The Anonymous Cabby

Disclaimer:  Articles by the Anonymous Cabby are periodically by emailed to us. The Anonymous Cabbie is in no way affiliated with Buddy's Taxi, Buddy's Transport Services and Spokane Airport Express Shuttle.  Articles by the Anonymous Cabbie are strictly for entertainment purposes.