Picture a Lakota sweat lodge in the Rose Garden or an ayahuasca ceremony in the Green Room…. Hell, imagine each official visitor having to undergo a sweat-lodge session and a spiritual healing before being allowed to talk business. Maybe do a little sage smudging in the oval office, then get yourself a case of organic orange-oil cleanser and get the barbeque smudges off the doorknobs. It doesn’t necessarily need to be televised or even talked about if you’re afraid of what the neighbors will think… but then again, it might serve us well if the entire country could partake in a televised mass shamanic trance to exorcise the demonic negative energy that has permeated the executive mansion and the spirit of every cognizant sentient being for the past eight years.
     And what a bizarre eight years it has been…. After the brain-rattling events of the Bush v. Gore election the country was still reeling when just nine months later the towers were obliterated in Manhattan, the Pentagon was hit, and the White House targeted. That was all the neo-cons needed to steamroll an insane policy of mass retribution over a nation in shock. The release of anthrax by persons wishing to sway the country toward war sealed the deal. Rumsfeld and Cheney set Colin Powell up in front of the UN with a little vile of Ice 9 and he waved it around like a gangster with a Glock, swearing on his mother’s good name that Saddam was packing tons of the Devil’s dust, along with VX, sarin, ricin, botulism toxin, mustard gas, and maybe even nukes. Sure, they hung his brass out to dry on that bullshit later on when nothing was found and all the intelligence behind the accusations was demonstrated to be bogus, but it worked all the same.
      From the outset of the Afghanistan invasion the Bush team had plans for Iraq. They saw the opportunity to relieve American military stockpiles of aging munitions, test the frontiers of our military reach and channel the largest volume of wartime spending in human history to friends and family throughout the petrochemical and military industrial complexes. They knew they could tap the treasury for that 237 billion dollar “Peace Dividend” budget surplus that had been acquired during the Clinton years. We were supposed to use that to begin fixing social security, education, health care, and infrastructure in America. Instead it was used to light up Afghanistan. The money for Iraq was just printed up fresh and borrowed from Chinese banks against a ballooning national debt of nine and a half trillion or so.
     The idea was simple on paper. If we’ve already spent all the money and time and political capital to get ourselves to the region why not finish the job George Senior didn’t by toppling Saddam and tapping into Iraqi oil to cover the long term cost? Use it as an extension of our political will and our military presence between a nuclear Pakistan and nuclearizing Iran; establish permanent fly zones, give ourselves access to forty more years of oil and a good view of the neighbors. Oh, and let’s give‘em some democracy too. That oughta work, right?