There’s a fabulous article over at Something Awful (warning– the site may be offensive to those without a sense of humor) about what the United States could have done with the 250 billion dollars already spent on the Iraqi war. Allow me to quote from some of the better choices:
…more than 80,000 of the world’s biggest truck!
We like things big in America, but South Africa and Australia get to have a modest glut of the world’s biggest truck. According to the truck’s creator only 50 to 75 are ordered every year. Why would we ever need to go to war again if we have 80,000 of these trucks? We could just drive over anyone who opposed us like some sort of apocalyptic monster truck rally.
…298,412,466 Sony Wega 23″ LCD HDTVs!
That number may not seem to clarify the issue, but it is an HDTV for every single person in the United States of America. Man, woman, child. Old or young. Everybody gets an HDTV from Sony courtesy of the government. Even better, the actual cost of doing this is only about 235 billion, leaving another 15 billion to actually ship the things all over the country and probably enough on top of that to buy a DVD player for everyone. Too bad the Democrats were too busy falling over each other to be the first in line to vote for the Iraq war. They really could have pitched this one to the people. “Guys, look, we could go get misguided revenge and blow up Iraq…or…we have this beautiful 23 inch crystal-clear Sony HDTV for each and every American citizen.” The thing is, this is probably going to cost another 250 billion, so why don’t the Democrats pitch this to the American people now? “We’ll bring the troops home and hey, everybody gets a TV!”
…every adult man and woman in Iraq $16,000 and a plane ticket to the United States!
This probably isn’t such a hot idea now that most of them want to smack us in the face with shoes, but instead of invading their country to get rid of Saddam and turning it into an apocalyptic hellstorm of violence we could have just flown everyone who wanted out to America. They’d have a nice startup nest egg. They could put a down payment on a decent 3-bedroom house somewhere in the Midwest, get jobs and live the life of freedom we seem to cherish so much. Everyone’s happy! The money we gave them goes right back into local economies, we get a bunch of great folks from Iraq to enrich our melting pot culture, all of the people who hate Saddam get to leave him in the dust, and the dumb jerks who like Saddam can stick around.
The mind boggles.