Mulligan Iraq

(In case you are unfamiliar with golfing terms, a "mulligan" is a chance to hit the ball again without counting the first unacceptable stroke.)

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/02/war-iraq-helped-finance-personal-beltway-financial-boom/
How the Iraq War Financed a Beltway Real Estate Boom
By Ken Silverstein

Back in the DC real estate doldrums of the mid-1990s, before he helped pave the way for war in Iraq, Stephen Rademaker owned a modest condo in Arlington, Va.

Then, a few years later, as a House staffer on the International Relations Committee, Rademaker wrote the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which called for regime change, a phrase that altered the course of history. Bill Clinton signed the Act, which became the basis for the congressional authorization for the use of force against Saddam Hussein four years later; by then Rademaker was working at the State Department.

Things soon took a turn for the better, at least for Rademaker; he left government and went to work as a lobbyist, eventually joining countless numbers of retired government officials who cleaned up, directly or indirectly, by leading the country into war.

I wrote the other day about two of these former senior government officials, who have made a killing in the post-9/11 era: former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh. But when it comes to those who profited directly from the last thirteen years of war, Exhibit A perhaps is Rademaker, a man for whom the Iraq war became a giant piggybank.

[...]


Also worth mentioning is that Rademaker is married to neocon Danielle Pletka, another former Hill staffer who is now senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, and who clings by her nails to the cliff’s edge of sanity. She and her think tank were major proponents of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and last August, Pletka co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed that called President Obama’s response to ISIS “inadequate.” She demanded that Obama arm the Syrian opposition, send military advisers and trainers to Iraq “by the thousands, not hundreds,” and stop “blocking the delivery of much-needed weapons” to Iraq.

There is a lot of interesting skullduggery here, but I am most interested in the portion I underlined in the paragraph first quoted and the one last quoted.

Imagine this:

(1) instead of attacking Al Qa'ida directly, we went off and attacked somebody who we have been taught to hate since the Gulf War on TV in 1990,


(2) this person and his regime had nothing to do with 9/11 or the terrorism of that day,

(3) the official cause for war was a lie.

By today, we have spent just over a $ trillion in this misplaced endeavor, with future costs estimated to total $3 trillion +plus ( a large portion being medical care for injured vets).

So, why not go back now and do it right for another coupla $trillion?

Well, why not?

It takes a while to get it right.

And while we're at it, let's bail out the Financial Sector again in 2017, and get it right this time.

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