Anyone who works for a social service agency, hospital, or school has had to deal with outcomes and benchmarks, particularly if that program receives public money. They are written into your funding allocation and tracked monthly, quarterly and yearly by some auditor who will rag you constantly should you fail somehow to meet the mark. And if you fail to hit that ceiling too many times, you risk loosing all that money, sometimes permanently. We who receive the public money to do, presumably the public good, have lived in this world for a good number of years. We live with it, why can’t the folks in Iraq?
We could say that the Iraqis don’t want a democracy-that they want to keep fighting amongst themselves and let Allah sort it out in the end. This may be true. Others say that Iraq is an artificial country made up after the World Wars and that the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds aren’t a people. This could be true too. Yet neither of these points matter. What matters to us Americans is that we gave them money and blood and we want something out of it. We look upon Iraq like we do a product in a store. When I bought my lawnmower today, I expected that when I got home, it would cut my grass. When the American people give my substance abuse treatment program money, they expect me to cure people of drug and alcohol addiction. And when the U.S. subsides a country, we expect it to be a iPod wearing, American Idol watching, SUV driving, Coors guzzling democracy-Gosh darn it all!
I feel for the folks in Iraq but the bottom line is that they have failed to meet the benchmarks of what it takes to be a democratic country. If Iraq was a social service agency, it would have it funding allocation cut and the money given to another organization to run things. I suppose we could give the money to Iran or Syria. They would be happy to divide Iraq up, take what they want, throw a few bones at some cronies who share their political or religious ideology, then leave the rest to blow away in the hot dust.
Better yet, let’s give it to the Israelis.
No comments:
Post a Comment