The United States is learning in Iraq what most men who were ever little boys have known all along. It’s a lot easier, and way more fun, to smash things and blow them up, than build things and fix them.
Smashing things and blowing them up is not only way more interesting and entertaining, it only takes a fraction of the time that it takes to build things and fix them.
This has certainly been true in Iraq. The military campaign went swiftly and efficiently, but the rebuilding, well, that’s another story.
Recently, President George W. Bush, unhappy with the pace of reconstruction in Iraq, replaced Jay Garner, who’d been sent to Baghdad only a few weeks ago to get the country back in shape after the U.S. bombed the snot out of it, with a new guy, L. Paul Bremer. Right off the bat, I think everyone’s going to take more seriously a guy whose first name is just an initial, as opposed to a guy named Jay.
The White House is hoping this new U.S. civilian administrator can bring order to Iraq, a place that has become somewhat chaotic without water, electricity, or the rule of law.
If you ever went to the beach as a kid, you know what Bremer is up against. Bremer is having to build the sand castle. But the real fun comes in smashing the sand castle. Building a sand castle is slow, methodical work, but when you see that tide coming in, and know your castle’s minutes are numbered, it’s a wonderful excuse to indulge yourself in a brief frenzy of stomping and kicking and smashing.
Smashing things is also a much bigger crowd pleaser. You don’t see George Bush landing on an aircraft carrier to brag about rebuilding a country’s watermains and erecting some hydro towers. Boring! No, what George wants to talk about is kicking Saddam’s ass, which, while still missing in the technical sense of the word, was achieved in some measure by blowing up lots of his stuff.
Blowing up stuff is fun because you see the results quickly. It’s not what you’d call precision work. Okay, you want to make sure you hit the munitions factory and not the hospital, but it’s not like it really matters what part of the munitions factory you hit.
But when you’re building that factory, it’s fussy detail work. Light switch right here, bomb assembly line right there, that kind of thing.
Let’s say you have two guys getting orders from their boss. One has to blow something up, the other has to fix something.
Boss: Okay, O’Neill, I want you to bomb that factory.
O’Neill: I’m on it.
Boss: And you, Simpson, I want you to get the city’s water system up and running again.
Simpson: Sure thing, I’ll get my crew together.
O’Neill: I’m done. Anything else you want?
All the big, successful Hollywood action films are based on blowing things up, not putting them back together again. What if Bruce Willis, to defeat the bad guys, had to put up drywall and upgrade some wiring, instead of blowing their helicopter out of the sky with a surface-to-air missile? Would you pay to see a movie like that? I wouldn’t.
U.S. voters will be a lot more impressed with George Bush if, just before he comes up for re-election, he’s able to blow up something else. He can still have people working in the background restoring water and electricity to Iraq, but that’s not going to play very well with Americans, except for those who run Halliburton, and are best friends of its former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, and are making billions and billions of dollars on the reconstruction of Iraq.
If you’re not in on that gravy train, you want to see something blow up. Maybe Iceland. Or Saskatchewan. Whatever.
