Once upon a time, I was employed at an athletic club. Every morning, there was a water exercise class that would be attended by anywhere from 18-25 long-in-the-tooth individuals (median age… maybe 70). They paid special membership rates to take two of these classes a week, either Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday.
A long time before I started, a Friday class was also added under the guise of being available to people who had missed one of their regularly scheduled weekday classes. However, this Friday class was mainly attended by members of the Monday/Wednesday class who hadn’t missed any of their weekly classes, essentially, they just regarded it as part of their schedule.
I would admit that it is entirely plausible that some of these people had no idea that they were benefiting from something that they had not paid for and were, technically, getting for free. Upon my sleuth-like discovery of this conundrum, I passed the information along to the person in charge of that department, who, in as many words, told me not to worry about it, that’s how it has always been and it can’t be changed now.
That’s all well and good, except it didn’t jive with my virtuous side, and the person who told me it had a propensity to be lazy and dislike confrontation, which I knew was the real reason for her answer. So I passed the information on to the owner, who called for an end to the Friday class at once, and enlisted the curmudgeon-like, lazy fitness trainer who told me this wasn’t a problem to explain the situation to the class.
Now think for a second… what do you think happened?
A) The classmates got together and continued to run the Friday class by themselves in the pool, sans teacher.
B) The classmates just stopped coming on Friday and wrote a nice ‘thank you’ note to the owner for allowing the class to take place.
C) The classmates signed a petition stating that they would like the class back and would be willing to negotiate the terms of its return.
D) The classmates raised holy hell, including, but not limited to threatening to quit the athletic club and not coming to the annual Senior thanksgiving party.
If you guessed D; you would be correct, people are never grateful for what they receive with out asking for. And all of this has got me thinking about Iraq.
We’ve been in Iraq for more than 5 years now. We’ve tried to quell the sectarian violence, keep our own people safe and rebuild the infrastructure of the fledgling nation. Yet, we’ve been met with dissent and opposition here in America, in Iraq and around the world.
Iraq never asked, at least formally, to be liberated from under the rule of Saddam Hussein, however, it was arguably the right thing to do from a human rights standpoint. What seems to ruffle so many feathers is the fact that we went into Iraq under the semblance of finding WMDs (which apparently don’t exist or made exit, stage right, to Syria or Iran).
But, Iraq (through violence) and the rest of the world (including the American left (through dissent)) have become the same as those little old grandmas and grandpas who were just irate that they weren’t getting their Friday time in the pool anymore (what they wanted, us to leave Iraq or do things differently). The American right (and other supporters of our efforts in Iraq) has been like the lazy athletic director, who is too gun shy and too lazy to try a different approach to fix a problem that has gone on the way it has for much too long.
But in this case, there is no self-interested, motivated leader (like the athletic club owner) with the power to make final decisions that (although may upset some people) would put this war on the path to being effectively ended for the betterment of the Middle East, America and the world.
Neo-conservatives and hippies should all be able to agree on, at least, the fact that this war has already cost us too much financially, and more importantly, in loss of life (although the loss of life is nowhere near the levels of Vietnam, even though some pundits and talking heads would like you to believe that this is Vietnam II).
Right now, the United States House is trying to pass a war-funding bill that is (again) tied to withdrawal from Iraq. But these unilateral declarations that the left wants to make aren’t reasonable, and they don’t allow for important wiggle room that would keep the insurgents on their toes. I mean, lets say I am a Sunni, why kill a bunch of American soldiers with a suicide bomb, when I could, hypothetically, wait until the Americans leave, kill a bunch of Shiites and try to have my people assume power of the country.
One thing America obviously didn’t appear to understand before entering Iraq is the level of hatred between those two groups. This is probably, honestly, America’s biggest, and most inexcusable, gaff in relation to the Iraq war. Before you go to war and take over a country that obviously won’t put up too much resistance, you should know everything there is to know about that country. Not doing that would be like going to the human society and just telling them to bring out whatever dog they see first to take home to your two children under 5. The human society would probably just give you the least desirable dog (or the one that was hardest to get rid of). No one smart would operate this way.
Which brings me to my idea, and also something that would have worked in retrospect at my old job.
Now let’s say that there was someone who had picked up on this discrepancy at my old job way earlier than I did. Let’s say that instead of just deciding to (in some people’s opinions) tactlessly drop that class, they decided to find a way to properly convey that the benevolent owner is offering them this class free of charge. And, let’s say that they are reminded of this on a continual basis, maybe by the teacher when the class begins. Then, instead of feeling angry when this free class stopped being offered, they would just feel like they had saved a lot of money while it was going on (old people love to save money, that’s kind of what they do). Of course, there would still probably be a couple octogenarians who would get their Depends in a bundle, but consensus is never reflected by the most radical reactions. Most of the people probably would have just started spending their Friday mornings at the Old Country Buffet instead.
But what is OCB in Iraq?
Goodwill has never, it appears, been something that has been showered on Americans in Iraq (by anyone, but mostly by Iraqis), with the possible exception of Sean Penn (the blowhard actor). They think we aren’t doing anything constructive, and maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. Truth is, we probably don’t really know...
Let’s say you are a parent and you have a child. You want him to learn to ride his bike; to begin you get a tricycle. Then they graduate to a bike with training wheels. Then the wheels come off and you help them balance as they ride slowly, with your balancing assistance. Then you let them go…
Sometimes they stay up, sometimes they fall. If they stay up, they may never require or ask for you help again, if they fall, well that’s another story entirely.
But let us assume that Iraq is that child, a kicking, screaming ball of suicide bombers and roadside bombs. Well maybe you don’t wait anymore for the kid to balance, maybe you just let him go and see what the hell happens.
If nothing else, when he falls, the kid will appreciate your assistance more, and if he rides off into the sunset, well that’s a totally unexpected situation that will probably still require vigilance and a close eye kept on the country and those who assume leadership roles within, however, this sustained loss of life could, perhaps, be stopped for the time being. If he falls, we could swoop back in with more of an idea about why things didn’t work out, and all of the talk from the right about how they aren’t ready to stand on their own would be validated in more than a hypothetical sense.
I’d say it would take 2 weeks for things to get totally out of control, then we could go back in, knowing that our occupation there is required, as opposed to just assuming it is, when no practical litmus test has been applied.
Would Iraq be better off without America? I doubt it. Would it become a breeding ground for terrorists? Who knows, we’d have to keep a close eye on that. Is what we are doing now working in any discernible way? It doesn’t seem like it.
It’s time for a new plan in Iraq. Let’s take the wheels off and let’s send the old ladies to Old Country Buffet.
