Stop Saying Iraq Is Another Vietnam; It's Another Enron

From AlterNet, libertarian comedian Bill Maher on yet another good Iraq metaphor:

Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He's fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there. "The surge" is simply another in a long series of inflated stock quotes.

This past weekend Marcel Marceau passed away at age 84. Doctors say he went quietly. Thus proving that evil thrives when good men stay silent. And just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.

Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled "The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers," just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for.

In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question. And folks, it's a war-zone, you're dealing with a culture known for its haggling skills, so you've got factor in a little skimming, but this is ridiculous. If you stole that much money from the Mafia you'd be dead.

Click here for the rest.

Well, if you want to get serious about it, Vietnam was another Enron, too, complete with enormous lies and doctored statistics believed by the people spewing them to the public. The fact is that all institutions of power in relatively open and free societies, which include both governments and corporations, must lie, repeatedly, and on a grand scale. Wielding power, it seems, must ultimately become self-serving, which means that, even in a "democracy," powerful people will pursue their own ends, rather than the public's best interest. If people knew how the powers-that-be are stuffing their own pockets at the expense of everybody else, there'd be hell to pay. Lies and secrecy, then, are necessarily the common currency of the powerful.

What's frightening is how these powerful people appear lately to believe their own bullshit. I suppose that's why everything is going to pot these days. They don't really know what they're doing.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$