How the war could have been avoided-- really easily.

The total cost of the Iraq War has now exceeded $845 billion dollars. It occurs to me that if we are willing to spend $845 billion dollars and thousands of lives, for much less we could have solved the problem without bloodshed.

Before the start of the war (when Saddam was still alive), we could have simply bribed him to do whatever we wanted. In fact, we could have sent him yearly checks for $1 billion dollars and he'd have recorded 2girls1cup if we asked him to. No, he'd have even played the part of the cup. More importantly, it would have only cost us, at maximum, around $35 billion dollars to keep it up for the worst-case duration of his natural life (he was 65ish before the war). Since he was a dictator, and since he had a natural power over his people, we could have simply made the stipulation that the only way he can keep receiving the money is if truly made steps to convert the nation to a democracy, and, obviously, it would be important to allow us free access to the country for inspections.

It's a pretty simple idea, and, it would have worked. Think of it: no bloodshed, no terrorism, no economic collapse, and, most importantly, $0.99/gallon gas. Best of all, it'd only be 35 easy payments of $1 billion a year (and inflation would be on our side). Instead, we've got this debacle, which has cost us 5 easy payments of $169 billion dollars a year.

I'm just trying to plan for next time.

Cheers.