Everything Your Heart Desires. . .
By Will come to you if you’re a neocon in Iraq.
One of the biggest problems with reconstruction in Iraq has been the hair-brained attempt to turn Iraq into a free-marketarian fantasy world. Fortunately, large parts of this project have been abandoned, as we’ve discovered that a fair amount of Iraqis rather like their socialism and don’t want to be lab rats running through the maze in Nozickland. The spectacle of Heritage Foundation interns running a country of twenty-five million almost makes you think that Niall Ferguson is on to something when he suggests that Americans need to become better imperialists.
Then again, sometimes this disaster makes me think that I made a fundamental wrong turn back in 1993 when I decided to renounce my Republican Party affiliation. I voted for George Bush in 1992, and went to one meeting of the College Republicans at the University of Oregon in early 1993. I was a bit turned off by the discussion, which dealt for roughly two hours with how Arkansas sucked and how Hillary Clinton was a lesbian. I never really looked back, and although I didn’t vote in 1996, by 1998 I was a committed Democrat.
Now, imagine that I had remained a Republican. I like to fancy myself as a reasonably sharp guy (for a Republican, anyway), and I don’t think it’s absurd to suggest I could have done well in the College Republicans. There are bloody few Republicans at the University of Oregon, anyway, so I might well have quickly ascended to a position of some responsibility. I might have interned with Gordon Smith, then perhaps later at the Heritage Foundation. My middling commitment to academia and almost total lack of ethical standards would have played well there. I’d like to think I could have become a figure of some minor importance in Republican intellectual circles, perhaps not quite Jonah Goldberg, but somewhere close. Then, willing to whore myself in support of the 2003 war, it’s possible that the powers-that-be would have selected me to become part of the reconstruction project. Think about it; had I chosen with more foresight, I might now be one of the overlords of Iraq, happily privatizing industries and busting unions while singing the praises of George W.
Oh, what might have been.