Another useless stunt

Patrick over at I Speak Dog notes that Codpiece popped up all unexpected in Iraq today. He (Patrick, not Bubble Boy) wonders “what the fuck is he doing there? What is anybody doing there?”

This strikes me as an excellent question, particularly given the price of gasoline, jet fuel and the like these days. It had to cost a bundle to zoom him over there just so he could have a little face time.

You know, because it wasn’t necessary. Codpiece was scheduled to talk to the new Iraqi prime minister and his cabinet by video conference from Camp David this morning. Instead, when his aids couldn’t find him at breakfast eating his Wheaties, upon inquiring they found out that he’d flown off to Iraq during the night, all secret and hush-hush. He'd ditched ‘em.

It wasn’t like he planned to stay long, after all. The idea was that he’d be in Baghdad for five hours (lessee, that’s two or three hours, at least, for some good photo-ops, some inspirin’ speechifyin’, travel time from and back to Baghdad Airport in a helicopter, and etc.). That would leave him a couple of hours for actual politickin’ and bamboozlin’ before “oops, time is up, boys, gotta run! It’s been real!”

Why did he have fly to Baghdad personally when he has, at his 24-7 disposal, a state-of-the-art teleconferencing set-up at Camp David – and everywhere else he happens to be? Maybe he wanted to look deep into Nouri al-Maliki’s eyes and see his heart. Maybe they took a leisurely, hand-in-hand walk over to Burger King in the Green Zone for a soda and some freedom fries. Maybe he got to try out some of that nice fitness equipment they’ve got there.

Here’s what else I wish he’d done while he was there, besides glad-handing the staff and being a good ol’ boy:

I wish he’d ridden in a poorly armored SUV all the way from the airport to the Green Zone, risking his life like the soldiers he’s in command of. After he'd changed his shorts, I wish he’d stopped in to visit an Iraqi family as they sweltered in the heat inside their apartment, wishing the electricity would come on long enough to make a little dinner. I wish he’d gone out walking so he could see, right there on the ground all around him, what the destruction and desolation of war looks like. I wish he’d been close enough to a firefight or a car bombing, a suicide bombing, a sniper or a gang of junkyard-dog-crazy, fundamentalist militia members to know what fear really feels like. I wish he’d visited an overcrowded Iraqi morgue, where the rows of corpses have drill-holes in their heads and family members scream and cry, or one of the U.S. military hospitals, so he could watch some poor soldier having his legs amputated. I wish he had to drink warm, stagnant water from a canteen. I wish he'd stuck around long enough to have his ears assaulted by the law-mower noise of hot generators and to breathe the thick, exhaust-filled air. I wish he'd had to wait in line for hours and hours in the deadly, unrelenting heat of the day, the SUV’s motor switched off so it wouldn’t overheat, so he could buy a few litres of gasoline. I wish he had to eat a MRE with a plastic fork and then use a stinking porta-potty when his guts turned to hot liquid.

You know, it’s bad enough paying more than $37 to fill up my little car. I don’t appreciate having to pay for Codpiece to pull a useless political stunt like this.