Oh, what the hell, let’s just stay forever

We broke it, we own it, and we’ll be paying for it for the next thousand years, so let’s just keep Iraq. Let’s make it an organized unincorporated territory of the United States--like Guam, ie, non-self-governing, of course, but with lots and lots and lots of oil reserves.

Let’s call it Neoconlandia.

George W. Bush will be its first governor, Cheney its first lieutenant governor. Bush can appoint Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and Podhoretz to whatever cabinets and departments for which they are least competent. Rumsfeld can be in charge of sanitation. And dear old Robert Bork can practice his version of Sharia law as Chief Justice of Neoconlandia’s Supreme Court.

People, we’ve been thinking about the Iraq War too unidimensionally. We’re thinking inside the box, we’re coloring between the lines, we’re letting ourselves be constrained, dare I say it, by reality.

Iraq is not a quagmire--it’s a postage-due godsend!

Let’s face it, most of our good bubbles have already burst: the currency bubble, the tech bubble, the housing bubble, the finance bubble. This may be our last chance for a really good bubble: the annexation and colonization of Neoconlandia, which, you should remember, already has a heavenly flat tax system.

As Russian immigrants once volunteered to settle the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Neoconlandia will need its own supply of desperate motivated settlers. Prime candidates include Neoconservatives (obviously), rapture-ready Christians, and polygamist orthodox Mormons; they’ll all fit right in.

On the secular side, those struggling with huge credit card debts or facing foreclosure due to subprime mortgages can have the slate wiped clean if they’ll just agree to rent some modest apartments (utilities not included) in downtown Mosul or Tikrit for a decade or two. College grads can be forgiven their crushing student loan debt in exchange for living and working in Baghdad until their fortieth birthday.

But wait--there’s more!

Too old to qualify as a desperate motivated settler? Don’t worry. Neoconlandia also will be designed to accommodate the growing health-tourist industry. If your health insurer is one of those cranky for-profit-only types that labels everything a noncovered preexisting condition, then bring your clogged arteries, arthritic hips, and morbid obesity to the ultra-high-tech Iraqi hospitals that are being built as part of the Pottery Barn Marshall Plan. Stop throwing away your good money for health care that you know you’ll never receive. In Neoconlandia, you don’t need health insurance. Given the rate of exchange between dollars and New Iraqi Dinars, your quadruple bypass surgery will cost less than your monthly cable bill!

And stay-at-home Americans who are missing out on the excitement of the new Eastern frontier will at least get to enjoy Neoconlandia brand gasoline and heating fuel oil at prices so low that it’s cheaper for the suppliers and distributors to give it away for free than to bother billing you for it.

Why would anybody ever want the US to leave Iraq Neoconlandia? Let’s just stay forever.