Bush's Iraq policy: Too big to fail?

You remember the phrase from the Go-Go Eighties: A corporation--usually an iconic one, an industry leader, a byword for American commercial might--outsmarts itself and gets into deep financial and/or legal trouble. Sometimes it was a whole industry, as in the case of the savings and loan implosion.

Inevitably, the top brass, and their cheerleaders in the business media, confidently and usually correctly predicted the arrival of a government bail-out--their horror of government intervention in the market place was temporarily set aside--because the corporation/industry was "too big to fail." The Right People would understand that the risks associated with a government bail-out would be outweighed by the risks associated with business failure.

This, perhaps, is the one lesson young George W. Bush absorbed during his stint in an MBA program.

Josh Marshall has a spot-on discussion of the parallels between Bush the failed entrepreneur and Bush the leader of a failed mission in Iraq.

A taste:

Setting aside the vast costs in human life, national treasure and regional stability, I see President Bush's adventure as a failed business venture, a start-up that went bad -- an analogy that, come to think of it, he could probably relate to.

A failed company can lose money for a very long time before it makes money and becomes a success. It only really fails when the investors decide that the problems aren't transient but terminal. They decide to stop throwing good money after bad. And then that's it.

Taking Marshall at face value, it suggests that, when it comes time for historians to one day get a proper bead on why the Bush administration was so dysfunctional, the best starting point won't be by analyzing its policy decisions, nor even by looking at the twisted Oedipal psychology that drives its central player. In fact, they may discover that most of the variance is accounted for by the fact that he received a graduate degree from a field that teaches its students to memorize a canon of failed theoretical models and milk them to death using someone else's money.

A dean I used to work for once claimed that if Thomas Edison had gotten an MBA, he wouldn't have invented the light bulb. He'd have invented a candle, 14 feet tall.

John Ralston Saul, author of Voltaire's Bastards, used to say that there's not much wrong with America that couldn't be fixed by planting a bomb under the Chicago School of Economics, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard School of Business.

(Note to Homeland Security: All evidence indicates that Saul was kidding--making an extreme-sounding claim for satiric purposes. Please let him board his airplane.)