Another Modest Proposal.
By Michael Reynolds | Related entries in Foreign Policy, The War On Terrorism, WarSomeone who can do simple math might want to check the following figures, but with that caveat…
The population of Iran is about 68 million. (Only a third of which are certifiably insane.)
Their per capita GDP is listed as $7,700. Their oil minister recently boasted that this figure would rise to 10 g’s a head. Let’s pretend he’s an honest politician, and that’s the truth. 68 million people, 10 grand a head, that comes to about 680 billion bucks per year in nice round numbers.
The gross municipal product of New York City is 500 billion. God knows what the property value is. But a nuke in NYC would cost us, let’s say, two trillion dollars without batting an eye. (Four trillion if it’s Trump generating the stats.)
Now, in the worst case scenario the Iranian government builds a nuke, hands it to Osama, and there goes New York City. A minimum two trillion dollar cost, not to mention the lives. With me so far?
Here’s my plan: let’s offer every man, woman and child in Iran a year’s income — $10,000 a head — to take care of the nuke-o-philiac beardmasters who run the country. A year’s income, tax free, and all they have to do is make sure that the government of Iran loses interest in building nukes. How the Iranian people bring about this change of heart in their leadership is up to them. But if they want to borrow some guns, we could probably make that happen.
680 billion for the 68 million Iranians, against the minimum hit of two trillion if something happens to NYC.
And here’s the beauty part: we can tap the allies for at least a third of that. Our hit would be no more than 450 billion. For half a trillion we take down the Mad Mullahs, lose not a single American life, ensure the safety of trillions of dollars worth of property and tens of thousands of American lives, and dazzle the world with our brilliance.
(Cross-posted from The Mighty Middle.)
This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 and is filed under Foreign Policy, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 14th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
So how do we handle the payments? Paypal? The Iraqi insurgence supposedly use it all the time.
More importantly how do we get the offer past the Iranian censors.
April 14th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
You nut! Give me a month and I’ll figure out why that won’t work.
April 14th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Here’s why it won’t work: fear. You can bribe people with all the money in the world, but they’ll still be stuck with the job of making sure their kids don’t disappear overnight.
The mullahs in Iran have effectively terrorized the reformers, with brief interruptions, for three decades now. Even the Khatami government was quickly made into a sock puppet, unable to achieve any real reform.
Of course, we didn’t help them out when we could have – we’ve actually hindered them ever since Bush’s regrettable “axis of evil” speech – and that has made for a hell of a problem in the present.
I should say, contra to my otherwise identical comment at mightymiddle, that fomenting some kind of citizen uprising absolutely needs to be part of the picture.
April 15th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Can you take that math and do a similar calculation please:
When the ice caps melt, global warming will displace hundreds of millions of people, put who knows how many acres of arable and urban land under water and reak the consequent economic havok on the entire planet. Given the cost of that, how much does the rest of the world have to pay, per capita, to get the people of your country to elect leaders who give a shit about global warming?
(Please note, starting a discussion about whether global warming might or might not be happen isn’t a relevant or valid response, since a similar discussion can be had about Middle Eastern countries and their nuclear weapons and whether or not they might happen. Whether you dispute its truth, the probablity of global warming being manmade is still orders of magnitude more likely than a nuke making it to being used, let alone on American soil.)