Clearly, the Iraq invasion and subsequent civil war needs reassessing, though perhaps not as you’d think. First, you’ve got to understand what Bush has actually done.

In a move reflecting fashionable corporate-think, the President applied today’s business thinking to the battlefield. Finding the cost of the war on terror too high to pay at home, he did what any executive of a company would do. He outsourced it.

He spent time looking for a suitable partner from among the axis of evil. North Korea? Been there, got the shrapnel. Iran? Too crazy and too many allies. Iraq? Perfect – a country with no powerful friends and lots of oil. And like Nike, IBM and Walmart before him, the President has also discovered the benefits of subcontracting to someplace else.

Instead of terrorists making targets of people here, they now target American soldiers over there - guys who are paid to be shot at. And instead of American civilians dying in their thousands, it’s i-Raqis. But heck, it’s not just the labor in these developing countries that’s cheaper: their lives are, too.

Moreover, like any good executive he’s kept the real money in American firms. The contractors who contract nothing but fees, the rebuilders who build nothing but profits.

However, the real issue lies not in Iraq but in what Bush has created as a bi-product of his outsourced war.

Just as American industry has built an efficient workforce out of a bunch of unskilled laborers that now competes directly with ours, Bush has made a ruthless army out of what used to be a bunch of amateur bombers. When they start competing directly with us, you might want to outsource yourself a long way from here.