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A Businessman President? Beware of Running Government Like a Business [1]

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Date: 2025-03-05

George W. Bush attacked Iraq making false claims about Iraq’s connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Suspiciously, Iraq had the fourth largest oil reserves in the world – about 10% of the world’s proven reserves. Bush was a “oil man” with many friends in the oil business. When challenged about how the administration planned to pay for the war, Bush’s people claimed the US would take Iraq’s oil to compensate the US for the cost of the war and its reconstruction. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and a fanatical war hawk, told Congress that Iraq was "a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

And the oil companies got what they wanted from the war. Prior to operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq’s oil company was nationalized. After the war, Exxon, Halliburton, Chevron, and others gained access to Iraq’s oil reserves at the small cost to the US taxpayer of over a trillion dollars.

This is a standard practice of colonial powers. Use the claim of terrorism or some other dubious reason like the “white man’s burden” or the “doctrine of discovery” to justify thievery and domination of less powerful native peoples. And then proceed to extract resources from these conquered peoples and lands.

The white man’s burden justification claimed that white people are civilizing and modernizing native peoples. So, they could and should take anything they want from them in return. The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem The White Man’s Burden in 1899 in support of the US taking over the Philippines. In the poem, he justified the act of aggression based on the moral imperative of imperial expansion.

The doctrine of discovery was a statement by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 (Columbus discovered America in 1492) who proclaimed that European explorers could steal the land and resources of native peoples as long as they Christianized them in the process. The doctrine was adopted by the US Supreme Court and in 2023, the Roman Curia of the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine

I especially like another expansionist justification — that of “manifest destiny” which seems to claim that since white settlers from Europe in the form of the US government had already conquered much of America’s land and native peoples, they were destined to take the rest as well. Who can argue with destiny? This is American “exceptionalism” at its finest.

But now we have another businessman, a real estate developer, in the White House. What do real estate developers value most of all? The answer is likely to be waterfront property that has become available for development because of the recent demolition of the entire area by the Israeli army.

This is classic 19th century colonialism combined with 21st century entrepreneurial ambition in the real estate business.

The US government appears to be being used as a front by property developers just like it was used by big oil executives and investors who wanted to extract oil from Iraqis as payment for conquering them. Of course, this was all justified by false claims of WMDs and terrorism.

One thing we can say about Republicans. They are serious when they say they want the government to be run like a business. But unfortunately, as in the past, it seems the businesses they want to run will benefit a small number of connected billionaires rather than the American people as a whole.

And somehow, their business ventures seem to consistently generate and follow great death and violence as in the colonization of America, India, and Africa, the Israel war against the Palestinians, and the estimated half a million Iraqis killed in operation Iraqi Freedom.

There is a lesson to be learned here: Beware of putting a businessman in the White House who wants to run government like a business.

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