I was sitting in a meeting with entertainment lawyers on Friday, and being a “creative type” I, of course, let my mind wander. Specifically, to this. It’s not that big a deal, in a sense: we knew all along this is what happened regarding post-war planning in Iraq. But there’s something so evilly intentional about it, now. I mean, I know my dog sometimes craps on the rug. He’s a pug, he’s high strung, it happens. But imagine if you came across a reliable report of your dog actively planning to crap the rug. Saying, “If anybody attempts to prevent me from crapping the rug, I will bite them.”

So the article raises, again, and rather sharply, the question: what were they thinking?

I think I figured it out.

The Bushies, we know now, not only didn’t have a plan to occupy Iraq, they actively discouraged anybody from even thinking about it. Nope, not necessary, we were going to go in, shock a little awe, get on out. They must have been thinking that Saddam would just slide off the head of the body politic, perhaps still talking, as villains sometimes do at the end of movies in which the hero is armed with some kind of cool laser sword.

And then what? Well, then, the Westernized, secular, educated people of Iraq would instantly convert to a pro-US democracy, or at the very least, a dictatorship with a sense of decorum, like Pakistan. It would be like a geo-political Transformer toy: couple of twists and presto bango, they’re having national elections with 30% turnout, just like us.

But how in the world could Bush and Co ever think this was possible? How could they imagine that a nation that even an occasional reader of National Geographic Kids knew was a pressure cooker of ethnic hatred held together by barbed wire and the threat of torture would just… bloom into an mid-Eastern Singapore?

I’ll tell you how. Because Iraqis wore ties.Check it out.

Even the heinous murderers of Saddam’s regime were neatly dressed in decent business suits. Or, at the very least, smart military wear. They looked like us. They looked like lawyers, in fact, which is why I thought of it. They looked like people who would very easily forgive you for invading their country, and get down to business. “The past is past,” they’d say. “Let’s have a working lunch.”

North Korea? They wear those weird Mao suits: clearly unstable. Iran? Check out those turbans! God knows what they’d do. Saudi Arabia, where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from? Anybody who wears those crazy robes would kill you as soon as look at you.

I’m tellling you. If Iraqis had just changed into Bedouin robes every time they went on CNN in the 90s, Saddam would be in power today.

You may think I’m crazy. You may think this is nonsense. You got any better explanations? The comments are open.