I was talking with OlyBlogger Ogre Mage today and in the course of the conversation we came up with a weird, but not entirely unrealistic scenario for Iraq's future.

First, here's the precedent. When I was in high school, back when Richard Milhous Nixon was in office, the highly unpopular Vietnam War was continuing to drag on. The military recruiters really had their jobs cut out for them. So, what happened was this: when a young man got into any kind of legal trouble the judge would give him a choice-- serve time or serve your country. Several of my high school classmates went into uniform this way.

So, today. The Bushites are having trouble keeping up the troop numbers in the places where we went in to destroy all those weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. But now we are stuck. In an extension of the 1970s "nudge from the judge," we place massive numbers of convicts in uniform and send them to Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, legitimate troops are sent home to finally be with their families and perhaps help in domestic disasters like Katrina, which is where they should've been in the first place helping to avoid the kind of total Bush Administration failure and incompetency we witnessed.

At first, it seems to work. Professional soldiers at home really helping real Americans in need (what a concept!) and out in Iraq, disposable American convicts running around with powerful weapons shooting at disposable Iraqis. And when everyone is dead, we can march in under a flag of democracy and claim all the oil in the name of Anglo-Americanism. Sounds sweet, if you are a sweaty-palmed corpulent neo-con in an air-conditioned office who sees the outside world through venetian blinds only when you separate the slats in order to peek out there.

However.

The American convicts have a different idea, and through leadership and organization they take over Iraq and Afghanistan-- apart from U.S. control. And they have sovereignty over the oil, America's biggest drug.

And here we have the makings of a good novel. Or so Ogre Mage and I thought.

What happens next?