Kitchen in the hole!

Many years ago a good friend, a fellow toy inventor, showed a working prototype to a company at the annual New York Toy Fair. The company guy was very impressed. They began negotiations. My friend was very pleased. He remained pleased right up until the company guy said, “I must come over and visit your facility.” Cut to our conversation back home, “What am I going to do, show him my back bedroom!?” That was his ‘facility.’
There lies the difference between England and America. It’s rather like judging the quality of a football team by the excellence of its changing rooms. They may win matches but do they have power showers? Something to muse about as you fly the Atlantic, Business Class.
That’s England/America, now think about Al-qaeda/America.
Al-qaeda doesn’t even have football boots! They could change in a telephone booth like Superman if they had a strip to change into. But they kick balls pretty hard. Now if the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost America $3 trillion and they’ve killed 200,000 that’s $15 million per death. Al-qaeda’s cost per American death by comparison is probably around a thousand dollars. This is similar to Robert the Bruce defeating Edward II’s two thousand fully armoured and mounted knights by supplying his men with long pointy sticks. War in these situations becomes a contest of monetary attrition and ends when one side can’t afford it anymore, and on those figures it’s likely to be the Americans.
Now everyone likes a new fitted kitchen right, and that goes for Afghans too, so why not spend the money on shipping in thousands of flat pack kitchens? Al-qaeda can’t do that, they don’t have the facility. During the cold war someone suggested air dropping thousands of JC Penny mail-order catalogues over the USSR. OK you would kill a few pedestrians but it could have toppled the regime. So next time there’s a war forget bombs, fight it with fitted kitchens.