HOW TO FAIL A STATE…
[c] 2008 by Michael Roloff
A failed state
Is like a dwarf star
It never made it, poor thing
It needs a think-tank to keep it on life-support,
Michael O'Hanlon of The Brookings perhaps…
He's good for a new set of suggestions every month…
I'm sure he goes to church on Sunday and prays for failed and failing states…
And gives no end of Fs
Instruction on how to produce a a "failed state":
Get a Stan of some kind, rattle its government in your money maker…
Create a fright…
Get an interested party to intervene…
Initiate an uprising against the invader…
What the hell, the U.N. won't mind.
Lots of things you can do…
No end of opportunities…
But first you need to define a state… Well, there must be a government that holds the majority shares of violence power to dispense, yes Flower Children, that's how things are…
Thence you find something that approximates the definition…
You destabilize something that ends in Stan… or Lia… or La
its becomes shaky…
the outlying provinces are not in its control..
You get a foreign power to invade it… say, some bears, or coyotes or ants…
You support an insurgency against the occupation…
You supply it with weapons…
When the insurgency is a spectacular success
You parade a few of its leaders for the media…
the invader withdraws, licking wounds…
withers on the vine because congress, mission accomplished, won't fund it…
now the insurgency fends for itself in a country wide civil war between insurgency leaders transformed into war lords…
if you have a special animosity for them you call them thugs…
what the hell
call them anything you want
nothing they can do about it anyway…
killing by naming,
that too has been going on a long time…
that kind of consigning…
And hoopla, Michael O'Hanlon has his a geographic entity that he can call a "failed state", something like a dwarf star, poor thing, that never had its shining day… and you bring in the think tanks to think upon the misery.
You hold conferences…
Someone gets another degree…
You hand out grants…
You import some left over insurgents that want to study law or maybe also start a Stan restaurant of some sort…
You find some bleeding hearts…
And everything is cool unless it isn't.
© Michael Roloff, 2008
