A LETTER TO SULZBERGER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES ABOUT THEIR SUPPORT FOR THE AFGHAN WAR

Message from mikerol@gmail.com:

 Dear Mr. Sulzberger,
Below a short Brechtian poem that your frequent op-edder Michael O'Hanlon elicited from me - and which your appalling editorial of Friday the 13th
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/opinion/13fri1.html?_r=1&ref=editorials
makes me share with you. http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
Once again, no mention of the U.S. destabilization of that country of 25 million in 1979,
a monstrous crime of which Mr. Brzezinski continues to be proud;
once again no mention of the world wide genii the Mujaheddin of Casey/ Reagan's devising,
and now it is world wide and it means forever war, and it might break the bottle.
And yet another NY Times version of "Marja" - if you want to know why people do not trust news sources, something my former county executive Ron Sims, now secretary of HUD, bemoaned the other day,
just look at your own editorial and the way the NY Times reported something as simple as Marja - starting out with a reprint of the Pentagon Press release. This is not just Bush's and now Obama's war, but yours!
This war again reminds me that the US is like that dog that gets stuck in the bitch and can only get in deeper, and there is no one with a bucket of ice water to help it out of its distress. It's the same old same old imperialist moron, over and over again.
Sincerely,


 MICHAEL ROLOFF
 

HOW TO FAIL A STATE…




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..
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 wound…
withers on the vine because congress, with mission accomplished, won’t fund it any more…


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




Now 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.