See, That's Your Problem Right There

Here's a public service announcement for you. When trying to displace the government of a culture dramatically different than your own, which has only ever known brutal dictatorship for most of its history, and replacing that with a government that enacts and enforces the rule of law, you want to take some care in determining who is going to be elected to the government.

What you don't want is a terrorist capping off his quarter-century career of dealing death and destruction from his seat in your puppet Parliament. Tends to gum up the works.

Oh, and I'll add a... a codicil to that bit of statesman like advice. If you find yourself in the highly embarrassing situation of having mistakenly allowed such a person into the decision-making body of your client government, keep it quiet. That way, if you really need to, you can use your covert operatives to, shall we say, discreetly neutralize the problem.

No one possessed of their faculties will accept that here, finally, is the link between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Rather, they will wonder why you allowed such a person to run for office in the first place and what kind of attention you were paying to setting up your puppet government, increasing your perception as an incompetent leading a squadron of fellow incompetents down the Incompetence Interstate to Incompetent Island. Why hand your critics that kind of ammunition if you don't have to? (An unfortunate analogy, I belatedly realize.)

Under no circumstances should you allow this information to make it into the hands of the global media to be splashed all over the Internet so any fool can link to the story from his silly little blog thingy.

Follow-up at 4:28 p.m.: Holy crap. This looks like an even bigger problem. That "incompetence train" may well have sent ten billion dollars cash -- that means currency, so much of it that it had to be loaded on pallets on multiple cargo planes -- was sent into the middle of a war zone, with the intention of delivering it into the hands of the new Iraqi government, which we now know for a fact includes terrorists and Iranian agents, not to mention subjecting this money to the frankly-to-be-expected cupidity of obviously corrupt Iraqi governmental officials. It's a bit late in the day and I need to finish a complaint before I go teach, so I'll have to sputter my outrage later tonight or tomorrow. Suffice to say that when nearly nine billion dollars goes missing, that, too, is a very bad thing, but perhaps one that takes the wonder out of the question "Where are the insurgents getting the money to pay for all their activity?"