Getting Enthused

World leaders, revolutionaries and scam artists with less brains than chutzpah don't seem to realize that it takes more than morality or basic reason to impel the US Department of State or the White House to do anything other than say they have "little enthusiasm" for such things as sending troops into Haiti; you have to give them something to care about.

Reality is not part of that something.

But what will knock the old boys in the Oval Office on their asses is a good 'ole dose of razzle dazzle; some footage, some pictures, something simple but persuasive.

You see, the boys from Camp David suffer from the latest affliction to affect western society; they can't read anymore. But give them some satellite shots of what looks suspiciously like a truck stuck in a sand trap, along with a boatload of Halliburton stock options, and by God you'll have all the Marines you could ever hope for on your doorstep ready to hunt down dictators and restore order before you can say "Enduring Freedom."

Sadly, places like Haiti have very few trucks they can drive in a suspicious manner through the streets of Port-au-Prince to draw the attention of CIA spy satellites, and the few they do have have run out of gas. And unless an Exxon oil tanker washes up on a Haitian beach, there is no chance at all of paying for law, order or reconstruction out of those all important "oil dollars" George and the boys are so keen on spending.

What they are long on are despots, thugs, and sadistic fools, yet sadly these men never bought anthrax from Donald Rumsfeld, so they are of little interest to the powers that be who want to make the world a "better place."

Needless to say, if the people of Haiti want to get the attention of both the country that helped replace one of their crazed and corrupt leaders with another, and the United Nations (which has raised hand-sitting to a never before seen level of proficiency), they're going to have to do more than just kill one another and generate blood-soaked images for Dan Rather to ignore on the evening news.

First, I recommend making a few trips into the Dominican Republic and purchasing some fireworks, and the bigger the better, because visuals are all-important in this endeavor.

Next, start spreading the word that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, having snapped from the pressure and a little-known psychotic condition for which he has stopped taking his medication, has accelerated Haiti's missile defense program, with imminent test firings planned for the coming week. Be sure to do a lot of whispering about this around the US embassy, and with any luck some bored CIA operatives who have been languishing in this little backwater for saying something inappropriate like "they don't have any weapons of mass destruction" will see a chance to redeem themselves and come to check out the pyrotechnics.

Okay, now bundle all the rockets together with duct tape, place a fishing boat fifty miles out to shore full of whatever gasoline and rum you can find, light it on fire, launch your "rocket" and with any luck the boat will blow up in spectacular fashion. Then spread the word it was three hundred miles offshore and Haiti is about to join the ranks of the ICBM community, and you're in business.

All right, now you have to put something in your rocket, so we start spreading rumours about rebel leader Guy Philippe doing secret bio-weapon tests in some small Haitian village. The key here is to pick one that has dysentery problems out the you-know-what (and this really shouldn't be hard) and provide lots of stories about strange smells in the air, and planes flying overhead emitting an unknown, smoke-like substance (again, bad smells and planes with smoking engines should not be hard to find), and voila, you're now a country on the rise.

And once Colin Powell gets this little hot-potato of intelligence, well my Haitian friends, just sit back and watch the US come by and do some serious liberating, because they're really something to see when they get enthused.