On Fri, Mar 24, 2000 at 04:53:07PM -0500, Rob Sweeney wrote:
>
> So - how about the Revolution Foundation? A well-funded group develops
> both a business plan - and an invasion plan - for a target country. The
> ineffective leadership is forced out in one way or another. The group
> comes in with sufficient resources (mostly trained staff, this isn't to
> be another throw-money-away venture) to build up needed institutions -
> courts, schools, etc. Our favorite sort of minimal-interference,
> market-respecting government is instituted. It doesn't have to be
> democratic, day one likely it can't be. >Now< buy the land. Sit
> back and wait.
Point of order: it's been done.
The company in question went into a number of states, between 1950 and
1980, installed a new government and set up economic policies according
to their own idea of how things should be run.
The results included, of course, the Iranian revolution of 1979. How
do you think Reza Pahlavi came to power in the first place?
(This leaves aside all the other instances where such intervention wasn't
as spectacularly disastrous, but nevertheless left behind a legacy of
unmarked mass graves and political turmoil.)
Clue: if you do this with government backing, it's called covert ops
and has a _very_ bad smell these days because it tends to backfire
a generation down the line. When the children of the dissidents
your revolutionaries "disappeared" grow up, for example. Or when the
economic/educational improvements filter through enough for the locals
to realise fully just how they've been shafted. Or when your heavy-handed
attempts to retain control loosen up just enough to permit a popular
uprising.
And that's being optimistic -- it assumes that all your reforms work
precisely as advertised, and the initial seizure was successful. If
there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that nobody has a handle on The
Truth. If your scheme works, it merely leaves you running a developed
country full of people who hate you because you shot their parents'
leaders. If it fails ...
Have you considered a career in the State Department or the CIA?
-- Charlie
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