Comment on The Belmont Club "Opium barons"

herb,
By your calculations the local farmer is making three times as much as people around him and the Headman must be making some multiple of that. No wonder they needed to be supplied Viagra™, to handle their popularity. We should have laced the stuff with whatever the CIA tried to use on Fidel’s beard. Honestly I would start a rumor that anyone who has swallowed anything provided by the Americans has “ingested Judaism.” This would divide the tribal leaders into three camps.
1) Those who go bonkers and start slaughtering each other to purge
     the stain in blood.
2) Those who desperately try to prove they are more Islamic then
     their neighbors, but who will never be trusted by anyone.
3) Those who realize that their bridges are burned and go whole hog,
     so to speak, in renouncing Islam.

One reason that Moslems are so paranoid is that they know that the submission to their authority is wide but shallow. The failure to provide for spiritual, moral or temporal satisfaction, except through bursts of self destructive violence, makes the whole edifice of Islam a house of cards. As an enterprise it could rapidly go into reverse and unravel. That is one reason that I was so dissapointed in the installation of theocratic constitutional structures in Iraq and Afghanistan under American sponsorship back in 2003/04.

Helmand could use several hundred high desert savvy agronomists with an alternative spiritual message. My suggestion is that we send in the Mormons.