ARTICLE: “Sudan Leader Waits, and Waits, for His Ship to Come In,” by Marc Lacey, New York Times, 31 January 2006, p. A4.

A heart-warming tale of the president of Sudan, recently denied chairmanship of the African Union (how to put him at the head of a peacekeeping organization when his own government promotes genocide within its borders?). Seems he’s had to endure a tremendously long wait for his $4-million-plus ab fab yacht to show up.

It’ll probably take a good chunk of the nation’s GDP to transport it to its final destination in this war-torn, incredibly impoverished land. But hey, a Big Man’s gotta do what a Big Man’s gotta do. Africa’s postcolonial history is littered by all manner of Big Men who lived luxuriously while wars raged and citizenry (always predominately women and kids) died in droves.

Would you like a system for getting rid of guys like this? Do you think it would take massive invading forces or do you think that if we showed enough determination, we could get someone like this Big Man to abandon ship with his women, money, loot and—in this instance—the ship as well?

Of course, if we couldn’t do anything after scaring off today’s Big Man, then nothing would change: more civil strife, more death and suffering, another Big Man to take his place a few months later. So drive-by regime change is no answer without the second-half effort by the SysAdmin force and related connectivity forces.

What would it take to make Sudan acceptable to global business? It probably wouldn’t look like any traditional aid package. No, it would be something different, something that fostered connectivity with great rapidly, and it would likely smack of multinationals performing something akin to a UN trusteeship. Of course, you’d probably end up with some Core contact group, plus the UN, plus the African Union, plus some Core constellation of a SysAdmin force (probably working to train up a longer-term AU peacekeeping force) overseeing the whole process. Sudan’s “sovereignty,” such as it was, would be trashed for some undetermined period of time. Cheap labor would be exploited, as would the oil reserves.

None of this would be pretty, but all of it would beat the hell out of the genocide we’ve all been witnessing from the sidelines for several years now.

In the end, wouldn’t you like to find out exactly how hard such a task would be? Don’t you think the world would be a better place for trying, instead of sitting on the sidelines watching the bodies pile up?