WORLD NEWS [not]: "Rwandan Genocide Echoes in Congo Rebel's War," by Sarah Childress and Cassandra Vinograd, Wall Street Journal, 31 October 2008. EDITORIAL: "Congo: Don't let it happen all over again; The United Nations must be given more and tougher peacekeepers to prevent a catastrophe," The Economist, 1 November 2008. INTERNATIONAL: "African Leaders Agree to Send Military Advisers to Congo to Defuse Conflict," by Jeffrey Gettleman and Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 10 November 2008.

We hear of yet another rebel leader overrunning yet another city (Goma). His demands are pricelessly illustrative of the frontier-integrating age in which we live:

His current demands: talks about a $9 million Congolese deal with China that would exchange minerals for infrastructure projects, and the disarming of a Rwanda Hutu military that he says is supported by the Congolese government.

See, I told you, China's version of Development-in-a-Box™ is out there as the default mechanism. When there's no security, though, even Chinese connectivity--as corrupt as it often is--is hard to come by. So the Economist begs the UN to do more--awfully naïve for such a sophisticated observer. The dark reality: "In the even longer run, it is questionable whether Congo will ever hang together as a proper country." Why should it? It's a completely fake state--the left-over chunks in the middle stitched together by the European colonialists, it has no business being a state whatsoever. Globalization will remap it--plain and simple. And much violence will continue to be attached to this process. The only question is, How much will the Old Core care to do anything about it? New Core pillars will pay whatever bribes are necessary, but don't expect any of their blood to be shed. The Africans will do the usual: send observers who snap photos (They shoot dead people, don't they?) and talk endlessly about doing something they cannot possibly mount on their own. This is why we need an Africom.