Smells like ...

Normally not one who likes to slog through waste buckets like the New York Post, I would have missed this altogether except for the brave sacrifice that Billmon made in venturing there. He pointed to an hilarious op-ed by Ralph Peters that, frankly, had me rolling.

But we'll turn this into a fill in the blank exercise and see if we can figure out what country Peters is talking about. A few excerpts should serve the test:

______ doesn't have a government. It has a collection of warlords, demagogues and thieves with official titles.

If ______'s elected leaders won't stop looting their country long enough to pull together and defeat the foreign terrorists, internal insurgents and militias killing Iraqis, we should not ask our troops to defend them.

Above all, societies and cultures that refuse to accept responsibility for their own failures can't build democracies.

______ has behaved as irresponsibly as a drunk who won the lottery, squandering vast wealth and creating nothing beyond a few urban theme parks.

And the piece de resistance:

______ have condemned themselves to strategic incompetence. No society that ... indulges in fantastic hypocrisy, wallows in corruption, undervalues secular learning, reduces its god to a nasty disciplinarian and comforts itself with conspiracy theories will ever compete ....

Go on, take a guess.