Complete Annihilation of Countries ™ is a popular game played mainly by infantile Presidents and Prime Ministers aged 48 and upwards. As the name suggests, it involves arbitrarily invading, occupying and eventually demolishing a sovereign state of one’s choice, combining strategy, spin and brutal dishonesty for years of guaranteed entertainment and hype.

Here is a simple, step-to-step approach on how you too can enjoy a good game of CAC.

Step one:

Choosing your country

Beginners are advised to choose their target countries with care. Not only is CAC an expensive game to play, but any mistake in the choice of country will greatly decrease your chances of getting past the first few stages.

Sad as it is to report, certain countries have over the years developed a terribly selfish and unreasonable attitude to the idea of being completely annihilated. In fact, such States have allowed the game to fall into disrepute, by actually defending themselves from attack, inflicting casualties and even the occasional fatality to their benevolent invaders. (Note: According to the rules of the game, only citizens of the target country are allowed to be killed in hostilities.)

So what makes a country suitable for CAC? Ideally, it should be a country on the brink of collapse anyway; one which has already been attacked and weakened in a previous war, and whose re-armament capabilities have already been severely depleted by at least 10 years of UN economic sanctions.

If you can somehow wangle it to also be a country rich in an all-important natural reserve, control of which just happens to be indispensable to your own country’s economic survival in a competitive world, then so much the better.

Step Two:

Invasion

Contrary to popular belief, this part is actually the easiest phase of the operation. If step one was successfully completed, you should find that the nation’s defences are ready to crumble the moment you set foot on its soil.

Having said that, there could be a few inconveniences. Let’s face it: after your painstaking media campaign to convince the world that you’re invading that country for its own benefit, it wouldn’t exactly look good if its citizens fail to throw flowers at the feet of your victorious liberation army when it steamrolls into the capital. You might therefore wish to stage-manage a “spontaneous” celebration, involving (say) the toppling of a statue of the overthrown dictator in the main square. All you will need are a few tanks strategically placed at a short distance from the site, and a bit of judicious camera-work to suggest that the crowd was much larger than it actually was (Note: for expert help on this latter technique, I recommend the camera crews of Malta’s political party stations. They’ve been doing much the same thing for years…)

Step Three:

Governing the Country

We are now entering the less dramatic but more strategic phase of the operation: setting up a provisional administrative government for the period of occupation.

Remember: no matter what your top advisers say, under no circumstances must you place a citizen of the country in charge of its own provisional government. After all, the man in question will have to oversee the single most important phase in CAC: the dismantlement of security forces, thereby guaranteeing years of anarchy and chaos, which will in turn enable you to justify overstaying your welcome indefinitely, on the grounds that the country can’t guarantee its own people’s safety.

But the provisional government also serves another purpose: to filter out any remaining wealth from the country, thus perpetuating its dependence on your own generosity for its survival. This can be achieved in a number of ways, for instance, by declaring the country a “fraud-free zone”, and then inviting all your buddies in the business community so that they can gorge themselves on its financial assets while the fun lasts. Whichever strategy you choose, the crucial issue is how much money you eventually leave for the incoming national unity government once your provisional term is over. How much, I hear you ask? Ideally, very little. If (for argument’s sake) the national coffers at the time of the invasion amounted to $28 billion, on no account must you give back more than $6 billion. (Actually, even $6 billion may be too much. How many scud missiles can you buy for $6 billion?)

Step Four:

Complete Annihilation

So far, so good. The target country has been ravaged and occupied, its government has been toppled, its resources plundered, its police and armed forces disbanded, and its sectarian minorities engaged in a brutal and apparently endless internecine war. But the country has not yet been totally annihilated.

Now comes the tricky bit, because by this time, not only has your PR machine started to groan under the strain of countless untruths, but those nasty, ungrateful little insurgents have persisted with their entirely illegal resistance, and in blatant disregard of the rules of the game, are now killing your troops in ever increasing quantities.

This can have unpleasant consequences, especially if you are unfortunate enough to be the elected President of a democratic country. For one thing, body bags from overseas conflicts tend to have a somewhat deleterious effect on presidential approval ratings (Look under “Lyndon Johnson” for further details.) And to make matters worse, there are also these annoying little things called “Mid-Term Elections”… which as the name implies, always seem to come at a time when you’re in the middle of your favourite pastime (be it CAC, fishing or golf). As these elections often involve control of your own country’s legislative and financial organs, their outcome may seriously influence your operational abilities to continue playing the game. Consequently, the time may have come for a little repackaging of your master plan for public consumption.

At first sight, this may appear to be an admission of defeat. However, the seasoned CAC player will know that even this apparent discomfiture will itself provide further opportunity for complete country annihilation. Here’s how.

* * *

Under pressure, you will find yourself studying possible alternatives to prolonged occupation. Depending on the country you are occupying, a number of possibilities may present themselves. These include:

1. Overnight troop

withdrawal

An attractive option, which will not only halt the rising casualties among your own troops, but will also leave the seriously destabilised and fragmented country to get on with its own civil war, thereby finishing off the job you yourself started by gradually blowing itself to smithereens. But there is a snag. For this move will almost certainly be described by the Axis of Media-Evil as a case of “cutting and running”, which is what you yourself have repeatedly described as “cowardly”. Besides, abandoning the country to determine its own fate also means that you yourself will not have a say in the matter… something which is plainly not acceptable.

2. Gradual troop withdrawal

This option is better because it gives the semblance of a well-thought strategy, involving gradual reduction in the number of troops while at the same time beefing up the country’s own security so that it can “take care of itself” when you are gone.

This will almost certainly keep the critics at home happy (or at least, less ferocious); but if you are too successful in improving the country’s security, then there may be a possibility that the process of total annihilation will never be complete. For this reason, it is important to set unrealistic deadlines (for example, one year) for the war-torn and impoverished country to be able to guarantee its own security. And just to make sure that it never fully recovers after troop withdrawal, you might want to tie that deadline to a threat of future UN economic sanctions: you know, just to weaken the country all over again, so the process of annihilation can be completed at will later.

3. Partition

What better way to completely annihilate a country than to simply divide it into three, literally wiping the original country off the map in the process? Partition appears at a glance to be the ideal strategy with which to conclude a session of CAC. After all, your previous efforts have already dismantled the country’s unifying structures and split its population along ethnic and sectarian lines. Why not go one step further, and decree that it simply no longer exists? And there’s also another advantage: for by annihilating your target country and replacing it with three new fledgling States, you will have seriously altered the balance of power in an already explosive part of the world. Not only have you generously provided the world with three brand new countries, all ripe for mutual conflict, and ready to be lovingly annihilated by tomorrow’s generation of CAC players, but you will also have presented the remaining countries of the region (many of which have similar ethnic and sectarian divisions of their own) with the possibility of internal unrest and further fragmentation… thereby effectively guaranteeing a long and bloody future for the game.

So congratulations, and thanks for playing… Complete Annihilation of Countries ™.