From the Washington Post’s weekly “Ideas Industry” column:

THINK TANK HUMOR: Oh, and you thought think tankers were dry, mumbling folks. Ha! Laugh-parched staffers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace came in one morning last week to find a listing of “Coalition of the Willing: Contributions to War Effort” in their mailboxes, complete with “official” U.S. Department of State header.

Here’s an excerpt of the countries and their “donations”:

Lithuania: Giving up the Bomb: What’s in it for You? A Foreign Ministry Documentary.

Denmark: 721,999 boxes of Her Majesty’s Butter Cookies.

Georgia: Eduard Shevardnadze will resign to serve as interim Iraqi president.

Portugal: 23,339 tons of fresh calamari for Iraqi POWs.

Uganda: Offer of asylum to Saddam Hussein.

Netherlands: 290,000 tons of cannabis for medical purposes only.

Singapore: 50 copies of government film, Spanking for Freedom, plus 432,201 used Apple computers.

Honduras: 374,000 “We are NOT a Banana Republic!” T-shirts (In Arabic: Ihna mish Jumhouriyya Bananniyya!)

Nicaragua: 20 special lectures from leading government officials on “How to Get the Most Out of Elliot[t] Abrams” [Abrams, currently the director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, was a major proponent of aid to the Nicaraguan contras during the first Bush administration. He later pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts during Iran-contra, and was pardoned by Bush senior.]

Palau: Still thinking about it.

Laughs were courtesy of visiting scholar Daniel Brumberg, a Georgetown University professor working on CEIP’s Democracy and Rule of Law Project.