July
8, 2003, 3:45 p.m.
No on Liberia
The
case against nation-building.
e
are hard up on it in the matter of Liberia. The nation-changers see it
as one more nation to change and who would vote against a different nation,
except for the matter of how to bring it about? The nation-changing program
in Iraq is going muddily, and it is good news that the Iraqi guerrillas
don't have weapons of mass destruction at hand, but rifle fire and an
occasional hand grenade serve their political purposes. They aren't enough
to drive the Coalition forces out of the country, but they are enough
to give off a Chechnyan smell of perpetual armed resistance.
Three considerations
appear to be converging, in the matter of Liberia. The first is pretty
unqualified approval of intervention by the United Nations. The second
is the warrant issued for the arrest of Charles Taylor as a war criminal.
The third is a perceived sense that some singular exertion should be made
to do something in black Africa.
The best thing that
has happened in very recent years in that part of the world was the willingness
of the British, with some help from the French, to send a detachment of
soldiers to Sierra Leone to tell them they had to stop chopping off some
children's hands and sticking rifles into the hands of others. That form
of civil life was something of an endowment by Charles Taylor, who has
proudly thought himself the center of revolutionary activity on the west
coast of Africa.
Africa is a terrible
mess, and the inclination over the years has been to turn one's head away
from it, in part because of an accepted sense of futility in trying to
do anything about it, in part because there is a suspicion, mostly unexpressed,
that black countries simply don't know how to maintain civil democratic
order. Oh, we go through the proper formalities. Everybody cheered the
day that Ian Smith stepped down and Mugabe stepped up. In the Congo, The
Economist puts the figure of dead in fighting at 4.7 million. Oh,
and in the Sudan, something over 2 million in two decades. And we all
know about Rwanda and Burundi and the l.5 million dead. Abstention presupposes
a callused capacity for detachment from this continental gore, as we whistle
along, year after year. The figures of African dead amount to many times
the loss of Allied troops in the Second World War, and come near to the
numbers of the Holocaust. But what we are trained to celebrate is decolonialization.
There is little in post-decolonialization to warrant celebration.
President Bush put
off a decision to engage in Liberia. He said he wanted "all the facts."
What facts are we short of that have a bearing on the challenge at hand?
Our nation-building has given us Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, and Iraq. The intervention in Haiti, by Mr. Clinton, was
a political gesture designed to assure the black community that intervention
in behalf of blacks was something the United States was willing to do.
Putting down in six nations in Africa, President Bush will have an opportunity
to canvass sentiment on a venture into Liberia.
He would do well
to jettison, at the outset, any claim to special U.S. obligations to Liberia
stemming from our national sponsorship of a free and independent Liberian
state in 1847. We are not beholden to Liberia in the sense that the British,
French, and Belgians can be thought to be beholden to Rhodesia, Sierra
Leone, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo. To talk about responsibilities
traceable to events a century and one-half past gets you into the kind
of historical sandpit Clinton got into when he decided to apologize, in
Africa, for slavery. Mr. Bush has a pretty clear alternative, which is
to say that intervention in Liberia is primarily an African responsibility,
and that the Economic Community of West African States in Nigeria must
take the lead. The United Nations needs not only a mandate to intervene
in Liberia, but needs also to do effective recruiting to bring in the
necessary peacekeepers. Their first duty would be to send paratroopers
to chop off Charles Taylor's hands, sparing him the humiliation of having
to salute his captors.
Yes, of course, the
United States should offer a contribution of food, medicine, and peace-corpsmanship.
But the endeavor should be thought a black African enterprise, and that
is a hefty challenge to the diplomacy of the United States government.
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e
are hard up on it in the matter of Liberia. The nation-changers see it
as one more nation to change and who would vote against a different nation,
except for the matter of how to bring it about? The nation-changing program
in Iraq is going muddily, and it is good news that the Iraqi guerrillas
don't have weapons of mass destruction at hand, but rifle fire and an
occasional hand grenade serve their political purposes. They aren't enough
to drive the Coalition forces out of the country, but they are enough
to give off a Chechnyan smell of perpetual armed resistance. 
