Kenneth Timmerman has a useful piece in the New York Post on Jesse Jackson’s complicity to Liberia’s troubles. Which reminds me of Ryan Lizza’s truly outstanding piece from the July 24, 2000 New Republic (not on the web, but it should be) in which he savaged Bill Clinton’s shameless Africa “policy.” Here’s one money passage:

Indeed, confronted with several stark moral challenges, the Clinton administration has abandoned Africa every time: it fled from Somalia, it watched American stepchild Liberia descend into chaos, it blocked intervention in Rwanda. But Clinton’s soaring rhetoric has posed a problem that his predecessors did not face–the problem of rank hypocrisy. And so, time and again, the imperative guiding his administration’s Africa policy has been the imperative to appear to care. Unwilling to commit American blood and treasure to save African lives, and unwilling to admit that they refuse to do so, the Clintonites have developed a policy of coercive dishonesty. In Rwanda, afraid that evidence of the unfolding genocide would expose their inaction, they systematically suppressed it. And in Sierra Leone, unwilling to take on a rebel group that was maiming and slaughtering civilians by the thousands, the Clintonites insisted that all the rebels truly wanted was peace and a seat at the negotiating table.
Abandoning Africans is nothing new. But the Clinton administration has gone further. It has tried to deny them the reality of their own experience, to bludgeon them into pretending that the horrors around them do not truly exist–so that they won’t embarrass the American officials who proclaim so eloquently that their fates are inextricably linked to our own. Sierra Leone, a former British colony whose capital was founded in the late eighteenth century by freed slaves, was a pretty nasty place even before the birth of the Revolutionary United Front. After an initial bout with democracy upon gaining independence in 1961, it slid into dictatorship and kleptocracy and stayed there through the 1970s and ’80s–consistently near the bottom in world rankings of infant mortality, per capita income, and life expectancy. So the outside world barely noticed when, in 1991, a group of about 100 guerrillas launched a campaign to take over the country. But the RUF–backed by Charles Taylor, a warlord in neighboring Liberia–quickly established itself as a rather unusual rebel group. For one thing, it had no discernible political philosophy or agenda. For another, it was almost unimaginably brutal.