EFL. You’ll have to scroll down to the July 9th heading.
Many people in Liberia are begging us to intervene to stop their horrible civil war — by unspecified means. Even President-by-intimidation Taylor is asking for help. Liberia’s neighbors would also undoubtedly love to see us clean up this infectious hell-hole. UN leaders are asking for a peacekeeping force as well. Do we have any duty to Liberians? If we have no duty to interfere, is it advisable on other grounds? Do we have any right to interfere? If we did interfere, what should we do?
| Off the top of my head, I'd say we have a right to interfere, if only because some of the parties involved asked us. Whether we have an obligation or not is a different question entirely. The idea of Liberia as an American "colony" doesn't sit with me. It calls for redefining the word as it was used in the 19th and 20th centuries back to the way it was used in the 18th century. Ruling "the natives" from Paris or London or Brussels or Berlin is a different thing from sending your people to form settlements and prosper (or fall) on their own. Australia, the United States, and Canada were all colonies, and all were a different creature from the Congo or Indonesia or even Venezuela. Britain has no obligation to come and right any of our internal difficulties. The fact that the Liberians have screwed up their country imposes no obligation on us... |
The formal answer to the first question has to be no. The first duty of our government is to our own people, and secondarily to those with whom we have agreements of alliance. Liberians fall into neither category. But the formal answer isn’t the whole story, of course. Most Americans know nothing of Liberia and its history with the US; but it has been a friendly and cooperative partner, albeit a rather corrupt one, for its whole history. From allowing air bases during WWII to siting a huge VOA station during the Cold War it has worked as a minor military partner — not an ally, true; but a cooperative partner.
| This was largely due to the near 30-year rule of President Tubman (1944 - 1971). His successor, President Tolbert, flirted a little more strongly with the Soviets, trying to play both sides against each other to his own advantage. Sgt. Doe, his successor, was a nut... |
Arguments that we have a duty to help Liberians don’t seem overwhelming, but they’re not negligable either. It might be a hard sell to Americans who don’t know much about our mutual history, but could be successfully argued. Unfortunately Liberia’s troubles make that whole section of West Africa unstable and ungovernable; and we know what happens when a section of the world becomes ungovernable — especially a section of the world with a lot of Moslems in it. Contrary to statements I’ve seen elsewhere, Liberia does have a substantial Moslem population, and the Ivory Coast is becoming polarized a la Nigeria. Humanitarian issues aside, we have a strategic interest in making sure the region doesn’t contain lawless pits where our terrorist enemies can form enclaves.
| That's a true statement, and it also fits with what I think is Bush's vision of the post-WOT world. Leaving festing sores like Liberia spreads the infection to neighboring states — in this case, Guinea and Ivory Coast. We're not going to have a stable world until the day of the condotierre is over. Liberia by that measure is as much a threat as North Korea. But so is Burma, and, as of today, Sao Tome. Tin hats and bully boys don't make good governments, and bad governments bring out the worst in people. Ask any pygmy... |
Quite a number of unrelated groups outside Liberia are also asking us to intervene on humanitarian ground, intimating that we can get back in their good graces by doing so. However, since these same people (Kofi et al) will wail about "imperialism" after the first Liberian casualty, we can safely discount any implied goodwill.
| Getting back into Kofi's good graces should be the least of our worries. Again I ask the age-old question: "Why do we have to please them?" |
The question of a right to interfere is a rather vexed question with a counterintuitive answer. When a nation’s survival is at stake (no matter what philosophers and theologians say), we accept it as given that that nation has the right to attack its active enemies, and even enemies that are not currently threatening them if this makes strategic sense. We invaded Iraq on these grounds, though the proximate cause was Iraq’s non-compliance with disarmament rules made to enforce the peace agreements. We invaded France as a step toward rolling up the Nazi empire, though France was not a grave threat to us. Life is more clear-cut when you limit wars to self-interest. Mugabe is a despicable villain who uses starvation as a political tool, but he does not threaten American interests, and so he knows he is safe from US attack. But if we allow "humanitarian reasons" as a trigger for war, he cannot think himself safe at all. You may think "Wonderful! The creep ought to worry." But think instead what an amazingly wide scope "humanitarian reasons" covers. Mugabe starves only a small fraction of Zimbabwe’s population. You can trivially find terrible abuses in South Africa, or Libya, or Morocco, or France, or any prison anywhere in the world. Suppose a group of Gypsies in Hungary beg for relief from the abuse of their human rights from anybody willing to invade Hungary. Do you need a threshold for action that says people’s lives have to be in danger? Here in the US we have a population that the EU considers oppressed, and whose lives are at stake: death row inmates. Nobody is safe, anybody is a target.
| That's why it's always polite to wait for somebody to invite you in. Had I been Bush (we can all be glad I wasn't) I'd probably have recognized the Iraqi National Congress as a government in exile and invaded to put them in charge. |
You can’t safely rely on appeals for outside intervention, either: who do you listen to, and who do you trust? You can find a Quisling in any country, to say that they need the German army to come restore order. Don’t complaint about the grammar in that sentence, it means what it says.
| That's where you balance national interest with available resources and what you damned well feel like doing. It'll be a sadder world when we're invading people for any reason at all... |
The cold-blooded rule of self-interest turns out to restrict war more than the more tender-hearted defense of human rights. I have to class "humanitarian reasons" together with "our country’s honor" and "our country’s destiny" as invitations to unnecessary wars. And . . . it never hurts to remember that power corrupts. We are not holy angels. Even our intricate systems of accountability don’t always work, as the Arthur Anderson and the brokerage scandals recently showed. This time the cries of "No blood for oil" were so much cow dung — the Iraq war worked against the oil industry’s interests. Next time it might be an honest indictment. Want to bet who’ll be president in 2009? Bush has been an honest man, as far as I can tell. But who comes after him? I don’t see that the words "humanitarian relief" automatically give us the right to do what needs to be done.
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So, let’s pretend we want to intervene. What options do we have?- We can toss in some US troops to serve with a UN/ECOMOG peacekeeping force. We’d get a lot of respect and nominal cooperation at first, but if we go in with the usual UN rules of engagement that will evaporate pretty quickly. Liberia is afflicted with many free-lance bandit gangs, loosely associated with warring factions. Unless we have the authority to chase after them when they show up nearby, we’re pretty useless.
| I'd rule out the "return fire only when fired upon" nonsense right off the bat, too... |
- If we go in with the understanding that our soldiers get to patrol wherever they want and shoot anybody who annoys them, the roadblock checkpoints will go away and the refugee problem will start to be solved. However, the same kleptocrats that are currently entrenched will still be there, and with somewhat less of an imperative to change. It does not matter much whether Taylor himself is still in the country or not. The people he surrounded himself with are of the same stripe as he.
| One of the other things that's going to jump out to bite our national nether regions is the fact that Liberians are (dare I say it?) black. The intervention that's being pushed on us now will become "Mr. Bush's Racist War™" just about as soon as the domestic ankle-biters can get the signs printed... |
- We can do the above, and start importing guns and ammo and training village elders in their use. Of course Taylor’s people would go ape, but if we could get around that problem the scheme might actually work. The idea relies on the fact that the bandit groups are not trained, and rely on superior firepower to terrorize and make up for their poor marksmanship. If your bandit group discovers that villages can fight back, they can either try to change tactics or look for easier prey. Bear in mind that an attacked village doesn’t have a lot to hope for as it is, so fighting back can’t hurt. This scheme takes far too long, though: months at least to supply and train, and many more months for bandits to start getting scared.
| It's also an approach we tried in Vietnam and Laos, with a certain amount of success, especially among the Hmong and allied tribes, but not enough success to avoid both countries having everyone running around calling each other "comrade." |
- We can intervene as part of a UN peacekeeping force, and then turn on the government. I’ve said before I think this a terrible option —probably the worst thing we could do.
| Turn on the post-Taylor government? As a member of a UN force? Lousy idea... |
- We can try to get agreement beforehand that Liberia as a government and a country no longer exists. On the basis of our historic ties with the land we are in a better position than Britain, France, or the UN to try to chase out the bandits and rebuild the nation. This would be very scary to a lot of kleptocratic governments out there, but I think we might be able to define non-existence tightly enough to keep focussed on the real basket cases. Then we land Marines. Since that can’t happen instantly, Taylor et al will have time to escape. And possibly go back to the bush and try for another revolution when we’re gone. So somebody needs to take out Taylor too.
Hmmm... Declaring that the country no longer exists seems pretty drastic. With 16 different ethnic groups, we could end up subsequently recognizing 16 separate countries that are now counties. Certainly, though, I'd withdraw all recognition of the Taylor government, to include the functionaries and the legislature. But there are other options, as well:- We could recognize LURD and/or MODEL as the legitimate government of Liberia and throw all our support behind them, at the same time requiring that they adhere to civilized rules of behavior;
- We could recognize none of the contending groups and demand a return to the 1847 constitution, installing a civil administration similar to the one we have in Iraq while the machinery for elections, legislature, courts, etc., are established;
- We could declare Liberia a failed state and import a head of state (Uganda's got a few minor kings lying around, f'rinstance, or Swaziland could probably kick in somebody royal) and rebuild the machinery of government with foreign functionaries. This sets up a government that's truly neutral among the competing parties in Liberia. Of course it also establishes a government with no local roots and will cause some local elements to complain about "them furriners," with its accompanying urge to use them for target practice. On the other hand, the original colonists represented something like the same approach, and five percent of the population controlled the country fairly well for 130 years.
Given enough time, there are lots of different approaches that are available for dealing with Liberia, and Bush & Co. are probably going over quite a few of them now. It may very well turn out that we end up doing the same thing we did for Ivory Coast, when they were begging for U.S. intervention, lo, these many months (six of them) ago. |
I d’no if this goes here or under "Home Front" |