The killing goes on in Liberia, but help is on the way. The
White House announced on Friday that two ships from a naval
amphibious force should be off the coast of that beleaguered
country in about a week. A third ship will be a few days behind.
The ships are carrying 2,300 Marines from the 26th Marine
Expeditionary Unit, although what they will do when they arrive is
unclear. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on “Fox News
Sunday” that the U.S. wanted to “to stabilize the situation” in
Liberia, but he stopped short of committing the Marines to forcible
intervention. “They are going in,” he said, “when there is a
cease-fire, when [Liberian president] Charles Taylor is leaving,
has left.”
But as ambiguous as this may be, it is at least a start. The
U.S. had to do something about Liberia, and in dispatching the
amphibious force, President Bush followed his own humanitarian
instincts, and over-ruled the know-nothing wing of his own party.
Liberia, of course, has a long-standing U.S. connection. It was
founded by freed American slaves, and it has always thought of
itself as an unofficial American colony. The Firestone company ran
the country for years, and during the Cold War the CIA used it as a
base. Liberia was our most dependable African ally.
Liberia’s problems, however, have been festering for years, and
there have been many missed opportunities to solve them. The game
now, though, especially among liberals, is to deny any
responsibility for policy failures. Liberia has become a political
football. As Susan Rice, once the utterly feckless secretary of
state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, told the
New York Times:
“I’m becoming increasingly cynical. The dithering and delaying,
particularly after raising expectations in Liberia and throughout
Africa and in the international community, is bordering on the
criminally irresponsible.”
Ms. Rice’s chutzpah here is breathtaking. As a National Security
Council official, before she became an assistant secretary of
state, she was, if not responsible, at least complicit, in a
Clinton administration policy that helped lead to 800,000 or more
deaths in Rwanda. Then, as assistant secretary, she applauded the
agreement in Sierra Leone that gave Charles Taylor’s proxies, the
murderous RUF rebels, control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines. The
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Clinton’s special envoy to Africa, helped
broker the agreement. Taylor, incidentally, once asked that Jackson
be appointed U.S. ambassador to Liberia.
Liberia, in fact, has attracted, and still attracts, numerous
frauds, charlatans and con men. The Rev. Al Sharpton announced a
few weeks ago that he and Cornel West were going to Monrovia, the
Liberian capital, to help bring about peace. Actually they never
got any closer than Ghana, but no matter. Standing outside the
Liberian U.N. mission on Friday, Sharpton played the race card.
“This administration’s policy is different, absolutely different,
when it comes to people of color,” he said. “I can’t imagine that
there wouldn’t be intervention in Europe if thousands were dying in
war.”
Rep. Donald Payne, the main spokesman on Africa for the
Congressional Black Caucus, is also playing the race card. Racism,
he says, is at the bottom of the administration’s failure to
intervene so far in Liberia. Payne’s chutzpah here is a match for
Ms. Rice’s and then some. Payne was once Charles Taylor’s great
champion in Congress, even though in his march to power in Liberia
Taylor pioneered in the use of child soldiers, while he murdered a
great many people.
Meanwhile as Payne, Sharpton and others play the race card,
Taylor plays the Jesus card. Pat Robertson supports him. Robertson
says this has nothing to do with his gold-mining venture with
Taylor’s government; it has to do with Taylor’s supposedly deep
faith. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network once reported
that Taylor told Liberians, “I am not your president, Jesus is.” At
the same time, Robertson has insisted, weirdly and without
foundation, that Christian Liberia is under attack by its Muslim
neighbors.
But in fact, Taylor has been fomenting violence and supporting
rebels in other countries, not only Sierra Leone, but Guinea and
the Ivory Coast as well, for some time now. Indeed the virtual
certainty that one way or another he will now fall from power and
no longer assist the rebels may already have had some effect. The
civil war in the Ivory Coast has ended, and the civil war in Guinea
seems to be waning. Taylor is causing less mischief in West Africa
now than before.
No one can be sure what will happen next in Liberia, although
certainly there are grounds for hope. The appearance of U.S. ships
off its coast is likely to have an effect. In mid-June, when
negotiations between Taylor’s government and the rebels were at a
critical point, the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault
ship, turned up off the West African coast, charged with aiding the
possible evacuation of American citizens from Liberia. Its mere
appearance was instrumental in persuading the rebels and Taylor’s
government, especially Taylor’s government, to sign a peace
agreement. But after only three days the Kearsarge was
ordered back to Norfolk, Virginia, and when it sailed away the
peace agreement collapsed. The fighting and dying in Liberia
continued.
Negotiations are going on now in Ghana between U.S. and Nigerian
officials on the terms for deploying two Nigerian battalions, some
1,300 troops, to Liberia for peacekeeping duties. Nigeria is asking
for logistical support, and this time it is likely to get it. When
it conducted peacekeeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone in
the 1990s, it did so without U.S. assistance. Nigeria had a
military government, and the Black Caucus and its liberal allies,
misinformed, as always, on African matters, were adamant: They did
not want to aid Nigeria.
Consequently Nigeria went into Liberia and Sierra Leone on its
own. Some 700 Nigerian soldiers then lost their lives in Sierra
Leone; many others died in Liberia. At the same time, the
peacekeeping operations reportedly cost Nigeria some $8
billion.
So Nigeria is now saying never again; it is demanding help, and
in the absence now of liberal objection, help will be forthcoming.
Indeed liberals now support some kind of U.S. intervention in
Liberia, and the resistance is coming from knee-jerk myopic
conservatives: Liberia has no strategic importance, and U.S. forces
are already stretched thin, and so on.
But on July 17, according to AllAfrica.com, a reliable and unbiased
source of African news, a Special Forces major, Roger Carstens,
turned up at the American Enterprise Institute and made a case for
U.S. involvement in Liberia. AEI, good conservative think tank that
it is, opposes intervention or involvement. But Carstens, who was
speaking in a private and not an official capacity, said U.S.
“interests and values match” in Liberia, and that if the U.S.
intervened to help end the fighting it would also “strike a blow in
the war on terrorism.”
Moreover, he said, “everyone wants us to be there,” and “a small
number of Special Forces units and a Marine amphibious strike
force” could deal effectively with both Taylor’s thugs and the
rebels. AllAfrica.com did not say whether or not he changed any
hearts and minds at AEI, but clearly he had tried.
