The refugees return to a country where, according to the United Nations, 80 percent of people have no access to basic medical care. More than two-thirds have no running water. A whole generation of children has never opened a schoolbook. Life expectancy is less than 40 years. Three in ten children will die before reaching their fifth birthday.
[...]
"What we have in Angola now is negative peace," said Raphael Marques, a 31-year-old journalist and dissident who is the director of the Open Society Institute's Angolan office. "It is the absence of conflict, yes. But it is peace without justice, peace without opportunity, peace without democracy. This is not a peace that promises much to the Angolan people."
[...]
One British organization, Global Witness, investigated the country's finances and found at least $1 billion worth of revenues a year simply unaccounted for — a sum that is a quarter of the nation's income.
Last year an internal report by the International Monetary Fund on Angola's finances reached a similar conclusion. Angola has not been able to qualify for low-cost loans from the I.M.F. to help in the rebuilding effort. Instead the government has borrowed money from private banks at high interest rates, using its oil as collateral.
These are not silly arguments, but they can be addressed. Military interventions are always risky, but success looks relatively promising in Liberia. All Liberian factions say they want us on the ground, and ordinary Liberians have been pleading for Mr. Bush to send troops.
Would anybody shoot at us? Probably, but in neighboring Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, local fighters melted away rather than take on European troops. The ragtag Liberian militias, bereft of popular support, would probably collapse even more quickly.
I argued against invading Iraq, but Liberia presents a much more compelling case for intervention. The difference is not that Saddam slaughtered at most 1 percent of his population over the last 14 years, while Liberian warfare has killed more than 6 percent of its population so far. Nor is it that rescuing Liberia would bolster our international stature rather than devastate it.
No, the crucial differences lie elsewhere. First, Liberia has an urgency to it that Iraq did not: people are being hacked apart daily in Liberia, and if we do nothing, the conflict may spread across West Africa. Second, success can be more easily accomplished in Liberia, using just 1 or 2 percent of the number of troops we have in Iraq, mostly because Liberians desperately want us to intervene.
Liberia's warfare has already infected Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast, costing perhaps a half-million lives in all since Charles Taylor grabbed Liberia in 1989. Just as the Rwandan crisis (and Mr. Clinton's failure to respond decisively) led to a catastrophe across central Africa that has cost more than four million lives so far, Liberia's civil war could lead to upheaval across West Africa.
West Africa's civil wars are usually reported as tragedies befalling individual states. This month, the spotlight is on Liberia. A couple of months ago, the conflict in Côte d'Ivoire received more attention. Before that, it was Guinea, and before that, Sierra Leone. In fact, all these wars are intertwined, and it is impossible to understand one without reference to the others.
If one thinks of Liberia as an isolated calamity, the case for American military intervention is weak. Granted, America has old links to the country—it was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves—but Liberia has no strategic or economic significance. Its people are suffering, but a cynic might point out that there are only 3m of them. If, however, one sees Liberia as a flaming match in a petrol-drenched neighbourhood, the case for extinguishing that flame is much stronger.
It's the best background the skeptic has seen on Liberia.
Also, it's worth noting Robert Kaplan's piece about how the U.S. should manage the world (pay to play):
RULE NO. 8
THE MISSION IS EVERYTHING
No mission should ever be compromised by diplomatic punctilio. That sounds obvious, and at the same time is often impossible to implement. But here is what happens when this rule is broken.
In the late 1990s Nigerian soldiers deputized by the international community were in Sierra Leone, not only to keep the peace but also, if truth be told, in some cases to steal alluvial diamonds. Like other African peacekeeping contingents in Sierra Leone, the Nigerians weren't always paid by their own government, even though the government was getting money from the international community to provide peacekeeping. Some of these contingents were openly incompetent; the Zarnbians, for instance, were a battalion of mechanics, cooks, and clerks. But the United Nations said little about any of this; instead it officially accepted the obvious falsehood that all national armies are roughly equal Diplomatic nicety had completely compromised the mission. The result: the peacekeeping effort nearly collapsed as demoralized and incompetent peacekeepers surrendered without a fight to murderous teenage paramilitaries, who closed in on the capital of Freetown. Order was restored only after the British government dispatched commandos to Sierra Leone. Mounted on rooftops at the airport, a contingent of those commandos shot and killed any rebel who emerged from the bush. For the British, only the mission mattered.
the skeptic is an avid reader who decided one day that he should stop harrassing his friends by e-mailing them all the time, and instead allow them to read (or ignore) his punditry at their leisure.
Questions, comments? Send an e-mail to the_skeptic @ hotmail.com
I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.--H.L. Mencken
