Pleading intervention

I am half-expecting the usual peaceniks to take to the streets once more. Their b_te noir, George W. Bush just consented to send US troops into Liberia.

This time, there is no talk of weapons of mass destruction. But there is, no doubt, a mission of nation-building here.

In Iraq, the Coalition of the Willing confronted a rouge regime that threatened the world with its military prowess and its terrorist minions. In Liberia, there is, simply, a failed regime.

Once the brightest star of democratic nationhood in all of Africa, Liberia has degenerated into tyrannical squalor under the misrule of Charles Taylor. Civil war has reduced the country – founded by freed American slaves over a century ago – to shambles.

A ragtag rebel army has cut off the West African nation’s capital from the rest of the country. A major human calamity is in the offing. The loyalist forces of Taylor will be prepared fro a long period of bloodshed unless the tyrant of Monrovia volunteers to leave.

There is, at the moment, a tenuous ceasefire brokered by the UN. The rebels have threatened to attack US troops if they arrive ahead of Taylor leaving. Nigeria has offered the beleaguered tyrant a place of exile. Under US pressure, Nigeria has also offered troops for peace-keeping work in Liberia.

Unlike Iraq, the US is not coming in gung-ho into Liberia. On the contrary, UN Secretary-General has been pleading for weeks for Washington to intervene in a country already soaked in blood.

In a sense, the US will now be leading a Coalition of the Unwilling.

Those who make decisions in Washington would rather that the French or the Germans or the Belgians come in. The Americans and the British, the Dutch and the Australians have contributed troops to oust Saddam Hussein and re-establish the Iraqi nation. That coalition was supported by Polish soldiers and will soon be reinforced by Spanish troops.

But the French and the Germans and the Belgians are not volunteering. They are laying back and waiting for the sole superpower to do something about the situation.

The Americans are understandably reluctant.

The US carried the brunt of the operations in Bosnia and Serbia. They still have troops keeping the peace in Afghanistan and hunting down the remaining Al-Qaeda forces – including the elusive Osama bin Laden. Their occupation army in Iraq continues to take casualties by the day as Saddam loyalists mount hit-and-run attacks on isolated American infantry.

The horror of Somalia still hangs heavily in the memory of the American public. Highly trained US troops proved vulnerable in urban warfare against ragtag warlord armies.

Military analysts have pointed out again and again that US troops are the worst prepared for peace-keeping operations in dirt-poor Third World countries. The US Army is trained to move in with heavy armor and intensive air support. They deploy quickly, hit hard and move fast.

In countries like Somalia or Liberia, there are no "quality targets" worthy of expensive smart bombs. There are no heavily armed formations that could be overrun by massed armor and superior air power. US troops will be severely underemployed patrolling dusty streets and distributing potable water.

Military analysts agree that Swedish soldiers or even the French Foreign Legion are better-trained in doing pacification operations and restoring civil order in societies that have descended into chaos. They are not trained to work closely with spy satellites, cruise missile launchers, heavy bombers flying out of European bases and low flying drones.

But no one else wants to go in and do the dirty job in a country as woefully unimportant as Liberia. The same way no one wants to deploy a first-class army in Somalia and clean up the starving armies of ignorant warlords.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan, uncomfortable over the paralysis of the Security Council in the face of crisis over Iraq, had to make all sorts of squeaky sounds to entice Washington to come over to Liberia and liberate the place. There is nothing heroic about this job. But it has to be done.

There is no disagreement over the necessity of sending in an international security force to end the bloodshed in a country that failed. But no one else wants to commit troops and underwrite the costs of pacifying a country that might not be worth the expense.

And so George W. Bush, the man everyone vilified for being quick to deploy US troops in strange foreign lands, now reluctantly decides to intervene. That decision is compelled by obvious humanitarian considerations. The same considerations were not so readily evident to the peaceniks that opposed the offensive against the murderous Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad.

Even as he does so, the Coalition of the Willing does not seem to be behind him in this lonely chore. This is not part of the campaign against international terror. All this involves in the woefully unromantic job of cleaning up a place littered by internecine warfare in a society with too many guns but too little food to go around.

It might seem odd to denounce Bush’s decision to go into Liberia as yet another instance of "US imperialist intervention." But one does not know the depths of illogic that the passionately anti-American peaceniks are capable of plumbing.

They denounced the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan as an assault on sovereignty. They condemned the liberation of Iraq as an imperialist war for control of oil. Perhaps they will also denounce the reluctant intervention in Liberia as yet another imperialist ploy to control a vital continent?

Maybe this time around, with the humanitarian issues so glaringly clear, the peaceniks should instead direct their noisy marches at those democratic and humane powers that refuse to budge in the face of calamity.

The burden of rescuing societies that fail ought not to be borne by the US alone. The world has become too reliant on the military prowess of the US – a military prowess that is condemned when deployed but sorely missed when kept at home.

It has been once said that evil triumphs when good men do nothing. And what happens when good and perfectly capable nations do nothing in the face of human tragedy?