The end of a 14-year nightmare in Liberia is at hand. The first peacekeeping troops from neighboring West African countries have landed in Monrovia, Liberia's capital. The United Nations has authorized a peacekeeping force to take their place in October. Charles Taylor, the brutal Liberian head of state, has agreed to leave the country. U.S. ships with 2,500 Marines aboard arrived off the coast last weekend.
Salvation is at hand, but President Bush bizarrely has refused to order the U.S. forces into the country. With the UN, the regional allies and all factions of Liberians begging the United States to act, the president dithers—as a furious debate rages inside his administration.
Many of the same neocons who drove the United States into Iraq unilaterally oppose the United States going into Liberia as part of a multilateral force. They argue that we should not risk another Somalia, where U.S. troop casualties were made famous in the film ''Black Hawk Down.'' They suggest that with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can't afford more troops in Liberia.
But these arguments are spurious. In Liberia, all sides are begging the United States to come in and help sustain a cease-fire. And the president already has put 2,500 Marines on ships off the coast. If we don't have enough troops to sustain them, then countries across the world from North Korea to Iran are likely to draw stark conclusions. This is a mission the U.S. military can undertake easily.
The basic argument of the neocons is that impoverished Liberia just doesn't matter to the United States, that it isn't worth even the small effort needed to stop a 14-year civil war that has killed some 6 percent of the population.
These skeptics could not be more wrong. Throughout Africa and much of the world, Liberia is viewed as a measure of U.S. international responsibility. The country was established some 180 years ago when the U.S. American Colonization Society, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, bought land to provide a home for freed U.S. slaves.
Former American slaves named the capital city after Monroe and created a currency and a constitution modeled after that of the United States. In the 20th century, Liberia's rubber plantations helped the United States compete with Britain in the emerging automobile industry.
During the Cold War, Liberia remained an essential ally, providing a key navigation station, a central CIA post, and a center for satellite tracking. With Firestone running the world's largest rubber plantation, Liberia remains a central source of rubber for the United States.
This alliance did not serve Liberia well. In 1980, Samuel Doe led a violent coup. The United States, anxious to keep its bases intact, embraced Doe.
Doe's brutal and corrupt regime built up Liberia's military, but impoverished its economy. When a rebel force led by Charles Taylor in 1990 overthrew him, the United States sent in troops to rescue Americans, but left the former client there to be butchered.
In recent weeks, when anguished Liberians deposited the corpses of their loved ones in front of the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, they were not simply issuing a desperate plea for U.S. assistance. They were making a stark reminder of U.S. responsibility. How we respond will not go unnoticed.
This administration is learning in Iraq the perils and terrible costs of unilateral war, waged over the objections of the international community. Now in Liberia, we can demonstrate our responsibility to the global community and to the decent opinion of mankind. If the president fails to act, the United States will learn that failing its international responsibility is also costly. Let us hope that he acts rather than continues to duck.
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