Title Changed: Current news about Liberia.

And U.N. Ambassador Martin Chungong Ayafor of Cameroon, a Security Council member, suggested a U.S.-backed mission could win goodwill for the United States.
\"This could be a good face-saving measure for them, and show that they intervene for the sake of peace and security,\" Ayafor said.

In the span of 180 years, the relationship of the United States to Liberia has gone from one of parental nurturing to one of self-interested assistance to one of increasing disengagement. There are many views on whether the U.S. should have become more involved in the Liberian civil war, and how much assistance the U.S. should be providing to Liberia now. Some feel that the U.S. had a moral responsibility to prevent the massive destruction that took place in a country to whose creation it had been so instrumental. In this view, the U.S. should have intervened at the beginning of the war and, having not done so, should now at least be providing greater assistance to help promote a democratic system and stop the human rights abuses. Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo are examples of places in which the U.S. had minimal ties and yet offered significant postwar reconstruction assistance.
Others feel that U.S. interests in Liberia are peripheral, and that Liberia's destiny is best left in its own citizens' hands, whatever the cultural ties and affinities between the two nations. They point to the disastrous 1993 U.S. mission in Somalia which led to unnecessary U.S. casualties. They point to the economic and social problems at home which require political attention and funds.
In this globalized world in which countries, economies, and people are so connected, the question of the proper role of the United States in Liberia's past, present, and future is an increasingly complex one.

[..] Of course, the fracturing of Liberia by itself poses no direct threat to U.S. security interests. But what Rumsfeld didn't recognize is that the hue and cry about Liberia is only about Liberia in the secondary sense. It's primarily about American power, and how Washington will marshal that overwhelming power in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Liberia would be a case of America leading the world in the export of security to beleaguered and neglected regions, essentially underwriting stability in places where no vital national interest, classically defined, is at stake. It would be a powerful example to a skeptical world that U.S. hegemony truly is as benevolent as Washington claims--and proving that point should be a first-order priority for U.S. foreign policy. [..]

Consequently, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan did everything but beg the Bush administration to send peacekeepers. After calling for an international security force led by an unspecified permanent member of the Security Council, Annan coyly pointed out, "that is a sovereign decision for [the U.S.] to take--but all eyes are on them." All eyes are, indeed. At the gates of the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, an 18-year-old who called Americans his "big brothers" told The New York Times, "We want troops to be here," while the crowd around him chanted, "George Bush, we liiiiike you." Ghanian President John Kufuor quickly pledged up to 5,000 peacekeepers from West African countries to join in any multinational effort. Finally, Mohamed ibn Chambas of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) summed up the regional perspective on Sunday: "We can provide the manpower. But we need material support and participation of some of the members of the Security Council, especially the United States of America." [..]

[N]otice that only since the calls for U.S. intervention--calls that have been building for a month--reached a crescendo last week has the world jumped to its feet on the Liberia issue. Looking approvingly on Kufuor's pledge was French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, the architect of obstruction at the Security Council this winter. Stalwart ally Britain has also encouraged the United States to intervene. In short, the world is waiting to see if two things will happen: First, whether the United States will flex its muscle in the service of moral principle when U.S. economic and security interests are not directly at stake; and, second, whether concerted international outcries can spur the United States into multilateral action it would not otherwise take. If the Bush administration meets the test, it could find itself with something it doesn't have much of right now political capital to call upon the next time the United States seeks to address a security threat the world would rather ignore--say, in Iran or North Korea. Leaving aside the compelling human rights issues at stake, that would be quite a bargain for the 2,000 U.S. peacekeepers that ECOWAS is requesting.

But judging by Rumsfeld's comments, too many senior administration officials are treating Liberia as yet another heart-wrenching but ultimately insoluble African crisis rather than the challenge to post-Iraq U.S. leadership it represents. [..]