The only way to make peace in a place like Liberia (or anywhere else for that matter) is to defeat the bad guys. It may be that our deployments to Japan and Western Europe have outlived their usefulness, and we'd be better served to move our troops to more dangerous parts of the globe. But absent such a re-evaluation of our commitments, piling on new ones is not sensible.
It is most heartbreaking to consider the plight of Liberia, and also to reflect that so many nations of the world are scarcely better off. If we intervene in Liberia on purely humanitarian grounds, it seems likely that we will raise impossible hopes in the minds of other oppressed people around the globe. Rescue by American GIs may come to seem a worldwide entitlement.
I take an expansive view of America's role in the world and believe strongly that we should do what we can to promote and facilitate the spread of democracy. And I have elsewhere praised the Bush administration for its initiative in helping Africa to fight the scourge of AIDS. But when Americans are asked to risk their lives, it should only be to protect the interests of the United States. Those interests were very much at stake in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Liberia, they are not. John Quincy Adams said 180 years ago that America was "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Perhaps someday the world will maintain an all-volunteer force of liberators to save places like Liberia and Burma and Sierra Leone. But that day is not at hand, and the United States cannot range abroad "in search of monsters to destroy."