President Bush put off a decision to engage in Liberia. He said he wanted "all the facts." What facts are we short of that have a bearing on the challenge at hand? Our nation-building has given us Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The intervention in Haiti, by Mr. Clinton, was a political gesture designed to assure the black community that intervention in behalf of blacks was something the United States was willing to do. Putting down in six nations in Africa, President Bush will have an opportunity to canvass sentiment on a venture into Liberia.
He would do well to jettison, at the outset, any claim to special U.S. obligations to Liberia stemming from our national sponsorship of a free and independent Liberian state in 1847. We are not beholden to Liberia in the sense that the British, French, and Belgians can be thought to be beholden to Rhodesia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo. To talk about responsibilities traceable to events a century and one-half past gets you into the kind of historical sandpit Clinton got into when he decided to apologize, in Africa, for slavery. Mr. Bush has a pretty clear alternative, which is to say that intervention in Liberia is primarily an African responsibility, and that the Economic Community of West African States in Nigeria must take the lead. The United Nations needs not only a mandate to intervene in Liberia, but needs also to do effective recruiting to bring in the necessary peacekeepers. Their first duty would be to send paratroopers to chop off Charles Taylor's hands, sparing him the humiliation of having to salute his captors.
Yes, of course, the United States should offer a contribution of food, medicine, and peace-corpsmanship. But the endeavor should be thought a black African enterprise, and that is a hefty challenge to the diplomacy of the United States government.