The Liberia squeeze serves political purposes for those who labor to accumulate faults in President Bush's leadership. But some of these are conflicting. Certainly the Democrats will need to straighten out their views on the military and on expeditionary relief.
There is only one reason to refuse intervention in Liberia. It isn't a bad reason, but isolationism -- the presumptive rule against going into a foreign country -- looks squat and provincial and uncaring in such a situation as Liberia's. And then there is the question of military resources. The critics have been playing hard the line that our entry into Iraq has depleted our resources. That's true, and one response to that is to urge a bigger military. But to do that runs up against the general Democratic disposition to downplay the military.
The Democratic critics are up in arms over the projected budget deficit and, in their censure, speak repeatedly about the $4 billion per month that we are spending to maintain the military operation in Iraq. They do not dwell on the $3-plus billion per month envisioned by the prescription-drug bill. But they race quickly to the tax cut, bemoaning the lost revenue when most it hurts, which is in election season.
There is a creeping incoherence in the Democrats' general line, and the Liberian emergency will turn a floodlight on it. We have no national interest in Liberia. It is not alleged that, hidden there, are weapons of mass destruction or storehouses for al-Qaida. The deployment of 18 mutilated bodies outside our embassy is understandably seen as a desperate cry for help. But note, that help would be to provide shelter against one more African faction that, like so many others in recent years, is prepared to kill wholesale in order to steal wholesale and to exercise power. Moreover, the embattled chief is a murderous tyrant whom President Bush exhorted to leave office many corpses ago.
One surmises that Bush et al. are waiting for very hard international pressure to move into Liberia before consenting to do so. We are stung by the denial of peacekeeping troops in Iraq. India arrested a planned deployment of several thousand soldiers there. New Delhi pleads that only if the United Nations passes a resolution endorsing the U.S. presence in Iraq will India feel conscientiously permitted to participate. And the administration, while unwilling to say in as many words that it underestimated the troops that would be necessary to restore order in Iraq and initiate democracy there, scrambles for manpower.