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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (105093)	7/13/2003 12:49:56 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

There are on-the-ground facets to Liberia that make sensible a US involvement there ... i wasn't thinking so much of internal US partisan politics, though of course they will enter into any decision .... but more enduringly important are the country-specific factors, imho Principally, liberians themselves identify with the US, for historical reasons, and this applies not only to descendants of freed slaves, but to many among the indigenous as well .... the latter don't want a return to the police state repression of Tubman, but they do very much like the fine rhetoric of the great Cradle of Liberty .... the way it is written, that is This is no Somalia ... and it's a world away from Iraq, where military occupation by a single nation with a religion hostile to the indigenous is a clear advancement of the grand plan of bin Laden .... not the same thing at all, when you're invited Depending on how the US went about an involvement, it could likely pick up some allies for the effort quite easily, and in so doing patch up to an extent some of the relations damaged by its unilateral actions in re iraquis .... although, Liberia is quite unique in that its people relate specifically to the US, not any of the independent democracies .... still, it can help to have friends in this world, even if they aren't going to mark the neocon box in November 2004 balloting ..... meanwhile the independents can do things elsewhere - personally i would like to see Canada get more involved in Rhod ... um, Zimbabwe .... historical ties, and all that ... not that our current regime in Ottawa is ever likely to admit that Ian Smith was right on a thing or two, but the place is clearly headed downhill and could use some help How you do things is crucial .... there are in Liberia far more than the descendants of slaves, there are mostly indigenous, mande, mel, kwa, and krahn tribes are all mentioned in this article, there will likely be more - ajc.com ... all have to be treated equitably, and this may mean undoing kleptocratic acquisitions of the past, particularly in land tenure ..... i can't recall what if anything my MSF friend has said in this regard, it's just a guess, sort of the way things go elsewhere, but chances are it would profit Dubya greatly to understand the fundamentals behind the philosophy of Gral Zapata, and ease off on the Gral Custer approach