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The Tug of Paternalism
August 3, 2003
By JAMES TRAUB
When Liberian citizens late last month deposited the
corpses of their friends and loved ones, killed by rebel
shells, at the gate of the American Embassy compound in the
capital of Monrovia, they were not only issuing a desperate
plea for salvation but also making a statement of
responsibility: it is you, the United States, who must
answer our prayers. But why? Because freed American slaves
settled in Liberia 180 years ago? Do these ties of history
impose a special obligation? Can the dim colonial past
exert a tug even on the hardheaded policy makers in the
Bush administration?
This administration came into office vowing to avoid what
one of its officials described to me at the time as
''profligate intervention.'' We would intervene to protect
our interests, not to save woebegone people in far-off
lands. During the presidential campaign, George Bush took
this position to its logical conclusion when he said that
he would not have intervened in Rwanda in 1994 had he been
president, even though close to a million people died in
the ensuing genocide. If anything, the war against
terrorism provides an ever-more-powerful rationale for
preserving the U.S. military for serious wars against
people who want to do us harm.
And yet the Bush administration is planning to station
troops off the coast of Liberia. (Whether those troops will
come ashore remains unclear at this writing.) Why Liberia
if not Rwanda, an infinitely more desperate situation?
Perhaps President Bush needs to prove that his promises of
engagement on his recent trip to Africa were not empty
ones. But it is also true that Rwanda wasn't ours; only
common humanity bade us act, and common humanity, for
George Bush (or Bill Clinton, for that matter), was not
enough. History has made Liberia ours. Paternalism, if not
colonialism, remains a real force, especially in Africa.
Look at the example of Sierra Leone and Great Britain, its
former colonial master. The British have no meaningful
''interests'' to protect in Sierra Leone. The expatriate
community is long gone, and the country is almost
irrelevant commercially. The only thing that remains is
ephemeral -- a historic relationship. But for the British,
that was enough. In the spring of 2000, when a precarious
peace entrusted to a U.N. force collapsed, Prime Minister
Tony Blair sent troops into Sierra Leone. A contingent of
800 soldiers deterred an attack on Freetown, the capital,
and most of them quickly returned home, demonstrating that
such interventions can achieve a great deal with minimal
effort.
Liberia was never an official American colony, and yet
since 1821, when the American Colonization Society bought
land there from local chiefs to resettle slaves, it has
been deeply entangled with the United States. Its capital
was named after President James Monroe. Liberia calls its
currency the dollar; it has a constitution, a flag and a
government modeled on ours; and it is still largely
controlled by the descendants of the original settlers,
known as Americo-Liberians.
Liberia once did matter to the United States. There was
rubber. Later there were C.I.A. posts and
satellite-tracking installations. But all that came to an
abrupt end with the conclusion of the cold war. When the
country's strongman, Samuel Doe, was about to be toppled
from power in 1990, the U.S. sent warships with more than
2,000 marines -- to evacuate Americans. Doe, our former
client, we left to be butchered. Over the next decade, as
warlords fought to dominate the clandestine trade in
diamonds and timber, Liberia descended into a state of
terrifying chaos. It now has nothing but trouble to offer a
potential savior.
And yet it was to our embassy gate that those bodies were
dragged, because it is as natural for Liberians to look to
us for protection as it is for Leoneans to look to Great
Britain and Ivoirians to France (which sent troops to the
Ivory Coast to quell an uprising there last fall). We may
object that Liberia is not our problem. But whose is it,
then? Only the terminally naive still expect U.N.
peacekeeping to work in situations of rampant violence. The
U.N. peacekeeping force sent to Sierra Leone in 1999
inspired so little respect, much less fear, that about 500
of them were taken hostage by rebels -- an act that
provoked the British intervention. A West African force
known as Ecomog, which entered Liberia in 1990, did
ultimately provide a measure of stability; and troops from
Nigeria are now preparing to return. But a local army will
not have the deterrent value of a well-armed and
well-trained Western one.
For all the talk of global integration, the fate of the
very poorest countries has become, if anything, a matter of
even greater indifference to the rich ones than it used to
be. Virtually the entirety of West Africa, and for that
matter the equally beleaguered nations of central Africa,
like Burundi, offer little strategic and only potential
economic value to the West and do not really figure in the
war on terrorism. And the fate of Rwanda proves all too
clearly that, in the absence of self-interest, appeals to
common humanity will not bring rescue.
And so these countries are left with no claims save the
utterly unexpected one: paternalism. What could be more
archaic in this globalized age? And isn't there something
here of the former servant throwing himself on the mercy of
his master? Well, yes. And that is a terrible affirmation
of failure. But is paternalism so very bad? It's an
acknowledgment of obligations incurred by shared history.
It's an _expression_ of kinship. After all, Liberia looks to
the United States because the United States is in its
blood. It is not simply pro-American but, in some odd but
meaningful way, American. Would it be better for us to
renounce paternalism and its obligations -- and abandon
Liberia to its dismal fate?
James Traub is a contributing writer for the magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03WWLN.html?ex=1061027142&ei=1&en=bb70b01aff0c3a28
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