Sometimes I read the paper and grit my teeth. In today’s NT Times:
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on the American-led forces in Iraq to set out a “clear timetable” for a staged withdrawal, noting that numerous Iraqis had told United Nations officials that “democracy should not be imposed from the outside.”
While welcoming the formation last weekend of the 25-member Governing Council for Iraq, Mr. Annan said in a report distributed to Security Council members on Friday that “there is a pressing need to set out a clear and specific sequence of events leading to the end of the military occupation.”
This is the same Kofi Annan who is quite willing to put US troops at risk in Liberia:
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan kept up pressure on the United States to lead intervention in Liberia on Monday as troops strengthened defenses around battle-worn Monrovia in fear of another bloody rebel attack. West African countries pledged troops for a peacekeeping force on Sunday, but they want help from the United States to prevent a bloodbath in the capital and end nearly 14 years of violence that have infected the impoverished region. “There are lots of expectations that the United States will be able to lead the force,” Annan told reporters in Geneva. “But that is a sovereign decision for them to take.”
Sorry, Kofi, you’re being a little heavy-handed in asserting the UN’s primacy over my country. We’d really like to have the UN’s help in this, but there’s a cost which is simply too damn high.
In the same March post I quote below, I criticized Bush for doing a crummy job of building an international coalition in the months leading up to the war.
But Bush has failed to sell this war in three arenas.
He has failed to sell it (as well as it should have been) to the U.S. people. The reality of 9/11 has sold this war, and our atavistic desire for revenge is the engine that drives the support that Bush actually has.
He has failed to sell it diplomatically. Not that he could have ever gotten the support of France or Germany; as noted above, even with an AmEx receipt for the 9/11 plane tickets signed by Saddam himself, France would find a reason to defer this war. But he should never have let them get the moral high ground, which they have somehow managed to claim.
He has failed to sell it to our enemies, who do not believe today that we are serious about achieving our stated goals. This is, to me the most serious one, because the perception that we are not deadly serious is a perception that we are weak; and we will have to fight harder, not because we are too strong, but because we will be perceived as too weak.
Somehow Kofi seems to assuming that we’re so weak that he can direct our foreign policy.
Sorry, don’t think so.
And if Bush & Co. cave on this, and get outnegotiated in this situation, they’re clowns.
I really don’t get it. I just don’t get it. I’ve gotten to the point where I just throw my hands up in disgust.
Try this, linden: Kofi, like many in the West, no longer believes in state sovereignty. He believes, truly, in the idea of a world government that would issue orders to nation states and have them obeyed, much as Brussels issues regulations that are then obeyed EU-wide. This would include matters of war and peace. The idea is not new, but the revival of belief in it is and Annan recognizes this.
Like most bureaucraqts, he is happy to seize any opportunity. He believes that the current round of infighting in the USA and public consideration of going to the U.N. represents a cave-in by the USA, one he can use to enhance his own authority.
On that matter alone, I agree with him.
Kofi Annan, who directly refused to request additional military forces just before the genocide in Rwanda despite the pleas of the General in command (Can. Gen. Romeo Dallaire), will therefore continue to deliver his little packages of presumptuous self-righteousness despite his own shameful history. This behaviour will last until it becomes clear that he and his institution will pay a BIG political and financial price for doing so.
What this tells me is simple: it’s time to escalate attacks on the U.N.’s legitimacy, a task that hate-filled and corrupt body’s actions make fabulously easy.
Interestingly, the other side of this debate is also losing its belief in state sovereignty as supreme… but the implications and conclusions drawn from this belief are very different, and do not favour the U.N. Or many of the tin pot despotisms and kleptocratic hellholes that make up this body’s membership, for that matter.
Excellent Joe.
New realities require new divisions in thought.
There are two competing ideas of sovereignty in the world. The sovereign state and the sovereign individual.
Here comes the tricky part. Some states (what we call the anglosphere) support sovereignty of the individual. Which is a very strange thing for a state to do. It is in fact acting against it’s own interest.
Other states support sovereignty of the state. This is your normal historical state. The King or the Club makes the rules. Popular discontent can move these states but the individual counts for nothing. They are cattle.
What is so very interesting about all this is that the state of sovereign individuals acting against the interest of it’s own state is way more powerful than traditional states.
Orianna Falacci (did I spell it right?) gets it. Bush gets it. Blair understands it in relation to Iraq. He is clueless about the pEU.
Free man are more productive than cattle. Free men are better fighters than cattle. Free men are smarter than cattle. Free men attract allies.
Despots must hang together. Free men want to hang together. This is a war of necessity vs. desire.
Being an old hippie I will always take desire over necessity. it is the path of heart
This is very much to be expected from Kofi and his UNocrats. First and foremost, they’re jawboners, who are used to getting what they want by insisting. Second, they’re essentially powerless if the U.S. elects to ignore their demands and go its own way. Third, they’re captives of the major European powers and the satraps of the Muslim Middle East, who own them body and soul.
Note that they make no such demands of the true forces of evil in the world: the Palestinian terror squads and their prestigious enablers, the Cuban tyrant, the North Korean madmen, the Sudanese practitioners of genocide, the Muslim theocrats constantly calling for the destruction of America and Israel. Note that they retroactively approved the actions of France in Cote D’Ivoire.
Ignore them. I trust Dubya is doing so.
Francis:
The UN is smarter than they look. They don’t hector Castro, Kim, et. al., because the UN knows that tyrants don’t listen, while there is a chance that the democracies WILL listen.
I believe Bush will continue to ignore the UN–this may be one reason why the US is considered an evil imperialistic country-because we are not listening to (dripping with sarcasm)the know-it-alls at the UN.
By the way, when does the US get to hold Kofi Annan’s position at the UN (Secretary-General??)
Phil, you should check me on this, but I think it’s written into the United Nations Charter that the Secretary-General must come from a “nonaligned” nation: a nation not allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. That leaves us out for good and for all.
To quote a certain Ronald Reagan, that doesn’t upset my breakfast.
And on to Liberia.
Since it suits them in the present circumstances, Kofi Annan et al. believe (1) that the US has a unique obligation to intervene in Liberia; (2) that a cease-fire among the warring factions will be readily achieved; and (3) that this cease-fire will lead to the reconsitution of civil government and a civil society.
These assertions are mostly wrong. The justification for US intervention is real, but weak. **This 09 July Daily Telegraph Op-Ed** provides a consise summary.
The case for sending the Marines is based on painting the Charles Taylor faction and the two rebel movements as vicious brigands who prey on hapless civilians–an easy case to make. The logic drives off a cliff when we segue to the cease-fire: if the combatants are heavily-armed, ruthless, amoral, full of grievances, prone to terror tactics, and supported by their respective tribes, will they really stay cowed by a small international force in Monrovia? Anyway, why should we intervene to assure the survival of the very worst of the three, Taylor’s limb-choppin’, al-Quaeda-phile movement? Wars end when one side wins and the others lose. Kofi’s humanitarian plan to arrest this process will save lives (and limbs) in 2003–at the cost of much greater suffering in years to come.
I predict that we will shortly be shocked, shocked, to find that the Liberian situation is much more complex than today’s interventionists had advertised; that the military requirements are greater than foreseen; and that the cost in American treasure to rehabilitate Liberia’s economy and infrastructure will be high, very high.
Given that the US military is already stretched thin, Liberian operations will restrict our options with respect to Iraq and North Korea in a big way.
Of course, for some (still with me, Kofi? Jacques and Joschka?), that’s a feature, not a bug.
I think we could all learn from the fine gentlemen of Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it comes to dealing with the U.N.
“Tough titty for you, fishface!”
Seriously, I think that much of the world doesn’t quite realize how much of a sea change GWB is, compared to his predecessor. Bill Clinton was a darling of the UN and the EU, because he believed that U.S. power was best exercised through multilateral arrangements. Kofi still expects GWB to act in the same manner, despite evidence to the contrary.
The world has no idea just how radically the US gov’t changes every four years.
Kofi comes back with the message that “democracy cannot be imposed from outside” but he wants us in Liberia to do what? Simply make it seem like we’re doing something (such as the UN mission in Congo), pat ourselves on the back, while the mayhem and killing and dying go on all around (such as the UN mission in Congo)?
Or are we supposed to go there, get things to calm down a bit, leave in a few months, but without “imposing” any sort of civic democratic model, so that Kofi and the other UN functionaries can keep their rice bowl intact, knowing that they’ll still have their jobs of saying, in another few years down the road, how we need to go back in and calm things down again – and that obviously it was *us* who screwed up the last time which is why violence broke out again – when really it was them, by insisting we not actually solve the problem.
Or is he, as I suspect, being a hypocritical ass-clown, we *are* supposed to “impose democracy from outside” in Liberia but we *shouldn’t* in Iraq, on the strong principle that we must do what the UN tells us to do, whatever that is? Something I covered a bit in Part II of “America’s 21st Century Foreign Policy”.
As for this:
We’d really like to have the UN’s help in this
With Iraq?
I know how; kill two birds with one stone. Some are saying that to make up the shortfall of troops in Iraq we should go to the UN for them. How about, instead, those UN troops just deploy to Liberia instead?
Oh, there aren’t any UN troops? Hmmmmn. . .
Francis: That’s not written into the UN Charter, it just became tradition during the interum; sort of like the spoils-system for membership on UN Commissions that made gave such pillars of the international community as Libya the gavel on the UN Commissione on Human Rights.
I just dropped a post on the money games behind NGOs, Iraq and Liberia.
I think you will find it related to this thread as the same faces keep appearing in both.
The reality is that freedom and liberty are expressed through national institutions and nothing else.
Transnational institutions are by definition amoral and tyranny prone.
The biggest problem with the UN is that most governments in the world are fairly bad and therefore an organization made up of those governments is bound to be bad.
Imagine that the majority of voters in a Western nation were criminals. What would that nation’s government be like? Well, why should the UN be any different.
Of course on top of that you have everything that goes wrong in bureaucracies plus the desire of some weaker Western nations to use the UN and NGOs as tools to block the United States.
I can’t politically analyze the situation. I don’t know how many or what kind of troops may be needed in Liberia. But I do know the Liberian people. I lived in Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1991 to 2001 and I can’t believe that Liberia would become a “quagmire”. Some years ago I disagreed with those who suggested that we pay the fighters not to fight but now I am beginning to think it is a good idea. These “boys” are not hardened criminals – they have been inoculated to the effect of violence – as I have been.
Get rid of Taylor, there needs to be justice. Fix the water and electricity and provide education opportunities for all. Teach them trades. Get rid of UN workers – they drive up the prices of building materials for the local people. Don’t rush to try to have democratic elections – they don’t understand what that means. They are dependent and have always been. Give them seeds and fertilizer and 6 months to grow their own rice and then stop food aid and the importation of rice by Lebanese businessmen. The land is fertile and plenty – don’t give them rice. It may seem like a small thing but it is very important to Liberians. Let the process consolidate itself and you will see a proud, able people emerge.
I am fully in favor of the US presence in Liberia – perhaps to lead other troops. And a US led governing council of some sort.
JFarr (3:44am):
> I can’t believe that Liberia would become a “quagmire”.
But it has become one already.
> These “boys” are not hardened criminals – they have been inoculated to the effect of violence
…the next best thing to hardened criminals.
> I am beginning to think it is a good idea [to pay off fighters.]
It might solve today’s problems, but when do we stop the danegeld? If we have the will and the money to spend, let’s look at **hiring mercenaries to do the job**, then reconstituting a non-RUF, non-Taylor, non-kleptocratic government.
JFarr, you lived in Sierra Leone and Libera for 10 years. Care to suggest what went wrong and what we could do now? Your words cry out for a follow-up post.
Liberia not a quagmire? Then how about [warning: non-pc term ahead] tar-baby? I hope we do not get involved, there or almost anywhere in Africa. It may seem cold-blooded, indeed it is cold-blooded, but short of [re-]establishing colonial power I see no way to improve the situation. Bad enough having co-religionists wanting to kill each other off (eg Huguenots vs Catholics), even worse “ethnic cleansing” among tribal groups – there is no way to even pretend conversion, nor to remain apart.
Liberia, and Africa, scares me in ways North Korea and Saudi Arabia do not (Iran I actually consider hopeful, whether that seems believable or not: maintain a presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Supreme Council may eventually have to move their special troops to the borders – and the rest of the givernment, with regular amry and populace backing, will oust them), for being so fragmented. Any intervention would be faced with a Stalingrad style situation complicated by having the equivalent of every apartment block being just as happy to shoot its neighbors as the incoming troops.
Back in the Seventies, I talked with a South African who was angry with the US and other embargoes and insistence upon immediate open participation and ending apartheid. He was all for ending apartheid, but not soon. He was shocked when I said it should, as a practice of ghettoization, probably end quickly but full participation might take a generation of spending as much on elementary-level schooling as on physical infrastructure, that if the adults arriving in the cities have never seen flush toilets it is the children who must bear the burden of hope for their future. I still feel that way, but also that a generation has now passed – if without the education I called for.
AMac,
Here is a post that pretty-well describes what went wrong. One thing we should have done was stop Taylor in 1989.
http://www.vesselofhonour.com/archives/000148.php
I don’t claim to have all the answers – we (the US) have been pumping millions of $’s into Liberia forever – with not accountability of how the money was spent. Therefore it went into the pockets of the leaders.
In my first post I set out what I think should be done NOW. Infrastructure, self-reliance, education, education, education. And forget soverign nation talk – the education has to come first.
One advantage in going into Liberia is that the Liberians don’t hate “us”. They call themselves “Uncle Sam’s step-children”. They, dare I say it, love Americans. The masses really are helpless and child-like.
A story – during the fighting that started April 6, 1996 – after the first night of shelling, several friends had taken refuge with me in my home while most of the neighbors had fled. In came the looters and a van-load of about a dozen drunken children with AK47’s started beating on the door to let them in or they would shoot it down. I opened the door and they entered – the leader, about 17 years old, saw me and was surprised and asked where I am from. When I told him I am an American he called his boys off saing “she is our friend” and chatted for a while and left giving bath soap and stuffed toys to a child in the house.
Another group came to loot my car – we talked – I told them they couldn’t have it and that they should stop this and go back where they came from – we stared each other down and they went away and did not come back. In their own way they were respectful – only because I am an American.
One thing we should have done was stop Taylor in 1989.
It is interesting. How W. is basically going around cleaning up his father’s mistakes.
Just noticed this article that mentions Liberians attitudes toward Americans:
“Liberians feel anything that’s American is perfect,” Bility said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25408-2003Jul21.html
Thanks, JFarr.
Your recollections of life in Liberia have a Conradian “Heart of Darkness” flavor. How easily things could have ended badly for you and your friends…
Sadly, your stories make it seem less rather than more likely that long-term good will come of stationing many Marines in that country.