Wall Street Journal - July 10, 2003
Beware Wars of Altruism By DAVID RIEFF
It seems increasingly likely that the U.S. will either lead an intervention in Liberia or direct one from behind the scenes, even if the main troop deployment comes from Liberia's neighbors. For the Liberian people, martyred by almost two decades of war, banditry and successive tyrannical, kleptocratic regimes, such an intervention cannot come soon enough, as the rapturous welcome the people of Monrovia, Liberia's capital, have been giving in the last few days to an American military evaluation team amply demonstrates. If ever that much overused term "humanitarian intervention" seems justified, it is with regard to Liberia.
And yet the prospect of such a U.S. deployment poses at least as many problems as it resolves. The most obvious question that we need to ask ourselves is whether the mission of America should really be to save other nations from their own, homegrown calamities? John Adams's stern admonition to the nation, more than two centuries ago -- that it was not the job of the U.S. to go out and fight monsters -- cannot and should not be dismissed lightly. It is one thing to protect the vital interests of the republic, whether economic or strategic, and quite another to commit ourselves to endless wars of altruism.
For wars they will certainly be. Anyone who falls for the idea that deploying in Liberia is fundamentally risk-free or constitutes more an exercise in police work than an exercise in war-making has not understood the lessons of the 1990s in such supposed "peacekeeping" deployments as Somalia, Bosnia or Kosovo. Somalia went badly wrong and Bosnia and Kosovo went right, but the chastening lesson is the same: to intervene on humanitarian grounds is to go to war and, more important still, to conquer or -- to put the matter yet more starkly -- to colonize.
What is disturbing in the debate over a possible intervention in Liberia is the way this central question is being ignored. We should know better by now. In Somalia, both the first President Bush and President Clinton committed the nation to what was planned as a fundamentally humanitarian mission. It wasn't -- for the good and sufficient reason that there is no such thing. Humanitarian missions take place when there has been an earthquake or a flood. But modern famines like the one that impelled President Bush to act in 1992 in Somalia are not natural disasters. Rather, they are the byproduct of civil wars and massive state failure. To deploy U.S. forces to mitigate them is, whether we like it or not, to take sides in the political struggle that caused them in the first place.
That was the fundamental mistake we made in Somalia. We imagined we were deploying forces to give aid, but the Somali warlords understood, even if we did not, that for us to be successful meant clipping their wings. And this they were not prepared to accept; and, as events demonstrated, we did not have the will to impose ourselves. It was the same in Bosnia and Kosovo, though there we did have the will. It would have been the same in Rwanda had the Clinton administration chosen to intervene to stop the genocide. And it will be the same in Liberia, if U.S. forces are committed or an African force is a proxy for a direct American intervention.
Chasing Charles Taylor into exile in Nigeria will only be a first step, welcome as his departure will be. Taylor is a genuine monster, right up there with Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe, and the Burmese generals. But unlike in the case of Zimbabwe, where the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is a genuine democrat, or Burma, where the regime's nemesis, Aung San Suu Kyi, is one of the great figures of our time, Taylor's enemies are as bad as he is. Throwing him out will not rescue Liberia, it will merely facilitate the rise of another tyrant.
If we are serious about rescuing Liberia from itself -- and that is the only worthwhile mission; we should not deploy otherwise -- then we must start by recognizing that we are in effect turning the country into an American dependency. We recognized this in the Balkans. After all, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia are all de facto NATO protectorates, despite thevarying degrees of face-saving, superficial political autonomy that we have granted to them. We did not recognize this in Afghanistan, where our reluctance to permit the expansion of the ISAF peace enforcement operation throughout the country after the fall of the Taliban has left a vacuum into which the old warlords have moved. And we have been dangerously ambivalent on the subject in Iraq, simultaneously asserting our authority and claiming our mission there will be comparatively short-lived and cost-free.
All of this constitutes a fundamental misreading of what a so-called humanitarian intervention really entails, and what its price is. It is not a question of debating "nation building." To the contrary, the lesson of the past decade is that there is no point, and no lasting benefit, in intervening unless the intervening power is willing to do nation building -- except where the national interest is so clear, as in Afghanistan, where the de facto fusion of the Taliban regime with al Qaeda made intervention a matter of U.S. national security no matter what we were willing to do after the conflict was over.
The British have shouldered this burden after their recent intervention in Sierra Leone, and the French have done the same in their intervention in Ivory Coast. If the U.S. does anything less in Liberia, not only will it have failed, but in all likelihood American soldiers will have died for nothing. So at the very least, the Bush administration should reflect long and hard on what it is willing to commit to in Liberia before going forward, no matter how much pressure there is to act and no matter what American intervention theoretically could accomplish in a tragic country that is indeed desperately in need of rescue.
The debate we should be having over intervening in Liberia is the same one as the broader question of humanitarian intervention. It may not be politically correct to say so, but there is a strong argument to be made that humanitarian interventions are positive for the people of a Liberia or a Bosnia and negative for the U.S. since, whatever the conspiracy theorists of the anti-globalizing left and the isolationist right imagine, such wars almost never serve any geostrategic or economic interest of the U.S. or Western European powers.
The great 19th-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes once defined colonialism as philanthropy plus 5%. To me, that paints too rosy a portrait, ignoring colonialism's cruel and bloody essence. But there can be little doubt that contemporary humanitarian intervention is philanthropy without the 5%. Is this what the U.S. really wishes to do? For the moment, the answer is apparently yes. The upcoming American commitment to Liberia is only the latest chapter of the post-Cold War story of the rise of humanitarian intervention as a new vocation for Western arms.
John Adams would not have approved, and many who supported intervention in the Balkans, including myself, have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of an imperial America, and of this seemingly limitless readiness to fight monsters who do not threaten us (those who do, above all al Qaeda, are quite another matter; with them, the fight is inescapable). But for now, at least, it seems as if the interventionists have carried the day. Their Wilsonian dream of global redress -- a dream that now is shared as much by many conservative Republicans as liberal Democrats -- is the one that the nation seems to be committing itself to.
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If this is the case, then it is all the more urgent that these interventions be done right. In dreams begin responsibilities, as the American poet Delmore Schwartz once put it. So if we are going to intervene, let us understand the project that we must engage in, which is not just humanitarian intervention, nor even nation-building, but the de facto recolonization of some of the most unfortunate parts of the world. To do this, we must acquire all the trappings of an imperial bureaucracy, by whatever name we choose to conceal it, and not imagine that our armed forces, no matter how powerful they are, can do the job alone.
Mr. Rieff is the author, most recently, of "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis" (Simon & Schuster, 2002).