For real information about what real progressive Africa advocates who really know something about Liberia and the region say, see the website of Africa Action: <http://www.africaaction.org>.
Meanwhile, Laquandaria's piece shows that leftists aren't as far out of the mainstream culturally as either they or their critics would like to think. Something happening in Africa that has you vaguely worried? Mainstream response: plug in footage from old Tarzan movies, Wild Kingdom, and throw in a few "ancient tribal rivalries" and cannibalistic dictators. Left response: plug in tried and true platitudes about imperialism, add a few speculative questions, but certainly don't go to all the bother of learning about imperialism's actual historyin the actual area of your concern. In both cases, above all don't let current factual knowledge or genuine historical perspective about Africa make your world more complicated than it already is -- after all, who needs all that detail, it's only Africa, right?
What have we got here from D.L. passing itself off as "coverage"? A bunch of tritely reductionist speculative questions about Bush & Co.'s possible motives, asked as if they obviously answer themselves, when they do not, and then a dollop of comparison to ancient Rome, a la Joseph Conrad. What an insult! If the Left can't bother to put in the energy to actually learn something about African countries and peoples, better that we remain silent.
Laquandaria apparently knows nothing about Liberia's longer or recent history. One basic clue everyone should have about Liberia's civil war -- if Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea all have been bases and sources of support for anti-Taylor factions, that fact is because Taylor earlier backed or launched hideously violent factional movements against those country's governments.
Is backing Taylor anti-imperialist? Well, how did Taylor get to be president? By winning elections, under the threat of resuming vicious anti- civilian warfare if he lost, signed off on by the famously anti-imperialist Clinton administration.
Is opposing all intervention in Africa inherently anti-imperialist? All hail the great anti-imperialist victory of our secret agent in the White House, Bill Clinton, for his heroic and successful effort not only to prevent U.S. intervention in Rwanda in 1994, but to force U.N. withdrawal and obstruct intervention by anyone else. What a triumph of anti- imperialism! Surely the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who died as a result faced the machetes in calm awareness that their martyrdom for the cause of anti-imperialist purity in the West would never be forgotten. After all, it is hard to forget what you've never understood.
An actual progressive position on Liberia has to take into account the actual lives of real Liberian people and not just political abstractions like imperialism. A phony radical position that puts anti-imperialism above African lives as a matter of "principle" is just the left wing of conventional anti-African racism.
An actual progressive position looks toward a struggle for internationalist solidarity that acts to protect African lives while hemming in the unilaterally aggressive imperialism of the U.S. government. It recognizes that in our world it is impossible to have clean hands -- that to restrain the worst imperialism of the present and create the political spaces in which stronger resistance can be built, we have to advocate for multi- lateral, U.N. controlled, African led intervention for which the U.S. pays its fair share, but does not thereby claim the right to re-create the bases in Liberia that it had throughout the Cold War, nor gain control of Liberia's potential wealth to be alienated from its people. A progressive position is not a purist position, just one that is better than accepting completely U.S. dominated intervention, or turning a blind eye to Liberia's bloodletting at the hands of the lowest forms of capitalist looters (e.g. Charles Taylor).
Chris Lowe Portland, Oregon USA