Vodkapundit - Joseph Conrad Was an Optimist

Joseph Conrad Was an Optimist

Posted by Stephen Green · 3 July 2003

One of the ways I spent my blogging vacation time last month was catching up on my reading.

Problem was, I hardly did any catching up. Instead, I re-read every word that Robert Kaplan ever wrote, and that I could get my hands on. I mention him now because it's looking likely that President Bush will be sending US troops to Liberia.

Bear with me now, please, while I explain why it's difficult to decide if a Liberian adventure is a noble cause or equally-noble stupidity.

Kaplan, to describe him in the very-shortest hand, is perhaps the first neo-conservative foreign affairs correspondent – with the accent on neo. His journalism credentials are impeccably liberal, complete with the standard complaints against Nixon, Kissinger, and our sad involvement in Vietnam's civil war. But his travels, often on foot, through the Third World in the '80s and '90s turned his thinking into something quite else.

When it comes to Africa, it is with a sigh that Kaplan sees a return to the 18th Century – if not earlier. To Europeans of the time, the map of sub-Saharan Africa was largely unknown. They knew the important coastal outposts and cities, but due to disease, war, and poverty, the interior was a blank waiting to be filled. And over the next hundreds years, they did fill it – with the artificial borders outlining the artificial nation-states we still know today.

Thanks to increasing disease, unceasing warfare, and unrelenting poverty, the interior is again becoming an ungoverned mystery, even to those who live there.

Already in West Africa, the national governments at best rule the capital (and almost always coastal) city, and even then, only during daylight hours. Leave the capital, and the rest of each country is governed – to use the loosest form of the word – by warlords, bandits, and even by the civil-war refugees of neighboring countries. On the map we see nice borders, just like the one between the US and Canada, or between Poland and Slovakia. In reality, as during the early days of European colonialism, the borders extend little beyond the coast, becoming blurred or even nonexistent as you travel inland.

True, there are elections in most every West African nation. But what do elections mean in countries made up of shantytowns around the capital, anarchy elsewhere, and a few choice hotels for tourists and diplomats?

The future of West Africa isn't just bleak – it's already arrived. And it's spreading to parts of the Arab world, much of Latin America, Central and South-East Asia, and most of southern Africa, too.

Want to catch a glimpse of the future of too much of the Third World? Look no further than the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, formerly the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly King Leopold's Private Playground for Plunder. Outside of most of Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim (including the Chinese coast but not the interior of China) the future is fucked and getting worse. About the best a person living in a Monrovia slum can think is, "Well, the good old days at least sucked less." Or perhaps hope to get a visa to the United States. Home, to paraphrase Robert Frost, is the place that when you have to stay there, they're going to make you pay for it.

And so, with intentions pure and powder dry, it looks like we're going to march off to Liberia.

Honestly, I can't tell you whether intervening there is the right thing to do; I know only that we're going in with the best of intentions. What I can do is tell you what we might expect to accomplish, and let you decide whether or not we're paving our own road to hell.

Outside of Monrovia, the capital, we'll accomplish exactly nothing. 12-year-old boys (!) with machetes, trained since childhood (?) to amputate the hands of anyone opposed to their 25-year-old "colonel," simply won't take to American discipline – much less market economies, the rule of law, or civic discourse. And that's assuming we'd even look for them out in the bush, which we won't.

Monrovia itself is a mess. The population is unknown, but probably around a million souls. It's growing faster than the country as a whole, which is growing so quickly as to double in less than 30 years. You think traffic in the US is bad? Imagine our roads if we were to have 580 million people by 2030. Liberia, of course, hardly has any roads, which is one of the reasons we won't venture far outside of Monrovia.

About 10 percent of the population is HIV-positive; a number you can bet is higher in the urban areas.

Here's what we can do. We can save many lives, and make life much more livable (for the duration of the occupation only) for the million people of Monrovia. Forget saving Liberia – there is no Liberia to save. There's just one major city, surrounded by a whole bunch of mess. If we go in, it will be for humanitarian reasons only, and the good we'll accomplish will likely end as soon as we leave.

Is it worth it? Improving a million lives and saving countless others, at little cost to us, sounds like a mighty fine bargain. But remember that all sales are final, and that, eventually, everything must go.

UPDATE: Alex Knapp argues that triage may be necessary.

Comments

I have a nephew living in the Ivory Coast at the present time, one of Liberia's neighbors. The horror stories he has told us of the violence and lack of humanity has touched us to the core. According to him, what is happening in the Ivory Coast is considered child's play compared to the atrocities in Liberia.

I fear for the safety of our troops, and yet, hope that in someway, we can contribute to the stability in the region. I fear that a solution to the massive problems in Africa are far beyond the current first world countries ability to find. I'm sure, if we all committed ourselves, a solution could be found. I just don't think we have the intestinal fortitude to find and act on it.

Posted by: Plunge at July 2, 2003 11:10 PM

I have to take issue with your image of Africa's future "spreading" to other parts of the developing and semi-developed world. Except insofar as they all suffer the ill-effects of exploding populations and teetering on the ecological brink, their problems are not the same and cannot be likened to a contagion.

That said, I have to say I am disturbed by the blithe resumption of neo-imperial rule throughout much of Africa these days. Outsiders can usually stanch the bloodflow, but only while the boots are on the ground. Thereafter the taps flow freely once more. What good do they do? They cannot make the structural repairs necessary to actually improve things, because then they really are accused of imperialism.

If the world is obliged to intervene in such instances, why not hire mercenaries to be the boots on the ground? What is really wanted is protection for the general populace; they can provide that, and we are not responsible for everything that goes wrong or every problem that is not fixed.

Ultimately, Africans will have to fix the problems of Africa. And don't tell me they cannot, because they are doing so in a few enlightened places, like Uganda. There is a model, now follow it.

Recolonization, even at the behest of Kofi Annan and his ilk, is no solution.

Posted by: Clio at July 3, 2003 09:00 AM

A few months ago Krauthammer (!) praised the Clinton handling of Mogodishu. Coarse paraphrasing: When some corner of humanity --unimportant to our national interests-- falls into a shitbath, it's reasonable to expect the most powerful nation in the world to step in and try clean it up... And it's reasonble for us to pull out when our soldiers start to bleed.

Posted by: Cridland at July 3, 2003 10:26 AM

If this proceeds as a UN sanctioned "helping hand" and it is a truly international force, what will be the effect when things eventually return to "normal" once we leave? Will it show the limited effectiveness of UN peacekeeping in Africa? Will it show up as a bloody nose for America?
From the look of things, this is going to be a Monrovia centered policing action. But what side are we policing for/against. We are essentially jumping into a civil war (as most of the West African countries are in, whether declared or not), and that automatically makes us targets by one side if not both sides in the conflict.

Too many questions, too few answers. On the other hand I don't think that the situation over there is something that can be ignored. But sometimes you have to do the right thing, even if it is only done on principle. Something France and the like haven't learned yet.

derf

Posted by: derf at July 3, 2003 11:13 AM

Should we chose to go, I wonder if they'll be as greatful for our assistance as the citizens of Iraq: http://www.realwomenonline.com/article.php?story=20030627054459786

Posted by: Dave S. at July 3, 2003 12:23 PM

Keith B. Richburg's Out of America should be required reading for anyone contemplating the Liberia operation.

Posted by: Reginleif the Valkyrie at July 4, 2003 09:28 AM

I figure Bush will have us go in and kill the fighters and then let the UN take over. That gives the UN a chance to prove they are relevant and not get the US stuck in an unnecessary place.
The only good guys in Liberia are unarmed. It's pretty much just a few bunches of armed cannibals and criminals fighting over the resources, including the people, of the country so we probably won't be allying with any group.
You know at least that anything done by Rumsfeld will be done competently.
I am ambivalent about our involvement, but I have to trust Bush. He's made me feel stupid too many times.

Posted by: Veeshir at July 6, 2003 11:37 AM

Liberia is a pretty rough place - I'm not sure if you guys have ever seen the video tape of former President Samuel Doe getting tortured and killed, but it wasn't pretty. Can't say he didn't ask for it - the guy once drove around Monrovia showing off the severed testicles of a group of officers he suspected of planning a coup. Not cool, not cool at all. Anyway, between the kids with guns/machetes, the drugs, and the lack of basic infrastructure, American forces might have their hands full should Bush decide to go through with this intervention. Nobody's doubting the guy's intentions, and certainly, given our historical ties to Liberia, on an emotional level, you want to help out. But pratically speaking, it's not the US military's job to build states and rebuild decimated civil societies. This is a mission that, well, lacks a mission - we go in, and then what? Wait for the first guys to get pissed off at us start shooting? There's something else that worries me, and it's that we'll be going in with other countries, and by that, I assume it's going to be the Nigerians. Look, by African standards, previous Nigerian interventions in Liberia weren't particularly bad, but they weren't particularly good, either. If we do go in together with the Nigerians, someone needs to let Lagos know that the US military holds itself to somewhat higher standards than to which the Nigerian brass might be acostumed, and that Washington will not tolerate extracurricular activities on the part of the Nigerian army.

By the way, Clio is right - there are a couple of functioning states in Africa, and Uganda is one of them, or at least it was when I spent a couple of weeks there back in 1995 (I was living in nearby Tanzania at the time). Even though you wouldn't know it now, Uganda used to be just as big a hole as Liberia is today, so I guess there is hope. But it's a hope that must come from within - Uganda succeeded because a) its citizens got tired of the crap and b) it was lucky enough to find decent leadership. Hopefully, Liberia can find within itself a similar future, but I'm not sure it's one that can be imposed upon it from abroad, no matter how pure the intentions of the imposer.

Posted by: The Marmot at July 6, 2003 09:00 PM