Thursday, July 10, 2003
Anthony Daniels addresses the double-edged sword of American intervention, and describes how ultimately, such intervention would be a short-lived victory until Liberians take responsibility for themselves.
...as Liberians never ceased to point out to me when I visited Monrovia during a brief lull in the civil war, a detachment of 500 trained troops could have put an end to the violence there in a couple of weeks. A few Marines would have saved 200,000 lives.
The trouble is that life is lived forwards, not backwards. If the Marines had been dispatched, no one would have known how many lives they saved, and then the very same people who condemn the Americans for not having dispatched them would have blamed the Americans for other reasons. They would have said that the Americans were trying to secure West African diamonds, or its iron and manganese deposits. There is no pleasing some people.[...]
