I've Seen This Movie:

Send in the Marines? I can't think why, when we will surely need them elsewhere soon enough. The threat of the Marine Corps is lessened tremendously when they are already bogged down somewhere else. With only two US Army divisions available to deploy for combat operations, it seems that even a few thousand Marines might be better kept for other purposes.

Additionally, I'm against going just because the UN said we should. I think the lesson of the last year ought to be that the UN be roundly ignored on all matters. Unless we have a pressing national interest, we ought not to go. Besides, the press reports from there are turning purple. Leftists who long for the US to be the army of the UN, and never act otherwise, have begun to really hype Liberia since the UN vote last week. Doesn't this lurid AP report sound like the movie Casablanca crossed with Aliens?

Liberia, fraught with danger and drunk killers, awaits U.S. forces
By Jonathan Paye-Layleh, Associated Press, 7/4/2003 19:57

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) Trapped in Liberia's besieged seaside capital, more than 1 million desperate, hungry residents and refugees dream of American troops coming to the rescue disarming rebel and government fighters locked in a vicious civil war.

Yet ending Liberia's nightmare is being weighed against the cost of U.S. intervention that would put American soldiers between AK-47-toting gunmen for whom mutilation and summary execution is commonplace.
Another reason to avoid Liberia: president Charles Taylor is being described as "indicted war crimes suspect" Charles Taylor. Ya'll remember that Bush, Blair, and Gen. Franks are also "indicted war crimes suspects." The ICC and similar organs are trying to use things like this to build legitimacy behind the idea that international bodies can violate national soverignity in order to seize people that the UN/ICC/whoever has voted to indict.

Pretty rich, you say, a defense of national soverignity coming from a guy who favors using the USMC to knock of tyrants anywhere we please? Touche. But you must understand that I support the old order, whereby national--presumably, democratically accountable--governments hold the power to choose war or peace. The international order is antidemocratic, as you must have noticed by now. Far better for matters of such importance to be in the hands of the people, not career bureaucrats drawn from the ranks least likely to understand or feel inclined to use force in a firm, just fashion. There are plenty of folks in those bureaucracies with ranks and titles, but damn few who understand what nobility is about.

One thing I do like to see though: Charles Taylor hopped pretty quickly in response to that US warning that he had 48 hours to step down, didn't he? The decapitation strike may not have gotten Saddam, but it put the world's tyrants on notice. Come the 49th hour, the bombs can already be on their way.

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