I’m proud to see U.S. troops deployed to countries that need them, particularly in neglected, impoverished, war-torn Africa (prouder still when I get the impression that the man sending them won’t shit his pants and pull them out after one rough firefight, unlike some presidents I could mention). But I can’t help but feel that the “invitation” extended to the U.S. by the UN to commit troops to Liberia wasn’t an almost solely politically motivated attempt to embarass the administration. Sending a small contingent of troops (too small to be tactically effective in any real way) to help keep the peace in a country that doesn’t have peace to keep and in which the U.S. has no economic, political, or security-based interests isn’t exactly a recipe for an auspicious military action. It looks like Bush is going to give it the OK, which like I said is actually pretty great. But the UN is well aware of its track record in “peace keeping” (please see Rwanda, Korea, and any nation ever discussed by Joe Sacco)–second in ignominy only to France’s–so this reads like a ploy to sucker the States into committing troops in a place where little palpable progress will be made (that is, if it’s the UN and not the U.S. that’s running the show) in order to prevent them from doing things elsewhere, 2,000 troops at a time.
(So naturally, Howard Dean’s all for it!)