The U.N. bureaucracy is still doing what certain folks did in the 1950's-1960's here in the US: building a structure that creates "aid/foreign aid junkies." The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Mogadishu was just a bus stop on the main line.
GRRRR! I hit post rather than Preview!!!
EDIT ADDITION
Quote:Then the United Nations Security Council would resolve to put Liberia under trusteeship, a rarely used form of world governance generally intended to administer former colonies in Africa and the Pacific judged incapable of self-rule.
The additional peacekeepers would be sought mostly from nations in Central Europe, Southwest Asia and Africa and would be used to help police this lawless land.
The nations sending peacekeepers may be comforted, officials said, by the presence of three American warships now bobbing within sight of Monrovia's harbor, and the more than 2,000 United States marines aboard them.
Thoughts on this little point.
OK, a UN trusteeship and a League of Nations Mandate. (Brits in Palestine, 1920's -1940's) How is that different? Not very. Not all a bad idea, since Liberia is not quite a crossroads of culture.
Those peacekeepers, if under UN dual key RoE, will be targets, or hostages, just as in the tribal conflict in Yugoslavia, when and if various factions decide to "make a point."
Oh, yeah, the Marines won't be there forever. The 9-11 force has to be in a lot of places at once, that is due to their scarcity and the fact that Presidents tend to move those pieces all over the board.
All in all, the UN Peacekeepers are there for the money, their countries get a head tax for each troop and their perdiem is staggering compared to their normal take home pay in their home countries. Their effectiveness as peacekeepers is likely low, though the Eastern Europeans are more likely to have their #$%& together than others.
Consider Cyprus when looking at this problem, though it may be an extreme case due to Turk-Greek issues.
That is the model for "endless U.N. presence" that I think applies to any and all "U.N. sponsored Peace Enforcement operations" until the U.N. and others can actually, successfully, disentangle once "stability" is reasonobly assured. (Hmmm, Watts riots 1965, and post Simi Valley Riots in LA 1991, in a "stable country.")
Until and unless the Bosnia experiment, which took NATO RoE and brute force to solve after 4 years of well intentioned U.N. self paralyzation, creates conditions that actually permit "peaceful coexistence," then the model that Mister Klein proposes as "a cookie cutter useful everywhere" is just more embedding of the "foreign aid junkie" plan.
The difference appears to be -- and herein lies the hope that one day the poor and needy will be weaned from the UN teat -- the emphasis on infrastructure and a period, hopefully Long Term, of providing the peace and security that allows democracy to grow as it did in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and in Europe. With no Cold War to undermine the aims and objectives, there may be hope unless the "Not So Cold War" with the Islamic World intrudes. Liberia is outside the Ring of Fire, here is hoping they are left alone.
Mozambique is still a work in progress. Liberia has a similar problem to Mozambique, in that its common cultural assumptions, down at the grass roots level, are not Western, not European. In Bosnia, and in Yugoslavia, that baseline cultural commonality was and is available to build on, and making progress remains a real bitch. It will take at least a generation, in either case, if my guess is anywhere close.
I consider how Iraq is devolving a bit more of late because some players keep cutting the electrical lines, keep blowing up water mains. It is within their interest to reduce stability, to reduce security, to reduce the chances for representative government to grow. That is a point of view not uncommonly pitted against the backdrop of Globalization.
As in Liberia, it is easier to destroy than create. Since 1990, Marines have now been to Liberia at least seven times to deal with "unrest" there. Chaos is the steady state condition there. The argument for greater UN involvement in Iraq can be made, (I am for it), however, until the social experiments show that they can work, we are left with the same old same old, be it in Liberia or elsewhere:
Folks
using the foreign presense, and the money that comes flowing in with it, to further their own agenda. That looks to me like both sides panhandling, and the "do gooders" being taken to the cleaners, again, while assauging their collective egos.
What was it that PT Barnum said again?
