# Why support war in Liberia but oppose war in Iraq? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 11, 2003, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683 "2003-07-11T11:34:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Fang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/96bed5/32.png) [@Fang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fang)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/41 "2003-07-11T16:01:27Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by even sven \* > **We are not giving a giant “fuck you” to the world at large. We are responding to a call to use our resources to create peace.** So basically, when the world wants us to intervene, we should intervene. When the world doesn’t want us to intervene, we shouldn’t intervene. Boy, that’s some independence we have there. ---
**Author:** ![rsa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/839c29/32.png) [@rsa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rsa)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/42 "2003-07-11T16:10:08Z")
So your assertion is that our “independence” should allow us to do anything we want while other countries’ independence is subjugated to ours? ---
**Author:** ![TwistofFate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@TwistofFate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TwistofFate)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/43 "2003-07-11T16:20:34Z")
Fang, there is a difference between intervening and invading. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/44 "2003-07-11T16:33:31Z")
[QUOTE] _Originally posted by december \* [ol][li]Both interventions could be justified on humanitarian grounds. Both countries suffered from dreadful governments, although Saddam had caused a much greater number of deaths.[_]Both interventions are risky, open-ended, and potentially expensive. Iraq is likely to have a considerably greater cost.[_]Iraq was a big potential threat to much of the world, due to Saddam’s desire to acquire and use WMDs. [_]It was important that Iraq’s oil resources not be controlled by the evil Saddam.[/ol]1) As **even sven** said, Iraq was at peace; Liberia is not. My personal take is that the breakdown of civil order is worse than all but the worst tyrannies.[/li] For instance, Saddam is believed to have killed [roughly 290,000 Iraqis](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17838-2003Jul6.html) out of a country of 22 million. That’s evil and not small potatoes, but the reality is still that daily life went on for most Iraqis: work, eat, sleep, raise children, socialize with friends. The breakdown of civil order sweeps even that away: there is no safety in living your life quietly and staying out of politics. And that is why civil wars such as those in Liberia or Congo are worse than tyrants like Saddam. It’s also why the potential existed, and remains today, for us to make life worse for most Iraqis than it was under Saddam. When will be pull out, and what will happen then? We don’t know. What will we have to do there to ensure that civil war doesn’t break out upon our departure? We don’t know. But in Liberia, every direction is up: even a temporary restoration of order will give the people of Liberia at least a respite from civil war, and it may enable them to keep it from resuming once we’re gone. Argued in humanitarian terms, Liberia makes more sense. 1. Can’t argue with you. 2. Bush didn’t expect to find significant WMDs. I’ve been over this in probably eight or nine threads now, dating back to the second week of May, including [these](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=196613) [two](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=196837) active ones. (Hint: it’s the war plan, stupid.\* :)) 3. Why was it important that Iraq’s oil resources not be controlled by Saddam? We weren’t letting him sell much oil anyway. Strategically speaking, the containment operation we’d been running on Saddam since Gulf War I was much cheaper than running Iraq is, in terms of military resources. Plus, we’ve pissed off the world. Meanwhile, we still have **real** threats to deal with, like Iran and North Korea, and we’re burning out our troops babysitting Iraq. We don’t have much left in the way of military or diplomatic resources to bring to bear on Iran and NK, and our military action in Iraq has reduced our credibility in Iran, which has to reduce our diplomatic options in dealing with their nuclear program. > [@](#): > > Is Liberian intervention considered better _because, it can’t do America any good_? Do these opinion leaders consider pure altruism a better motive than a mixture of altruism and realpolitik? I’m all for defending our genuine security interests where they exist. I’m all for realpolitik, but I want _real_ realpolitik, rather than the pretend crap we’re getting from the White House. Invading a country to deal with a trumped-up threat, then having to keep hundreds of thousands of soldiers there for years afterwards in a difficult nation-building exercise that we really should have had the sense to avoid, is _delusionpolitik_, if you will. But I think it’s in America’s overarching strategic interest to involve itself in periodic altruistic interventions, to the extent that it doesn’t endanger us in more immediate ways. We’ve had a bad long-term track record of having freedom and democracy at home, but exporting ruthless authoritarianism to the Third World. We’ve gotten better from the mid-1980s on, but we’ve still got a ways to go, as demonstrated by our current support for governments like those of China and Pakistan. Nobody’s going to believe us when we claim we went into Iraq due to our concern for the well-being of Iraqis; they’re only going to laugh. We need to develop the sort of track record that would make such a claim believable. In the long run, that will protect us better than any number of troops. - Note to **december** : JFTR, I’m _not_ calling you ‘stupid’. I’m just playing off of Clinton’s long-ago phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/45 "2003-07-11T18:32:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tagos \* > You are too stupid to realise the difference or you are trolling. Which is it, there are no other alternatives? What makes you think it’s an either/or situation? :dubious: To address the OP – while I’m not thrilled with the idea of getting into another firefight already, at least we’re being _invited_ into Liberia to clean up the mess there, and we would be doing it with real international support (none of this “Coalition of the Willing” bullstuff). It might get ugly, but at least it’s a morally correct kind of ugly. ---
**Author:** ![Publius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c57346/32.png) [@Publius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Publius)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/46 "2003-07-11T18:48:57Z")
I gave my answer to this question a few days ago in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=196218&highlight=Liberia). > [@](#): > > I’m still not sure that the United States should intervene in Liberia. Nevertheless, I see an important difference between the situation there and the situation in pre-war Iraq. > > Prior to the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was largely contained. His last act of overt foreign aggression was the 1990-1991 Gulf War, in which he was resoundingly and justly defeated. Since that time, he had essentially been crippled by economic sanctions and intermittent US/UK military activity. There was certainly the potential for him to become a significant threat again if this containment regime ever ended, but while it lasted Baghdad seems to have been rather impotent. The status quo ante bellum, while far from perfect, was stable. > > Liberia’s Charles Taylor, on the other hand, is far from contained. In the past year alone he has been directly responsible for a civil war in Cote d’Ivoire, previously one of the most stable countries in West Africa (and the source of most of the world’s cocoa). Before that he was responsible for brutal civil wars in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and, of course, Liberia. At the moment, cease-fires are holding in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire, but they remain fragile. Left unchecked, the Liberian situation threatens to sow chaos through a large swath of West Africa. > > Even more troubling from a purely American point of view, this chaos threatens the very West African economies (Cote d’Ivoire, to use the most obvious example) that have attracted large amounts of Western investment due to their previous reputations for stability. For that matter, we may like a crack at Charles Taylor on Noriega-esque grounds: the last time Taylor was in this country (where he spent much of his youth), he was a street thug who escaped from a Massachusetts prison. ---
**Author:** ![Publius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c57346/32.png) [@Publius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Publius)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/47 "2003-07-11T18:54:20Z")
I gave my answer to this question a few days ago in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=196218&highlight=Liberia). > [@](#): > > I’m still not sure that the United States should intervene in Liberia. Nevertheless, I see an important difference between the situation there and the situation in pre-war Iraq. > > Prior to the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was largely contained. His last act of overt foreign aggression was the 1990-1991 Gulf War, in which he was resoundingly and justly defeated. Since that time, he had essentially been crippled by economic sanctions and intermittent US/UK military activity. There was certainly the potential for him to become a significant threat again if this containment regime ever ended, but while it lasted Baghdad seems to have been rather impotent. The status quo ante bellum, while far from perfect, was stable. > > Liberia’s Charles Taylor, on the other hand, is far from contained. In the past year alone he has been directly responsible for a civil war in Cote d’Ivoire, previously one of the most stable countries in West Africa (and the source of most of the world’s cocoa). Before that he was responsible for brutal civil wars in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and, of course, Liberia. At the moment, cease-fires are holding in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire, but they remain fragile. Left unchecked, the Liberian situation threatens to sow chaos through a large swath of West Africa. > > Even more troubling from a purely American point of view, this chaos threatens the very West African economies (Cote d’Ivoire, to use the most obvious example) that have attracted large amounts of Western investment due to their previous reputations for stability. For that matter, we may like a crack at Charles Taylor on Noriega-esque grounds: the last time Taylor was in this country (where he spent much of his youth), he was a street thug who escaped from a Massachusetts prison. ---
**Author:** ![Publius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c57346/32.png) [@Publius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Publius)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/48 "2003-07-11T19:00:15Z")
I gave my answer to this question a few days ago in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=196218&highlight=Liberia). > [@](#): > > I’m still not sure that the United States should intervene in Liberia. Nevertheless, I see an important difference between the situation there and the situation in pre-war Iraq. > > Prior to the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was largely contained. His last act of overt foreign aggression was the 1990-1991 Gulf War, in which he was resoundingly and justly defeated. Since that time, he had essentially been crippled by economic sanctions and intermittent US/UK military activity. There was certainly the potential for him to become a significant threat again if this containment regime ever ended, but while it lasted Baghdad seems to have been rather impotent. The status quo ante bellum, while far from perfect, was stable. > > Liberia’s Charles Taylor, on the other hand, is far from contained. In the past year alone he has been directly responsible for a civil war in Cote d’Ivoire, previously one of the most stable countries in West Africa (and the source of most of the world’s cocoa). Before that he was responsible for brutal civil wars in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and, of course, Liberia. At the moment, cease-fires are holding in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire, but they remain fragile. Left unchecked, the Liberian situation threatens to sow chaos through a large swath of West Africa. > > Even more troubling from a purely American point of view, this chaos threatens the very West African economies (Cote d’Ivoire, to use the most obvious example) that have attracted large amounts of Western investment due to their previous reputations for stability. For that matter, we may like a crack at Charles Taylor on Noriega-esque grounds: the last time Taylor was in this country (where he spent much of his youth), he was a street thug who escaped from a Massachusetts prison. ---
**Author:** ![OliverH](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/278dde/32.png) [@OliverH](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OliverH)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2003, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/49 "2003-07-11T21:10:48Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Fang \* > \*\*So basically, when the world wants us to intervene, we should intervene. When the world doesn’t want us to intervene, we shouldn’t intervene. Boy, that’s some independence we have there. \*\* Independence? Since when did independence mean you get to behave like a lynchmob when hosted by others? What has independence to do with being a guest? Oh, I see, the only independence that matters to you is that from the law. You want to be independent of legal constraints. ---
**Author:** ![Zorro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/ad7895/32.png) [@Zorro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zorro)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2003, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683/50 "2003-07-12T12:24:37Z")
Could I just say how glad I am to see that there are still plenty of Americans who believe in the principles on which the USA was founded rather than in the current prevailing twisted and hypocritical version of them that the Bush administration favours. There is hope yet for _“peace, justice and the American Way”_ the way that Superman meant it! Just make sure that you lot rid yourselves and the world of Dubya and his cronies next year. I’ll see what we can do about Tony. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-support-war-in-liberia-but-oppose-war-in-iraq/187683.md?page=2)