With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere
to be found, the
president's Iraq talking points now center on
the humanitarian upside
of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His
speeches are liberally
peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture
chambers," and
encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from
the clutches of Saddam
Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the
sweet-smelling scent of
human rights and put on an Amnesty International
t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face
value and buy his new
argument that ending humanitarian crises through
military force is good
foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking
on his first trip to
sub-Saharan Africa next week without including
on his itinerary Congo
and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal,
Botswana, Uganda,
Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly
named Democratic
Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert
has labeled "the
worst humanitarian situation on the entire face
of the earth."
You'd think a president willing to send 200,000
U.S. troops to Iraq
because of Saddam's mass graves might want to
check out firsthand the
20 mass graves recently unearthed in the Congo,
freshly filled with close
to 1,000 victims of genocidal massacres. There's
your causus belli right
there -- that is, if there is any substance to
this new Bush doctrine that
evil dictators who abuse their own people must
be deposed, by force
if necessary, even if they pose no imminent threat
to the United States.
But I guess the 3.3 million people who have died
in the Congo since
1998 -- to say nothing of the horror stories
of macheted infants,
incinerated villages, and soldiers mutilating
and even cannibalizing
their victims -- are not enough to justify a
second muscular application of
the Bush human rights doctrine. They aren't even
enough to motivate the
president to squeeze a Congo stopover into his
African schedule and
bring some much-needed international attention
to this massive humanitarian
crisis. I'm not talking about making nice with
dictators; I'm talking about
using the power of his office to help stop the
bloodshed.
He also won't be going to war-torn Liberia, a
nation of 3 million with
historical ties to America, where 200,000 people
have been killed, a
million more displaced, disease is running rampant,
and beleaguered
citizens are pleading with the United States
to intervene. After 700
people were massacred in a rebel attack on the
capital city of Monrovia
two weeks ago, African leaders called on President
Bush to send in
2,000 U.S. troops as part of an international
peace keeping force. Both
the Pentagon and the State Department are in
favor of such a move, but
the White House has so far declined to expand
its adventures in
dictator-eradication to Africa.
Of course, that hasn't stopped the president from
paying lip service to
alleviating the suffering going on there. Just
last week he said: "We
are determined to help the people of Liberia
find the path to peace."
But, apparently, not determined enough to go
to the country himself to
facilitate a ceasefire agreement between the
warring factions.
Instead, he's dispatched 35 -- that's not a typo,
"thirty-five" -- U.S.
troops to the country, as he put it, "solely
for the purpose of
protecting American citizens and property." Wow,
I bet Liberian
President Charles Taylor is quaking in his jackboots.
Taylor, whose
murderous regime could teach Saddam a thing or
two about torture and
mass murder, was last month indicted for war
crimes by a U.N. court
While trying to drum up outrage at Saddam earlier
this year, the
president catalogued a list of his atrocities,
including mutilation and
rape, and proclaimed: "If this is not evil, then
evil has no meaning."
But the president's fly-over of Africa's hearts
of darkness, riven by
mutilation and rape, shows that it's his humanitarian
rhetoric that has
no meaning. Here is true evil, but next week
will instead be dominated
by a series of photo-ops with smiling children
and platitudes about the
virtues of democracy.
If more proof of the hypocritical selectivity
of Bush's moral outrage
were needed, look no further than the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq,
when, in the name of liberating the Iraqi people,
the White House
gladly linked arms with a host of countries its
own State Department
had castigated for significant human rights violations
-- including
Uzbekistan, Colombia, Georgia, Eritrea, Macedonia,
Rwanda, Uganda,
Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, and the Dominican Republic.
Given these
countries' dismal human rights record, maybe
we should have called them
the Coalition of the Willing to Torture, Execute,
and Rape.
The suddenly fashionable humanitarian justification
for the war in Iraq
is nothing more than yet another White House
deception designed to
cloak the fact that the original justification
-- Iraq as an imminent
threat -- hasn't panned out.
Which is just too darn bad for the long-suffering souls of Congo and Liberia.