Hooray

Lest it be thought that I only post about things that give me an opportunity to be ironic, angry or sarcastic, let me post one of the news stories that has touched my heart more than any in a long, long time. It seems the recent election in Sierra Leone has gone quite well. After two terms, President Ahmed Kabbah is stepping down and voter turnout is high, with over half the country registered to vote. Bear in mind, we are less than a decade out from the time when RUF (Revolutionary United Front) soldiers were hacking people's limbs off and the country was being torn apart by a shockingly horrific civil war. Now, the country is running its own elections with what there is every reason to expect will be a peaceful transfer of power.

There will be a great story written someday by someone with more brains and talent than I possess that compares the Middle East with the region of West Africa around Sierra Leone and Liberia. Both areas were blessed with natural resources that are highly valued around the world but particularly in richer countries. Both were stricken with conflict, unrest and authoritarianism that stemmed, at least in part, from that wealth. Both had problematic colonial legacies. The Great Lakes region might deserve a mention in that tale, with a similar trajectory but I know even less about that area than the first two.

The point of the story will be that no one likes instability and chaos in their own country. Because of this, events will tend to resolve themselves and no situation is hopeless. The news story mentions that the Sierra Leone civil war ended as the rebels agreed to disarm and turned their guns in. I cannot help but observe that as the Iraqi civil war is really cranking up, America has been handing more guns out. It is perverse and a very American way of looking at a problem. For anyone who stumbles across this and is somehow ignorant of the American way, we are quite good when it comes to fixing what looks bad, fighting symptoms and answering to emergencies. We are outrageously bad at rooting out the source of problems, preventative care, and planning ahead to save ourselves trouble later. You can find examples of this in our approach to infrastructure, our gun policy, our health care system, and how we approach the world in our foreign policy. The Middle School Lunchroom of international diplomacy does not allow for backing down or trying to talk out compromise positions if they "are the ones who started it."