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Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
Jesse Walker

Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.

So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.

With the national-security arguments for the Iraq war in tatters, the only remaining justifications for that war are the nastiness of the Ba'athist regime and the alleged benefits of American nation-building. And those, adjusted just slightly for local conditions, are the arguments we hear for sending U.S. troops to Liberia. It's easy to poke fun at Howard Dean for morphing so quickly into George W. Bush when the talk turned from intervention in the Middle East to intervention in West Africa. Left unexamined is how exactly George W. Bush morphed into Howard Dean.

The answer lies in Iraq, and in the ease with which anything can be linked, Kevin Bacon-style, to the war on terror....