Mark Steyn has some really good reasons for not intervening in Liberia. Here's a sample:

I know how most Americans would answer that. But the Bush administration thinks more about the Dark Continent than its predecessor did. Disease in Africa, for example, has been identified as a potential national security threat. An American diplomat recently described to me the war on terror as a Saudi civil war that the Saudis had successfully exported to the rest of the world. What would it take to export West Africa’s troubles to the world? For some no-account nickel’n’dime operator, Charles Taylor has done a grand job of destabilising a region. Where’s next? Benin? Togo? If you don’t think West Africa can be contained, it’ll have to be cured, and that’s a 30-year project. Otherwise, George F. Kennan’s argument against intervention in Somalia holds for the west of the continent, too: ‘This dreadful situation cannot possibly be put to rights other than by the establishment of a governing power for the entire territory, and a very ruthless, determined one at that. It would not be a democratic one, because the very prerequisites for a democratic political system do not exist among the people in question.’

Read the whole thing.