Who Will Stop the Killing?

It would be hard to design a more tragically absurd war than the one raging in Liberia. Battles are fought mainly by untrained, doped-up kids from the countryside, and no one on either side has effective command of the ragtag militias. Most combatants avoid fighting, preferring to spray bullets at the other side and then run. The rebels' only stated goal is the ouster of President Charles Taylor, a recently indicted war criminal who insists he is willing to step down and go into exile in Nigeria but keeps creating excuses to postpone his departure. In any case, the opposition is so fragmented and unpopular that there's no obvious candidate to replace him. So it is that even as hordes of angry Liberians dumped dead bodies at the gates of the U.S. embassy in Monrovia in a desperate plea for American help last week, Taylor held a state funeral for his beloved mother, who died of natural causes, complete with a military band and gospel choir. It would be hard to design a more tragically absurd war than the one raging in Liberia.