Liberia and the Bush Dynasty: Armies of Compassion? (The New Republic)

Liberia's current civil war doesn't have ancient roots. Indeed, the country was stable for most of its history. The seeds of the current crisis were laid in the '80s, during the dictatorship of Doe, who destroyed civil society and sowed ethnic hatred by blatantly favoring his own tribe. Rather than use its enormous leverage in Liberia to force Doe to relinquish power, the United States propped him up as an anti-communist client. After Doe blatantly rigged his 1985 reelection, then-Secretary of State George Schultz said Liberia was making "genuine progress" toward democracy. Between 1980 and 1987, according to Michael Clough's book Free at Last?: U.S. Policy Toward Africa and the End of the Cold War, Liberia's annual GNP spiraled downward at an annual rate of 5.2 percent, despite substantial U.S. aid.

In late 1989, Taylor, gathering troops from ethnic groups Doe had oppressed, led an army to the suburbs of the capital, Monrovia. With Liberia's strategic importance diminished by the end of the cold war, the United States refused to intervene.

    

IDF considers releasing its official history of 1973 war (Ha'aretz)

A two-volume, 744-page official Israel Defense Forces history of the Yom Kippur War, completed nearly a decade ago but not shown to anyone other than staff college graduates and the most senor officers - and the senior officers mentioned in it, or their relatives if officers have died - might yet be published in the coming months.

The assumption in the General Staff is that the report was shelved to satisfy various politicians, most specifically Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose performance as a reserve general, commanding a corps in the Sinai, is described in terms that infuriated him when he read a draft of the report and commented on it