In his 2000 Tanner Lecture at Princeton University, journalist and historian Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, observed: "Intervention is also problematic because we are not necessarily coming to the rescue of pure innocence. Intervention frequently requires us to side with one party in a civil war, and the choice frequently requires us to support parties who are themselves guilty of human rights abuses…We are intervening in the name of human rights as never before, but our interventions are sometimes making matters worse." As it enters into the middle of the long-simmering Haitian conflict, the international community would do well to reflect on this sobering realization.

Dr. J. Peter Pham, who served as a diplomat in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea from 2001 through 2002, is the author of Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State, just released by Reed Press.