The crimes being investigated by the Special Court for Sierra Leone are among the most heinous imaginable, even when set in the context of a century marred by humankind's inhumanity to its fellows. And some of those indicted - including the deposed Liberian ruler Taylor - are among the most unsympathetic of defendants. But all of these considerations, as well as implications for American policy in Iraq and elsewhere in the future, only reinforces the need for vigilance that the moral outrage does not blind us to political realities and bind us against our own national interests.

 

Dr. J. Peter Pham served as a senior international diplomat in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, from 2001 through the end of 2002. His book, Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State, will be published in January 2004 by Reed Press. He is presently working on a history of the civil war in Sierra Leone.