We’ve all heard plenty of discussion about U.S. involvement in Iraq. I find myself glossing over the topic each time it arises, my mind and emotions saturated with two equally noxious thoughts: first, images of horrific violence. Second, the endless politcal bickering, insulated from the violence by thousands of miles of sterile distance. My interest renewed, however, when I overheard two former Navy men discuss their strong support of invading Iraq, and their blasé dismissal of even minor intervention in Liberia. Why is it easy for Americans to view the dignity of human populations in Africa and outside of Africa so differently? How is this tied into our foreign policy, and what ramifications will this have for the United States?

It is easy to say that the people of Liberia have darker skin than the people of Iraq, or for that matter, those on whose behalf NATO intervened in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. To a significant extent, race and color will influence public opinion. Moreover, the legacy of the U.S.-Mogadishu incident doesn’t help matters, nor does the problem that the average American education regarding Africa consists of Black Hawk Down and the Cliff Notes on Heart of Darkness you skimmed to pass 11th grade English. Even so, American ignorance concerning Liberia and Africa may not be any greater than misconceptions surrounding Iraq and the Middle East, but the nature of the misconceptions are quite different, and it’s not just the uneducated that espouse them.

In fact, even the Ivy League is prone to delusions concerning Africa. Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University and former Vice President of the World Bank, suggested in 1991 that the World Bank facilitate the exportation of nuclear waste to Africa, essentially implying a lower human cost for things like increased prostate cancer rates. Harvard academic Samuel Huntington’s ethnocentric manifesto, The Clash of Civilizations, described a world containing a homogenous Arab-Islamic “antagonistic” threat, and even more telling, a world in which an African civilization may not even exist. The diverse and frequently impoverished populations of Africa have been dehumanized through their perceived lack of modernity, and depoliticized because the crises in places such as Liberia pose no security threat to the United States. Or do they?

In the wake of major combat operations in Iraq, the wisdom of hindsight of regime change proponents has followed that “even if we were wrong about a lot of things, we still liberated a country from an oppressive regime.” This professed altruism (and the tens of billions of dollars that come with it) could not, of course, be extended to the greatest tragedies of the last decade in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—countries with no apparent geopolitical significance to the United States; countries containing dark peoples. We come to a strange contradictory implementation of humanitarian aid, where purportedly benevolent economic assistance and democratization efforts are directed primarily towards an unwelcoming region which is largely perceived as mobilizing against the United States. The all-too-familiar lack of a convincing response in benign and Black Liberia reveals the fastest rising security threat of all: the increasing cynicism towards American foreign involvement, and the spreading and intensifying rage that results from it.

While we could easily write off these problems to racism and oil lust, the challenge America faces is much bigger than that. The challenge America faces is its own foreign policy trajectory, careening towards a positive feedback of violent struggle should its leaders not seriously reconsider their global vision. If nothing else, it would be a good start to behave towards the peoples of Africa and the Middle East as equally valuable and political beings, whose feelings towards America’s actions will hold real, potent consequences. In an increasingly anti-American world, the political sentiment in the seemingly smallest and darkest of places could have the greatest implications for the future of the United States.