Politics & Power Quote by Alex Morrison

The sentence is all hard edges and procedural calm, the kind of language soldiers use when they’re trying to sound like the aftermath can still be managed. Morrison isn’t arguing about ideals; he’s talking about sequencing. “Get it right” is doing heavy lifting: it implies prior failure, limited patience, and the sense that the next misstep won’t be a policy embarrassment but a collapse. The insistence that “they do have to” turns what could be a preference into an obligation, a subtle way of pre-loading blame onto unnamed decision-makers if Sierra Leone slides further.

The key word is “confidence,” and it’s not moral confidence, it’s operational. Confidence means locals believing the ground won’t shift under them tomorrow; it also means international actors believing their investment won’t be squandered. “There has to be something in there now” reads like a euphemism for presence: troops, observers, a mandate, leverage. It avoids the bloody nouns while still conveying urgency. The vagueness is intentional; it keeps options open and accountability diffuse.

Then comes the realist tell: negotiations are framed as something you reach only after “stabilize the situation.” Politics is treated as a second-phase luxury, possible only when force (or the credible threat of it) creates conditions. “Some sort of political negotiations” is almost dismissive, as if the form of democracy matters less than the act of stopping the spiral. The subtext is a familiar doctrine of intervention: security first, legitimacy later, with the quiet admission that legitimacy is often retrofitted to whatever stabilizes.