Bush should send forces to Liberia
President Bush is making an “I care” trip to Africa early next month, but a real test of his concern will be the level of U.S. involvement in making peace in Liberia, America’s only “colony” in Africa.
“The French have stood up to the plate in Cote d’Ivoire” (Ivory Coast) by sending in 3,000 troops, said one U.S. official, and Britain has sent 700 soldiers to keep the peace in neighboring Sierra Leone. “The question is,” this official said, “is the Pentagon going to step up to the plate? Is the president going to tell the Pentagon to step up to the plate? The president’s trip will force the issue.”
Bush is scheduled to visit five African nations from July 7 to 12, emphasizing his $15 billion AIDS initiative, a $9 billion “Millennium Challenge” aid program to encourage economic and political reform, U.S.-African trade relations, and “conflict resolution” for the continent’s several vicious wars.
Bush’s first stop is in Senegal, in West Africa, the launching point for slave trade to America — and also the place where he’d be likely to announce any measures to bring peace to nearby Liberia. Administration officials say the State Department is pushing for the U.S. military to be involved in a “stabilization force” for the civil war-ravaged nation, but the Pentagon opposes it, evidently fearing loss of American lives in an “unimportant” place.
As an alternative, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has talked about a U.S. program to train foreign soldiers to act as “constabularies” in Africa and elsewhere, thereby avoiding the need for American forces. That’s a worthwhile idea, but it wouldn’t be set up in time to do any good in Liberia, which is at a crisis stage right now.
The case for U.S. involvement is that freed American slaves established Liberia. Its capital, Monrovia, is named after the fifth president of the United States, James Monroe. During the Cold War, Liberia was a staunch U.S. ally, and many of its elite citizens have been educated in the United States. Moreover, Taylor is a protege of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qadaffi and has ties to Al Qaeda, which uses Taylor’s diamond- smuggling operations to launder money.
The U.S. should have intervened when Taylor seized power in 1990, but has more or less stood by watching as he wreaked havoc in his own country and neighboring Ivory Coast, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where his allies spread terror by hacking off the limbs of innocent civilians. An estimated 200,000 people have been killed in the fighting, and thousands more have been raped, maimed and forced to flee their homes.
The neighboring countries sponsored rebel forces to counter Taylor — some of them guilty of atrocities equal to his — and finally forced him to accept a cease-fire this month. He was recently indicted as a war criminal, but his whereabouts are unknown.
If the cease-fire breaks down — there were reports of renewed fighting this week — one administration official said that, “the spiral back to ‘Heart of Darkness’ could develop quickly.”
The situation cries out for an international force to step in to keep the peace, provide stability while an interim government takes charge, and help the new government disarm Taylor’s forces and the rebel groups. Some U.S. contingency plans envision American troops actually joining in the stabilization force, but officials say that — “realistically,” given Pentagon objections — the likeliest U.S. involvement will be to give airlift, logistical and communications support to an international force.
Bush is definitely showing concern for Africa — by going there and by advancing his AIDS and economic initiatives. But as an administration official said, “How serious can we be about Africa if we don’t help our only colony?”
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)