Washington, DC — A decade after 18 U.S. Army Rangers were killed by an angry mob in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, the Bush administration is facing mounting pressure to put American 'boots on the ground' in Africa once again. Calls for an active U.S. intervention in Liberia are coming from the United Nations and various member governments, including Britain and France and leading African officials.
Senior administration officials met at the White House Saturday to discuss Liberia during a Cabinet-level 'principals' meeting of the National Security Council. Another session is scheduled for Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said during a television appearance Monday. "There's a sense of urgency with respect to the situation, and I don't want to pre-judge when the president might decide or what he might decide, but we are seized with the matter," Powell told interviewer Jim Lehrer on public television's NewsHour program. "We understand that this is a problem that has to be dealt with in the very near future."
Last week, President George W. Bush called on the Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, to leave office "so that his country can be spared further bloodshed." Addressing a U.S.-Africa Business Summit sponsored by the Corporate Council on Africa, Bush said: "We are determined to help the people of Liberia find peace."
Because Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in 1847 and was a staunch U.S. ally during the Cold War, particularly in the 1980s, many people in Africa and other parts of the globe see the country as an American responsibility. However, administration policy to date has sent mixed signals to the parties involved in the conflict. In mid-June, with fighting in Monrovia escalating, the Bush administration positioned a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship, the USS Kearsarge, off the western shore of Africa to aid in the potential evacuation of American citizens. The ship, equipped with helicopters and a sizeable medical team, arrived just as negotiations over Liberia's future reached a critical point.
According to mediators taking part in the talks in Ghana, the presence of the American ship was a critical factor in persuading the warring parties, particularly Taylor's beleaguered government, to agree to end the fighting. But after only three days - before the ink on the accord was dry - the ship was ordered back to its homeport of Norfolk, Virginia, where it arrived Monday following six weeks involvement in the war on Iraq and a short stint providing security for President Bush's visits to Egypt and Jordan last month.
"Once Taylor saw that ship steam away, he reverted to his old ways - shifting and delaying and refusing to accept what he has already agreed to do," said one senior U.S. official involved in the issue. Instead of stepping aside for an interim administration, as the agreement envisioned, Taylor insisted he would serve out his term, which ends in January.
Despite this setback, the mediators last week managed to get a ceasefire in place, after first pressuring the rebels to end their assault on Monrovia and then arm-twisting Taylor to join in the truce. The accord was the work of Ghana's President John Kufuor, current chair of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), and General Abdulsalami Abubakar, a former Nigerian head-of-state, who is the chief Ecowas negotiator.
On Saturday, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called on the Security Council to augment the Ecowas effort with significant support. "International action is urgently needed to reverse Liberia's drift towards total disintegration," he said.
According to Chester Crocker, who served for eight years as assistant secretary of State for Africa in the Reagan administration, a decision to make even a small troop commitment to peacekeeping in Liberia will not be easy for the administration. "We lost our way on the streets of Mogadishu and the record since then has been one of avoiding direct engagement," Crocker said during a policy briefing Monday at the Brookings Institution focused on President George W. Bush's scheduled trip to Africa July 7 to 12.
"We can't keep saying 'no'," said Crocker, who now holds the post of Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. "If we say 'yes', we're much more likely to be credible, and I think we can do it without getting stuck in a quagmire," he said. "Liberians are fed up with Taylor and they're fed up with the fighting. They want civilian rule."
During a previous war-induced crisis in 1990, when the current U.S. president's father was in office, Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen toured West Africa to meet with key actors in the unfolding crisis, only to be recalled to Washington where the focus was on preparation for war with Iraq. "You can only concentrate on so many things at once," Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to President Bush said in a 1993 interview. The decision proved costly in both human lives and humanitarian assistance, Cohen said in an interview last week. The instability spread through the region, engulfing Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, and impacting the regional giant Nigeria.
The first Bush administration "looked the other way" while Liberia descended into chaos, Crocker said. This time around, Crocker said, "it wouldn't surprise me" if President Bush "confronts the skeptics in the Pentagon -- and we all know that is where they are -- and says this is the time to act."
Asked about Liberia on Monday at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: "We've spent time over the weekend -- a good deal of time over the weekend -- visiting among ourselves about that and thinking through different aspects of it," he said. The president has not yet "made a call," he said, "nor has the State Department requested an evacuation out of Monrovia." "We ought to be engaged," said Susan E. Rice, who was assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1997 until 2001. "Ecowas is saying they will send 3,000 troops as part of a multinational force if the United States will send 2,000 troops and takes the lead. I think that is a bargain we ought to accept," she told the Brookings forum. "For Liberia, the United States is the international 911. There is no other."
Rice said an "effective and relatively small force" of Britain's Royal Marines brought an end to the fighting in Sierra Leone three years ago. "They enabled the flow of humanitarian assistance. They basically created the space and time for the creation of an effective international force." More recently, French troops intervened to stem fighting between rebels and government forces in Cote d'Ivoire, a former French colony on Liberia's western border.
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Walter Kansteiner, the current assistant secretary for Africa, told the Brookings forum: "politically and diplomatically, we are engaged in Liberia - and we will remain so." During his Africa trip, the president wants to focus on a number of key issues - increased U.S trade and investment, the fight against HIV/Aids, to which he has pledged $15 billion over five years, environmental concerns and conflict resolution, Kansteiner said. But he conceded that peacekeeping in Liberia, and in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, will likely be high priorities for the African leaders Bush will meet during his six-day, five-nation tour. "I think the trip will probably help get the concerns [about these issues] across, because they will probably be consistently raised."
Gayle Smith, who during her tenure as senior director for Africa on the National Security Council staff helped plan two trips to Africa by President Bill Clinton, told the Brookings forum that major conflicts such as those in Liberia and the Congo could divert attention from what the president is trying to achieve.
"The United States cannot avoid answering the mail on Liberia and Congo," she said. These issues are "not easy to deal with," she added, but it has to be done.
On Saturday, the day the White House meeting on Liberia was held, the New York Times and other newspapers around the country featured a gripping photograph of a child soldier in Monrovia shouldering a rifle with a teddy-bear pack on his back. "These horror-story images are not what the White House wants to dominate coverage while the president is in Africa," one U.S. official said. "This adds significantly to the pressure to act."
