Who Will Stop the Killing?

Q. SAKAMAKI FOR TIME
The Front: Amid copious bullet casings, a loyalist militiaman gets in position to fight the rebels in Monrovia

It would be hard to design a more tragically absurd war than the one raging in Liberia. Battles are fought mainly by untrained, doped-up kids from the countryside, and no one on either side has effective command of the ragtag militias. The majority of casualties are civilian. Most combatants avoid fighting, preferring to spray bullets at the other side and then run. The rebels' only stated goal is the ouster of President Charles Taylor, a recently indicted war criminal who insists he is willing to step down and go into exile in Nigeria but keeps creating excuses to postpone his departure. In any case, the opposition is so fragmented and unpopular that there's no obvious candidate to replace him. So it is that even as hordes of angry Liberians dumped dead bodies at the gates of the U.S. embassy in Monrovia in a desperate plea for American help last week, Taylor held a state funeral for his beloved mother, who died of natural causes, complete with a military band and gospel choir.

Unfortunately, the insanity of the situation on the ground is matched and perhaps exacerbated by the diplomatic dithering over how to bring the war to an end. Almost every day, it seems, Liberia's neighbors hold another planning meeting in Senegal and pledge to send in several thousand peacekeeping troops, only to put off decisions on the specifics of the mission for a few more days. The Bush Administration says the Africans must take the lead in any such operation and that President Taylor must go into exile before U.S. troops will play any role. But Taylor insists he will not leave until peacekeepers arrive, and many Africans believe that only the U.S. can restore some semblance of order. The last time Nigerian peacekeepers did a tour of duty in Liberia, in the mid-'90s, they were notorious for their looting and pillaging.

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Will the U.S., which has historical ties to Liberia, get involved? The Bush Administration took a tentative step in that direction late last week, saying it would send ships to the waters off Liberia and contribute $10 million to help fund the logistics of moving West African peacekeepers into the country. The announcement followed by several days an order from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to move the ships into the Mediterranean Sea, where they could reach Liberia more quickly if called upon. The Administration's language was so tortured that it could mean almost anything or nothing. The "appropriate military capabilities," the White House said, would be on a mission of "limited time and scope" to help "support" a West African peacekeeping force.

At the very least, that means three ships, carrying close to 5,000 Marines and sailors, should arrive in the waters off Monrovia within the next two weeks. What they will do once they get there is unclear. A U.S. military official says the mission does not involve separating the combatants or enforcing a cease-fire, and others have insisted that any deployment would not last more than three to four months. President Bush stressed that the U.N. "will be responsible for developing a political solution and for relieving the U.S. troops in short order."

With the U.S. military stretched by conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is not surprising that the Pentagon and many members of the Administration have resisted an active peacekeeping role in Liberia. Bush has always made a point of saying he would not let American armed forces become a global police force. Only Secretary of State Colin Powell has been a relatively outspoken advocate of intervention in Liberia. He admitted to the Washington Times last week that the Administration could have done a better job of rallying a peacekeeping force and argued that "we do have an interest in making sure that West Africa doesn't simply come apart."

But while the folks in Washington recall the consequences of failing to prevent genocide in Rwanda almost a decade ago, the same people remember well what happened the last time a President Bush sent U.S. troops into Africa. To this day, the military is haunted by the memory of the 18 soldiers who were killed in the 1993 mission to stabilize Somalia. General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional hearing last week that Liberia "is not a pretty situation, and it's not going to give way to any instant fix."

If it weren't for the President's trip to Africa earlier this month, it's possible the U.S. would not be weighing such an altruistic, risky mission at all. Bush dangled the prospect of U.S. intervention in Liberia at least in part so that his trip would not be dominated by the issue, according to a senior State Department official. Now Bush risks hurting U.S. credibility if he doesn't follow through, argues Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Reagan. "If you walk away from this," he says, "there's a price."