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USA HAS NO VITAL INTEREST IN LIBERIA???
OR SOME "CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM" ARE MORE EQUAL
THAN OTHERS. ONLY THE "CHOSEN" NEED BE RESQUED????

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U.S. Resists Entreaties to Send Peacekeepers to Liberia

July 22, 2003
 By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS






WASHINGTON, July 21 - The United Nations secretary general
and West African countries implored the Bush administration
today to send peacekeepers to Liberia as fighting
intensified there and the American Embassy came under
mortar fire.

But administration officials resisted the appeals,
countering that Liberia's neighbors should act first in
helping stabilize the country. The administration called on
rebels and the government of President Charles G. Taylor to
respect a cease-fire.

Even as they balked at taking the lead in peacekeeping,
administration officials acted to strengthen the American
security presence in Liberia. The Pentagon sent a security
team to protect the United States Embassy compound, where
fewer than 100 Americans remained. An apartment building in
the embassy complex was hit by a mortar round, which
officials described as "stray," wounding two; a second
round exploded at an embassy annex, killing numerous war
refugees, officials said.

In recent days, the Pentagon ordered about 4,500 sailors
and marines to move closer to Liberia in preparation for
possible peacekeeping or evacuation duty, officials said.

Administration policy makers are torn over how to proceed,
if at all, in Liberia. Officials indicated after President
Bush's five-day trip to Africa this month that he might be
willing to send a peacekeeping force of limited scope and
duration. Pentagon officials are the most resistant, while
the State Department is more eager to find a solution.

Among the chief reasons cited for the ambivalence: The
United States has no vital interest in Liberia; the
military feels overextended in Iraq and elsewhere; the last
African intervention, in Somalia, ended in a debacle;
Pentagon officials, in particular, increasingly chafe at
noncombat missions.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, pleaded
for the United States to intercede "before it is too late"
and the best opportunity vanishes. "I think we can really
salvage the situation if troops were to be deployed
urgently and promptly," Mr. Annan told reporters.

Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman, said today
that the administration remained in close consultation with
Mr. Annan and West African leaders who brokered a
cease-fire, but he said no decision had been made to send
troops.

Instead, Mr. Reeker strongly condemned the rebel group,
Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, for
"their continued reckless and indiscriminate shelling" of
the capital, Monrovia.

Advocates of American action said the administration's
failure to lead in Liberia was unconscionable.

"There is a major humanitarian crisis on the horizon here,"
said Princeton N. Lyman, a former American ambassador to
Nigeria and South Africa. "For the U.S. not to come in, I
think, this would be a significant moral blot - right after
the president's trip to Africa."

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
dispatched a three-ship amphibious group from its position
off the Horn of Africa into the Mediterranean Sea. From
there, it would take the vessels another 7 to 10 days to
get to Liberia, officials said.

The amphibious group, led by the assault ship Iwo Jima,
includes 2,000 marines and 2,500 soldiers. Only the
marines, and perhaps only some of them, would probably go
ashore as part of any American mission, the defense
officials said.

The American reluctance to send even a token number of
peacekeepers comes just weeks after Pentagon officials
signaled that planning had begun for the deployment of 500
to 2,000 peacekeepers. Since then, however, the
administration has faced growing difficulties in Iraq,
sapping the appetite for a new undertaking of undetermined
scope.

Some Africa experts say the administration is risking a
historic chance to end the ruinous rebellion that surged in
2000 in a population exhausted by war. The disintegration
of the cease-fire two weeks ago was an indication that time
was running out, they said.

"A U.S. intervention at this point would be practical and
possible and well received," said Joseph Siegle, a fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, who
spent years as a relief worker in Liberia.

James Phillips, a research fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, a research institution with ties to the White
House, said he opposed sending troops to Liberia. The
military, he said, is already overcommitted, with half the
Army in Iraq, and training missions elsewhere.

"To undertake another peacekeeping operation would make
things worse," he said. "There's going to be a very
unsettled situation."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/22/international/africa/22DIPL.html?ex=1059885201&ei=1&en=50b406c67f72f614


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