George W. Bush likes to preach “moral clarity” in his foreign policy. And the moral imperative in Liberia, it seems, could not be clearer: step in and stop the killing. For a month now Bush has indicated he will, but on his own terms and in his own time: when the savage Taylor leaves the country for exile in Nigeria, and when a ceasefire is in place. Meanwhile the killing goes on, as a tenuous truce is broken again and again, and a besieged Taylor–the man once responsible for directing troops who hacked limbs off children–fights off rebels. Now, at last, a U.S.-trained Nigerian “vanguard” force is ready to deploy with U.S. financial and logistical support, and Liberians have a wisp of hope. “This is a golden opportunity to save thousands of lives with a tiny presence,” says Hassan Wazni, 32, a Monrovia businessman.
But for Bush, going into Liberia means a painful reckoning with policies for which he once denounced Bill Clinton and his 2000 campaign rival, Al Gore: “open-ended deployments and unclear military missions.” It was nearly a month ago, during the president’s trip to Africa, that Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters a decision on U.S. intervention would be made in days. On Friday, calling the situation “worse and worse and worse,” Bush finally announced he would position Marines off the coast for a mission to be “limited in time and scope,” as the White House’s wishful mantra goes. Yet even hours after Bush’s announcement, puzzled Pentagon officials who had been readying a three-ship amphibious group with 2,300 Marines aboard were still awaiting their orders, NEWSWEEK has learned.
One reason for the foot-dragging is that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be even more reluctant than his boss to take on Liberia. While Powell has pushed for the move as America’s moral duty, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon brass are still –fretting about the details. Last week Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers threw the old “Powell doctrine” back in the secretary’s face, saying the Pentagon was concerned about clarifying the mission and an exit strategy. Bush officials remain haunted by the “Black Hawk Down” disaster in Somalia–and what diplomat Richard Holbrooke calls the “Vietmalia” aversion to casualties on unclear missions–as well as their own chronic allergy to nation-building and peacekeeping.
Yet the Bush team is aware of another haunting precedent as well: the 1994-95 genocide in Rwanda, when Washington stood by as 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, though even a small number of peacekeepers might have deterred the murderers. Even so, despite Powell’s rhetoric, the White House plays down humanitarian motives; instead, by linking U.S. assistance to the war on terror, it is seeking to appease conservatives who don’t like peacekeeping. “We don’t want a vortex in Liberia to suck down neighboring states,” turning them into a harbor for terrorists, a White House official explains. Bush is also sensitive to charges from African-American voters, whom he is seeking to win over in 2004, that he has ignored Africa’s civil wars; and he has been lobbied by his political base, especially pro-intervention Christian activists like Pat Robertson.
For Bush, taking on Liberia also means a fresh reckoning with the United Nations, which he once declared would become “irrelevant” if it didn’t bend his way during the recent Iraq debate. U.S. officials have been content to let U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lead the negotiations on a new Liberian peace treaty and Constitution–a tacit acknowledgment that U.N.-led nation-building may not be all bad all the time. “When the U.S. goes in, it’s not just to garrison street corners,” says one senior administration official. “We’re going in to transform the situation.” But local observers are still skeptical, given the U.S. military’s aversion to casualties (though none of a 32-person U.S. advance team was ever in peril). “The commitment is not there,” says a Western relief official in Monrovia. “They’ve talked about doing things here but they’re doing zero.”
Bush officials call their approach a test for an evolving model of “regionalizing” conflict resolution: U.S. troops under Clinton trained the Nigerians going in, followed by the Nigerian-dominated Economic Community of West African States, known as Ecowas. As in Sierra Leone and Congo, the idea is to leave humanitarian intervention to the United Nations and local powers, but give it some “extra oomph,” says a senior official. While traveling in Africa, Bush implicitly praised the Clinton-era program to turn the Nigerians into peacekeepers. “I think our money has helped train seven battalions of peacekeepers amongst African troops,” Bush said, “so that we never do get overextended.” Indeed, while almost everything about the Liberian intervention remains murky, the administration achieved clarity on one point late last week: Ecowas must take the lead. According to one senior U.S. official, the idea was to end the Alphonse-Gaston routine of “you go first, no, you go first.” What no one seems to know is who or what comes next.
