Dilemma over troops to Liberia

Renewed fighting this week in Liberia may make the deployment there of any foreign peacekeeping force much more difficult - and, perhaps, more necessary.

No longer would US and West African troops be entering a tense yet stable standoff between rebels and forces loyal to Liberian President Charles Taylor. For the moment, rebel commanders appear intent on seizing the country's capital, Monrovia, by force.

Yet without some kind of intervention, a humanitarian crisis may overwhelm a country with which the US has historic ties.

Thus the Bush administration is facing calls for another commitment of troops at a time when the US military is already stretched thin, from Bosnia to Iraq.

"In terms of the difficulty of going in, yes, I think we are two steps back from where we were last week," says Joseph Siegle, an Africa expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

During his five-day swing through Africa earlier, this month President Bush indicated that he might be willing to dispatch US personnel to help enforce the cease-fire then in place in Liberia. But he indicated that such a force might well be modest, and since then administration councils have debated exactly how many troops they would be willing to spare.

While Liberia was founded by freed US slaves, and provided rubber and other raw materials for US corporations for decades, today it is of little geopolitical importance to the US, note experts. It has no oil. Its violence is consuming Liberia itself, not other longstanding US allies in the region. Al Qaeda is not using the Liberian bush as a training base.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon asserts that current missions already have caused it to be overextended. Virtually all the US Army's deployable combat forces are already engaged - and the situation in Iraq is such that commanders there are calling for more muscle, as well. Given all this, the administration's stated preference has been for Liberia's neighbors to take the lead in calming the situation there.

But recent experience shows that is not necessarily the best way to proceed, say critics of the administration's Liberia policy. The forces of the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the past have been accused of committing atrocities of their own, and of taking sides in some conflicts in which they have intervened.

"It's quite clear that West African peacekeepers can't do the job as effectively and with as much moral force as the US could," says Robert Rotberg, president of the World Peace Foundation and director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

As Mr. Bush debates whether to send troops to Liberia, military officials from ECOWAS met Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal, to discuss sending in a West African peacekeeper force.

ECOWAS, a regional organization of 15 West African nations, has previously pledged to send as many as 1,500 peacekeepers regardless of whether the US sends troops.

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