Liberian Misadventure

President Bush is considering dispatching U.S. troops to Liberia to help end the conflicts that have raged there for decades. But a hurried, ill-considered deployment to the West African nation would be a bad idea. The mission is unclear and seems driven more by the timing of Bush’s Africa trip next week and a desire to pacify European nations upset by the administration’s go-it-alone policies, especially in Iraq.

Though it’s true the United Sates has 1.45 million troops on active duty and could spare a few thousand, what’s the compelling reason to do so? The U.S. has its hands full in Iraq, where troops are under daily attack, and Afghanistan, where remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain active.

There is a fragile cease-fire in Liberia, where rebels hope to topple Charles Taylor, the thuggish president. But it is uncertain whether U.S. forces could maintain the peace and whether they would become targets for warring factions. It is also unclear how long troops might have to stay and who would succeed them -- an all-African force or United Nations peacekeepers? Would the goal be to prolong the cease-fire, disarm rebel armies or hold elections?

The United States does have ties to Liberia, founded by freed slaves more than 150 years ago and considered a staunch Cold War ally. Washington has given it hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and remains its largest donor. But those links do not compel armed intervention now.

Taylor is one of Liberia’s biggest problems. In 1989, he led a rebellion against President Samuel Doe, touching off a civil war that killed at least 200,000 people. Taylor won a tainted election in 1997 and since has backed rebels in neighboring countries. A U.N. court indicted him as a war criminal. Bush has demanded that Taylor resign -- but other reasonable folks have asked for that for years. Then too there’s the problem of possible successors; they appear as bad as he is. Intervention advocates say Liberia’s chaos could breed or harbor terrorists. But so too could Congo, arguably in worse shape, and many other nations racked by unspeakable poverty and violence. Britain’s dispatch of troops to Sierra Leone and France’s to Ivory Coast don’t provide a template for American forces in Liberia. London and Paris intervened in former colonies, where they have extensive ties; their missions were well defined.

The call for U.S. help in Liberia from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan echoes a plea from his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He pushed the U.S. to expand its humanitarian mission in Somalia 10 years ago to a political-military goal of ousting warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. That ended in disaster when rebels shot down helicopters and dragged through the streets the bodies of some of the 18 Americans they killed.

The United States should keep providing aid to African nations, including Liberia. But it should not send troops without a clear mission and exit plan -- something candidate George W. Bush, in critiquing the Clinton administration, once insisted on. Washington must remember the dangers of Somalia-style “mission creep” and of trying to do too much in too many places with too few troops.