August 11, 2003	Monday	Jumadi-us-Sani 12, 1424

CRAWFORD: President Bush built lofty expectations around the world about his willingness to help staunch the bloodshed in Liberia, and now is facing widespread criticism for sending only a handful of troops, with no promise of combat forces, after five weeks of delay.

Bush authorized six to 20 Marines to go ashore this week to help Liberia’s West African neighbours with the logistics of humanitarian efforts. But he made no provision for reining in the rape, looting and gunfire that is terrifying residents of the capital, Monrovia.

The decision reflects the tensions between the expansive foreign policy Bush launched after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, when he began focusing on failing states as breeding grounds for terrorism, and the more circumscribed worldview he held as a candidate, when he said that “while Africa may be important, it doesn’t fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them.”

Western leaders have a history of ignoring African crises with political impunity. But Liberia, an English-speaking country colonized by freed American slaves, was descending into chaos just as Bush was preparing for last month’s trip to Africa, which he had hoped to use to build goodwill by touting his efforts to alleviate the continent’s AIDS epidemic and reward progressive governments with development and anti-terrorism aid. The administration tried to buy time, dispatching Pentagon assessment teams to Liberia and later sending a three-ship group to the coast.

About 2,300 Marines remain nearby on those warships, but officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department said this week Bush has tentatively ruled against a major deployment. By Friday, when Bush met at his ranch house with Donald Rumsfeld, aides said the US might do more but that no decision had been made to do so.

Rebel attacks increased and chaos mounted as the administration quarrelled privately about what to do. Bush’s critics said that whatever he decides in the coming days, he squandered a chance to show a willingness to keep peace rather than just using war to engineer regime change. These critics said muscular US involvement also would have bolstered the human- rights justification for the Iraq war that Bush began emphasizing when no unconventional weapons immediately turned up.

A senior administration official said Bush has been consistent since he began addressing the crisis that West Africans, not US soldiers, should take the lead.

The strategy resulted from a bitter battle within the administration, Bush’s aides said. Some senior State Department officials had insisted the crisis in the civil-war-torn nation of 3 million could not be ignored and required US leadership. But the Pentagon resisted an open-ended commitment to a new mission in a chaotic country of arguably peripheral strategic importance at a time when the United States is taking near-daily casualties in post-war Iraq.

An added reason for hesitance was that this would be the first US crisis intervention in Africa since President Bill Clinton withdrew troops from Somalia in 1993 after the deaths of 18 commandos in Mogadishu.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.