Update ~ July 3, 2003: Bush is under pressure
to announce a decision on sending troops to Liberia before leaving
Washington
for Africa on Monday night. He is considering sending as many as
2,000 troops
to
enforce
a cease-fire
in the
war-torn West African country. According to a report this evening
from Knight
Ridder Newspapers, the deployment would be a marked
departure from his views during the
last presidential
campaign.
We believe that if Bush goes ahead and sends a couple of thousand
troops to Liberia, the gesture will be nothing more but an empty
attempt to save face and promote his own political agenda. Therefore,
we still stand behind the position below:
Commentary ~ July 01, 2003: Liberia, a West African country
that the United States created in the 19th century as a home for
freed American slaves, is in crisis. Nearly 1,000 civilians have
been
slaughtered
in the
last
10 days
of June 2003. Two rebel factions control 60 percent of the ruined
land and want to get rid of President Charles Taylor, a former
warlord indicted
for war crimes by an international court. Taylor, a close friend
of Jessie Jackson, has been charged with profiting from a long
and bloody civil war in neighboring Sierra
Leone
in exchange
for
a
steady
flow of
diamonds from that country.
hundreds of thousands of people died in that war, and many more
had their limbs amputated as part of a scare tactic to keep people
away from the diamond fields. Taylor himself is also responsible
for more than 200,000 dead in his own country during the civil
wars of the 1990s.
The Liberians are pleading with the Bush Administration to intervene
militarily. Bush has so far refused. Wait a minute...
wasn't the charge of genocide one of the excuses George Bush
gave for invading Iraq? Now that no Weapons of
Mass Destruction have been found, the Bush team is beating that
drum even louder.
This past week, among other things, President Bush put on an appearance
of concern by demanding that Taylor
step down to avert further
bloodshed. However, in a speech to a group of African leaders,
business executives and investors meeting in Washington around
the same
time, Bush gave no indication that
he would respond to calls from people across Africa
to send American troops to stop the slaughter of innocents in Liberia.
The case of Liberia exposes Bush's lies about invading Iraq.
TIt is obvious that he is not excited about sending the troops
into Africa. If he does, he will probably limit his contribution
to a couple of thousand troops. A small fraction of the number
now deployed in Iraq.
Too
bad Liberia does not have any oil.
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