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Seasoned Vet
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U.S. Military Team Arrives in Liberia
July 7, 12:11 PM (ET)
By GLENN McKENZIE
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) quote:
A team of U.S. military experts arrived in Liberia on Monday to assess whether to deploy troops as part of a peacekeeping force that would restore order to a nation torn by civil war.
A blue and white wide-bodied helicopter brought the experts, wearing armor and some carrying assault weapons, to the U.S. Embassy compound in Liberia - a west African nation founded in the 19th century by freed American slaves.
Liberian President Charles Taylor, beset by rebels and indicted by a U.N.-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone, said Sunday he would step down and take exile in Nigeria, but urged the United States to send peacekeepers to ensure an orderly transition.
Taylor gave no timeframe for when he would quit and did not say the deployment of a peacekeeping force was a condition for his departure.
Navy Capt. Roger Coldiron, leader of the 32-person team, told reporters that his mission is to "assess the security environment" in the country as well as study the humanitarian needs of its 3 million people - suffering greatly from more than a decade of civil strife.
"There is a security component," Coldiron said. "We want to be sure that whomever comes in is safe on the ground."
A decision on whether U.S. soldiers will join an intervention force shouldn't be expected Monday, U.S. Ambassador John W. Blaney told reporters. Coldiron said the mission would take as long as needed before making any recommendation.
U.S. President George W. Bush heads to Africa Monday for visits to five nations - including regional power Nigeria. Bush has asked Taylor to step down.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday that Taylor's promise to leave "remains encouraging" but that he must act on his words "so that stability can be achieved."
(AP) The first arrivals of a U.S. military security assessment team arrive by helicopter on the helipad...
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U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had telephoned Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Saturday, but details of their conversation were not released. Obasanjo has offered Taylor asylum.
As Bush awaited the team's report, American lawmakers and officials voiced deep reservations about committing U.S. troops to the West African country.
Both the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday they want Bush to get congressional approval before he sends any U.S. troops to Liberia.
At the same time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said military leaders would prefer that West African armies take the lead in any effort to end the Liberian conflict and police the peace.
"We're always prepared, in case of U.S. citizens and our folks that are on official duty in the embassy and so forth, to do a noncombatant evacuation of those individuals," the chairman, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers said in a television interview Sunday.
(AP) The first arrivals of a U.S. military security assessment team arrive by helicopter, not pictured,...
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"Beyond that, I think we'd really like to see the states in the region help with this particular problem," he told Fox News.
The United Nations and European leaders have sought U.S. troops to enforce an oft-violated cease-fire between forces loyal to Taylor and rebels fighting for three years to oust him. West African nations have offered 3,000 troops and have suggested that the United States contribute another 2,000.
After meeting Nigeria's President Obasanjo Sunday, Taylor said, "He has extended an invitation and we have accepted an invitation."
Obasanjo, whose nation led an intervention force in Liberia's 1989-96 civil war, has called for international support for a Liberian peacekeeping mission. There are fears violence could erupt if there is no smooth transition of power.
Taylor emerged from the last conflict as the strongest warlord and was elected president the following year.
He has been accused of supporting Sierra Leone's brutal Revolutionary United Front rebels, whose trademark atrocity was amputating the arms and facial features of their civilian victims with machetes.
Nigeria, like many countries, has no law allowing Taylor to be extradited to Sierra Leone to stand trial for war crimes trial, U.N. officials say.
Bush is scheduled to land Tuesday in Senegal, one largely peaceful West African nation that hasn't seen the ill effects of years of warring by Taylor - a former warlord long accused of sowing strife in the region by aiding rebel groups.
Nearly one third of Liberia's 3 million people have been forced from their homes by fighting since rebels took up arms against Taylor in 1999.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030707/D7S4PNKO0.html
"I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. . . . . .
They've experienced pain and bought jewelry."
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Hard Charger
 
Group: Registered User
Last Login: 12/21/2008 7:24 PM
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| Sounds like a job for the Marines.
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Ei Temporis Vita Semper Resumo Sese
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Uh... let's see. There are how many MEU's just floating around without a primary mission?
"The degenerative and loony should never be denigrated but, rather, thanked. In their absence, the rest of you would be obliged to fill congressional seats... positions naturally unsavory to the sane and honorable." Thorax
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Hard Charger
Group: Registered User
Last Login: 12/21/2008 7:24 PM
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| Let me be more specific, I expect to see Marines in Liberia with its ARG.
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Hard Charger
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Last Login: 3/27/2008 8:23 PM
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It must be because the the Liberians were all way's the immaginary force we all trained against
during FTX's & R'Tap's ! Well wasn't it always the Liberians that started all the mock wars & hot spot's we trained in???? And if it wasn't them it was those damn soviet motorized Rifle regiments again ; thatt were stirring things up'!
WEIRPPRAIRIEBOUNCER
"All The Way!"
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Hard Charger
Group: Registered User
Last Login: 12/21/2008 7:24 PM
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| The Marines have a tradition of making friends and influencing people in alot of strange and exotic places. Going to Liberia for them should be no different than a night on the town in Subic.
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Jarhead
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: 12/15/2007 1:24 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by tomahawk6
Sounds like a job for the Marines.
Most surely does!!
 "Your Marines having been under my command for nearly six months, I feel that I can give you a discriminating report as to their excellent standing with their brothers of the Army and their general good conduct."-General John J. Pershing, U.S. Army
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Seasoned Vet
Group: Past PNET Supporter
Last Login: 6/10/2006 7:52 AM
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2003-07-09
U.S. taking new role in Africa
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
American President George W. Bush's five-country tour of Africa is full of surprises. This is so because history is not a linear progression and is full of irony.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush was dismissive of Africa and America's involvement in that continent's accumulating woes.
But then came 9/11 and Bush, uninterested in the world beyond American shores, quickly learned how to be a foreign policy president.
In this space immediately following 9/11, I wrote: "We live in a global village, ever more deeply woven into an emerging global civilization where our ignorance about the other, irrespective of how near or distant, can be fatal."
Africa's misfortunes have been in part an assumption that the ills of Africans could remain confined to their continent.
During the Cold War years, Africa became an arena of East-West rivalry. There was little interest then to address the deep ethno-tribal divisions that lay below the political boundaries drawn by European powers in their rush to divide the spoils of Africa for themselves.
And when white-minority regimes clung to power in the ebb tide of colonialism, there was a mistaken view that once these remnants of a wicked past got interred, Africans would work out their problems.
They did not.
Africa's problem was too much history, too many divisions, too many expectations and too little responsible leadership to navigate the turbulent currents of a continent awash with poverty, diseases and an explosion of ethno-tribal conflicts that followed once, paradoxically, the brutally stabilizing effect of Cold War rivalry ended.
America's relationship with Africa is invariably conditioned by the guilt of the past. At some point both continents and peoples must put the history of slavery behind them, and meet each other with the respect of mutual interests.
But just when America was preparing itself to engage with Africa, the 1993 Somali episode made Washington turn its back on the continent.
The Somalia mission ended when American forces, as part of a UN effort to end clan warfare, were attacked and 18 (Rangers) killed. Osama bin Laden boastfully took credit for his organization's role in those killings.
The unintended consequence of the Somalia experience was America's refusal to risk involvement as Africa's troubles mounted.
Africa is roughly divided between Arab and Muslim in the north, and black, Christian and local folk traditions in the sub-Saharan south. In countries such as Sudan and Nigeria, these divisions collide.
The ethno-tribal divisions, magnified by corrupt leaders, have created killing fields in Rwanda, Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan.
These raging conflicts have impeded the greater urgency of meeting the basic needs of Africans.
Africa's famines, presently devastating six countries in the south -- Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland -- and recurrent in Ethiopia, have less to do with nature than political corruption and mismanagement. The same sad cause and effect of politics and greed have worsened the HIV/AIDS crisis in countries such as South Africa.
The August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by terrorists linked to bin Laden's network came as a warning to Americans that Africa could only be ignored at a frightening cost.
Then 9/11 confirmed, if such confirmation was sadly necessary, that for the U.S. to successfully fight international terro | | | |