Marching to Liberia: President Bush's plan to send U.S. troops on a UN mission into Liberia's sinkhole is worse than foolish.

George W. Bush's scorn for the United Nations, and particularly his scorn for President Bill Clinton's kowtowing to the UN, won him a lot of votes in 2000. More recently, President Bush's public contempt for UN opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq scored eardrum-breaking levels on the public applause meters. Americans are sick of the UN, especially when it comes to so-called peacekeeping operations committing U.S. troops to open-ended missions in the far-flung corners of the world, under crippling conditions imposed by the UN.

Many in the Bush cheering section must now be scratching their heads over the president's Clintonian UN policies. Such as his massive $15 billion commitment to the UN's HIV/AIDS program in Africa, his push to rejoin UNESCO, and his welcoming of the UN into the occupation of Iraq. Now comes his impending military foray into Liberia to establish yet another UN peacekeeping operation. Yes, Liberia appears to be the next big blue helmet gig slated for the world stage. What happened to the "Bush Doctrine" that U.S. troops would only be used in international situations where a vital national interest is at stake? What vital U.S. interest is at stake in Liberia?

Clinton wanted to go there. But after Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, the American public was fed up with the ever-expanding Clinton agenda of global interventionism. Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake cited Liberia as one of the top candidates for global crisis management. In an April 1996 speech delivered at Tufts University, Lake attacked so-called isolationists and urged U.S. involvement worldwide in "managing crises as they arise." These crises, said Lake, would include "an outbreak of violence in Liberia, trying to promote a Middle East cease-fire, or responding to a global 911 like the Kobe [Japan] earthquake."

Lake, one of the most alarming security risks in the Clinton administration, is a longtime radical activist with deep ties to Washington's premier Marxist brain trust, the institute for Policy Studies. Lake is also a significant player at another more respectable and influential revolutionary brain trust: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Lake's call for global crisis management was standard CFR boilerplate. Likewise his appeal for U.S./UN intervention in Liberia. According to the CFR choir in academe, the media, and government, the U.S. is morally obligated to send military forces to West Africa to help establish a UN trusteeship for the region's failed nation states. That has been the ongoing CFR chorus line for the past decade.

Liberia is only one of the countries over which the UN plans to assume control--with U.S. aid, of course. British troops are already deeply involved in aiding this UN objective next door in Sierra Leone, while French forces are serving as UN pawns in the neighboring chaos of the Congo. U.S. participation in this regional UN peacekeeping/nation-building scheme has been the missing element.

But there was no way that kind of UN mission could fly under Clinton sponsorship. Nor would it have gained the needed congressional and public support under a Gore presidency. Al Gore is too mushy, too wishy-washy, and too globalist-minded. It would take a Republican president generally perceived as conservative, anti-UN, America-First, unilateralist, and pro-military to pull off this CFR-concocted gambit to empower the UN with vast new powers in Africa.

George Bush fills the CFR bill on this count. Bush's Liberian misadventure has been crafted by CFR "Wise Men" (as the council's members are fond of calling themselves), both inside and outside of the administration. Beneath the guise of humanitarian concern cited as justification For the Liberia campaign is the continuing drive for a New World Order (NWO).

Deja Vu

The current Bush initiative for Liberia is a continuation of the disastrous UN-Africa NWO policy started by President Bush's father over a decade ago. It was the earlier Bush administration, recall, coasting on the popularity gained from its Desert Storm victory against Iraq, that launched the catastrophic mission to Somalia. In a speech before a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990, President Bush (the elder) outlined his five objectives for sending U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf: "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective--a new world order--can emerge.... We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." Creating a new world order under the United Nations, not protecting the United States of America, was the president's goal.

Bush I (a former CFR director) was--and remains--a globalist, a dyed-in-the-wool one-worlder. And his administration was packed with fellow CFR one-worlders who were also enamored of the vision of the UN founders. Those founders included Soviet dictator/mass murderer Joseph Stalin, Soviet agent Alger Hiss, megalomaniac President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a bevy of America-hating New Deal Communists and socialists. They envisioned a future of "world law" administered by a UN transformed into an all-powerful world government. Somalia was to be one of the first in a new series of UN takeovers.

Then as now, a bipartisan CFR choir composed of the usual suspects trotted out to provide cover for the NWO humanitarian plan for Somalia. One of the seminal pleas for intervention (still quoted today, a decade later, for the UN humanitarian mandate) was provided by Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner (CFR) in the Winter 1992 issue of Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "From Haiti in the Western Hemisphere to the remnants of Yugoslavia," wrote Helman and Ratner, "from Somalia, Sudan and Liberia in Africa to Cambodia in Southeast Asia, a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation state, utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community." The solution, they averred, was to put the UN in charge as trustee of these failed states.

You see, the CFR-Carnegie one-worlders specifically targeted Liberia over a decade ago for UN trusteeship status. In a December 6, 1992 New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Reluctant Heroes," Elaine Sciolino (CFR) quoted the Helman-Ratner article and echoed their UN-as-trustee thesis. Sciolino also reported that then-CIA Director Robert Gates (CFR) and then-National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft (CFR) had advised President Bush (the elder) that UN trusteeship may be the only viable option for Somalia.

On the same day, Michael Clough (CFR) was writing in the Los Angeles Times that "it is a very real possibility that the United Nations will eventually establish some form of trusteeship over Somalia that will have to be kept in place for an extended period of time." What would that entail? "In effect," said Clough, "a trusteeship would require the United Nations--and the United States--to take responsibility for the country. New police and security forces would have to be formed, basic services re-established, infrastructure rebuilt and jobs created. This would be directed by a cadre of international bureaucrats--de facto modern-day colonial, albeit humanitarian, governors." And, noted Clough, "a 'successful' humanitarian trusteeship in Somalia would inevitably create demands for similar trusteeships in other parts of Africa."

Developing the same theme, Paul A. Gigot (CFR) commended Bush (the elder) in the Wall Street Journal on December 4, 1992, claiming that the Somali expedition "is a welcome if surprising change of heart. It'd be even more consequential if it meant a renewal of what, in more optimistic days, Mr. Bush once called the New World Order."

But the downing of two American Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu and the subsequent slaughter of 18 U.S. Rangers soured American support for the UN's so-called humanitarianism in Africa. Now, a decade later the same program is being ramped up again. On July 14th, after two weeks of vague statements about considering a Liberian mission, President Bush invited UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the White House to announce his commitment to the enterprise.

"I'm so honored that Kofi Annan has come back to the Oval Office," President Bush told reporters following Mr. Annan's visit. He said he told Annan that Liberian dictator Charles Taylor "must leave" Liberia and that the U.S. is committed to helping the coalition forces of ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) and the UN pacify Liberia.

"I told the Secretary General that we want to help, that there must be a U.N. presence, quickly, into Liberia," said Bush. "He and I discussed how fast it would take to blue helmet whatever forces arrived, other than our own, of course. We would not be blue helmeted. We would be there to facilitate and then to--and then to leave."

"No long term commitments?" asked a reporter. "Correct," the president responded. "I think everybody understands, any commitment we had would be limited in size and limited in tenure. Our job would be to help facilitate an ECOWAS presence which would then be converted into a U.N. peacekeeping mission." However, the president has not delineated that force size and tenure. The figures floated unofficially suggest only 1,000-1,500 U.S. troops will be sent and only for a few months. If you believe that you probably also believe that out troops came home from Bosnia after just a few months, as promised. (A reminder: They're still over there, nearly eight years later.)

Annan's projected timetable for U.S. involvement was even less reassuring: "Eventually, U.N. blue helmets will be set up to stabilize the situation, along the lines that we've done in Sierra Leone, and once the situation is calmer and stabilized, U.S. would leave and the U.N. peacekeepers would carry on the situation." Eventually? After Liberia is stabilized? Liberia, remember, is only a part of that roiling imbroglio of coups, counter-coups, revolutions, and genocide that constitutes West Africa. Stabilizing Liberia also means stabilizing Sierra Leone, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and other ECOWAS regimes where cross-border ethnic and tribal warfare have been going on for years.

On July 16th President Bush sent a letter to Speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert informing him that he was extending the national declaration of emergency with respect to Liberia that he had put in place in 2001.

"Some 1,500 Revolutionary United Front (RUF) soldiers have crossed into Liberia in the past year, where they remain under arms and continue to pose a threat to the Government of Sierra Leone," President Bush's letter states. Moreover, the letter says, the government of Liberia "continues to support these RUF elements and give them sanctuary."

"These actions and policies," the letter declares, "are hostile to U.S. interests and pose a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States. For these reasons, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared with respect to Sierra Leone and Liberia...."

Even GOP loyalists may have difficulty swallowing the claim that 1,500 ragtag RUF soldiers in Liberia constitute an "unusual and extraordinary" threat to the U.S. worthy of declaring a national emergency. By any reasonable standard, several dozen other regimes worldwide would certainly top Liberia's threat level to America. If Liberia, why not also Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, the Philippines, Venezuela, China, Chechnya, etc., etc.? Don't worry, plans are underway for U.S./UN military intervention in some of those venues as well.

Pitiful Propaganda

Beginning July 19th, less than one week after the Bush-Annan White House meeting, Liberia became front-page headlines in newspapers and the lead story on the networks. It's the Somalia media barrage all over again: photos and footage of atrocities, emaciated children, streams of pitiful refugees, armed thugs wreaking chaos, desperate pleas for U.S. help. All calculated to win moral support for U.S. intervention anti to undercut critics of the president's new mission. This current propaganda salvo is building on a carefully choreographed and accelerated assault aimed at America's soft underbelly: our sense of compassion and justice.

Days and weeks before the Bush-Annan photo-op, the CFR opinion cartel was setting the stage for a completely open-ended Liberian operation. On June 30th the CFR's Bernard Gwertzman conducted an online interview with former Ambassador Princeton Lyman (CFR), who proclaimed the need for a much larger U.S. force of around 11,000, with a long-term commitment and aggressive, nation-building objectives.

On July 11th, Joseph Siegle, the Douglas Dillon Fellow at the CFR, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal with an op-ed entitled "Liberate Liberia," encapsulating much of the CFR propaganda line for the new venture. "Sending U.S. forces at the head of an international peacekeeping mission is the right thing to do and the president should authorize deployment," says Siegle. "America's long ties to Liberia make it the obvious choice for this crisis," claims Siegle, reminding us that Liberia was founded in 1847 by former slaves repatriated to Africa from the United States.

"Of course, Defense officials are already complaining that they're stretched too thin--with deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq," says Jonathan D. Tepperman, a senior editor at the CFR journal Foreign Affairs in a Newsweek op-ed for July 21st. "This is bunk," claims Tepperman. "The American military can deploy almost a million active-duty and reserve troops. That leaves plenty left over for a robust Liberian force." The dials are being set for launching a massive new UN occupation phase in Africa--made possible with American blood and treasure, courtesy of the Bush wing of the CFR.