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INSIGHT
INSIGHT
Aired July 3, 2003 - 17:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): President Bush is going to Africa. Are U.S. peacekeepers?
GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. PRESIDENT: We're talking to a heck of a lot of countries right now to determine what the nature of a peacekeeping force might look like. I'm the kind of person that likes to know all the facts before I make a decision.
MANN: The United Nations wants Liberia's leader to face trial. The United States wants him to step down. Will U.S. troops force him?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Hello and welcome.
You don't have to imagine how it happened. It was all on TV. President Bush was cleaning up the last details of the war with Iraq when pressure mounted from around the world for a different kind of military campaign, tied not to obvious strategic interests but to simple humanitarian concern.
An African nation had descended into armed chaos and aid agencies couldn't help it alone.
The president in question was George Herbert Walker Bush, the current head of state's father. The nation at the time was Somalia. The result was a deployment that led to U.S. bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and ever since a U.S. consensus that the mission was a public and painful disaster.
So now with U.S. troops still completing more recent assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans are suddenly learning with considerable surprise that the president is considering new plans. Forget Iran or North Korea.
On our program today, will there be regime change in Liberia?
We begin with CNN's Dana Bash at the White House.
DANA BASH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Jonathan.
Well, from the president on down they are making it very clear that Mr. Bush has not yet decided whether or not to send U.S. troops for peacekeeping reasons into Liberia.
However, in an interview that will air over the weekend with CNN, President Bush did say that he, for the third day in a row, said that he wants President Charles Taylor of Liberia to leave the country immediately.
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BUSH: We're talking to a heck of a lot of countries right now to determine what the nature of a peacekeeping force might look like. I'm the kind of person that likes to know all the facts before I make a decision.
We've got special ties to Liberia. There's historical ties to the United States. That's why we are involved in this issue. And I'm going to look at all the options to determine how best to bring peace and stability.
But one thing has to happen, and that's Mr. Taylor needs to leave. And I've been outspoken on that. Mr. Colin Powell has been outspoken on that. And I think most of the people involved with this issue understand that that's important, that he do leave.
TUMI MAKGABO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You said that he needs to leave. Does that mean that if those negotiations fail and President Charles Taylor refuses to go, that you will send troops to remove him from office, and not only to.
BUSH: First of all, I refuse to accept the negative. I understand that's your job, to try to put that forth.
I believe he'll listen. And until he doesn't listen, then we can come back and talk about the issue.
In other words, I hope he does listen, and I'm convinced he will listen.
MAKGABO: And should he not?
BUSH: No, I'm convinced -- you misunderstand. I'm convinced he will listen and make the right decision, if he cares about his country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: There you have President Bush, not taking the idea that President Taylor wouldn't leave the country as an issue for an answer. He was making it very clear he doesn't believe that will happen, and that is because that is part of the public comments from President Bush that goes along with intense diplomatic efforts to try to make that hope a reality.
They are working very hard through Secretary of State Colin Powell and other leaders in the United States, through European leaders and leaders in the region, to try to convince Charles Taylor to leave, and it is because, as the president's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice made clear, they believe he is a menace not only to his country, but also to the region.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CONDOLEEZZA RICE, U.S. NATL. SECURITY ADVISOR: Until Charles Taylor is out of politics, there isn't going to be any stabilization of the situation in Liberia. It doesn't matter what kind of force you send in. It doesn't matter what you try to do. His leaving is a condition for the party's coming to a stable peace and beginning of political process.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: There you heard Condoleezza Rice, not really allowing herself to be nailed down on the question of whether or not it is actually a condition for Charles Taylor to leave the country in order for the president to have the final sign off in sending U.S. troops into the region.
You know, a complicating factor here is of course that Charles Taylor has been indicted for war crimes, so this is all part of the negotiations. What exactly will happen to Taylor if he does agree to leave the region? Rice would not say whether or not they would agree to give him immunity or agree to give him safe harbor of any sort.
But the president and his aides are hoping to come to a decision on whether or not they will send troops to the region before he leaves for his trip to Africa on Monday. He will hit five countries on that continent. He is not going to go to Liberia, but he does understand and his aides understand that this issue will be overshadowing the trip when he talks to leaders there, especially since he is trying to emphasize the fact that the U.S. wants democracy and stability on the continent of Africa -- Jonathan.
MANN: Dana, how much does this trip play into the pressure to make this decision? Would George Bush really be thinking about sending peacekeepers to Liberia if he weren't about to go to Africa?
BASH: That is a very good question. Now, what they say here at the White House publicly is that of course the U.S. does have close ties to that country because it was settled more than 150 years ago by former U.S. slaves, and they also say that despite the fact that President Bush, as candidate Bush, made it clear he was very reluctant to send in U.S. troops for peacekeeping or any kind of nation building, they say that in a post-9- 11 world, it's a different story.
They are concerned about the fact that some terrorist groups, maybe even al Qaeda, are using countries in Africa, in western Africa, as a home base. So they say that this is -- publicly, they're saying this is something that the president does have on his agenda, but privately, they are certainly making it clear to us that his trip on Monday is proving somewhat of a deadline for the president to make his decision.
MANN: Dana Bash, at the White House, thanks very much.
A quick programming note before we go further. You can see the entirety of our colleague Tumi Makgabo's interview with President Bush this weekend on CNN's "INSIDE AFRICA." That's Saturday at 16:30 GMT.
But in essence, what we're hearing, once again, is a very broad signal from the United States. At the same time, there are some other signals being heard in Liberia itself.
Jeff Koinange joins us now from the Liberian capital, Monrovia, with the latest there -- Jeff.
JEFF KOINAGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jonathan, we heard a few moments ago from a senior source inside the executive mansion here in Monrovia that President Charles Taylor has been given 48 hours to leave town.
I asked my source who the ultimatum came from. They said, "You do the math." I asked when did this ultimatum come through, they said sometime Thursday afternoon.
So, again, Jonathan, President Taylor has been given 48 hours to leave town.
As you well know, there was a Nigerian contingent, special envoy, in town on Wednesday, to talk to President Taylor about possible asylum in Nigeria. Apparently President Taylor turned down that offer, but the special envoy did go back to Abuja with the Liberian foreign minister. They are due back in Monrovia sometime Friday. Maybe this time President Taylor will revisit the issue, because it seems like the clock is ticking - - Jonathan.
MANN: Jeff, ordinarily I wouldn't ask you to speculate, but it seems like your source is asking you to speculate.
Let's do the math together. Who would be in a position to demand the president's departure? Would it be a signal coming from the United States? Would it be coming from West African countries, including Nigeria? Would it be coming from the United Nations?
KOINAGE: Let's narrow it down, Jonathan.
West African leaders wouldn't -- even if they issued that kind of threat, President Taylor wouldn't take it that seriously.
I think the most serious threat would have to come from the United States, and the last few days -- the rhetoric coming out of Washington the last few days, I think this is it, Jonathan. The 48 hour deadline seems to be coming directly from the United States.
MANN: Intriguingly, Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor whom we heard from just briefly, a short time ago, spoke at greater length about Liberia on this day, and if I'm recalling it correctly, pointedly refused to describe what kind of communications that Washington has now with the president.
Do you know of any dialogue between Charles Taylor or his people and the U.S. diplomatic mission there or U.S. officials in the United States?
KOINAGE: Not officially, Jonathan, but I know there's a lot of diplomatic behind the scene's talks going on.
There's been a lot of communication. I've been trying to call my sources all day long, and their phones have been constantly jammed. That means they're definitely talking to Washington. They're talking to outside sources. They're talking to possible countries who will take in President Taylor because, again, time is running out.
So obviously there is some major discussion going on, but most of it, Jonathan, is behind the scenes.
MANN: OK. Once again, I'm just so intrigued by this. I think a lot of people are, by this deadline.
Charles Taylor is already besieged in his capital. It is surrounded by rebels. If anyone wanted to threaten him and force him to resign within the next 48 hours, how could they make his situation worse? What could they do to Charles Taylor that would make anyone inside his entourage take a threat seriously?
KOINAGE: Oh, anything -- and this is the biggest fear, Jonathan. The rebels could see this as their signal.
They have threatened to overrun Monrovia the last two weeks, and they came up to the gates of the city. They could see this as their signal now to move in, and we understand there has been fighting the last couple of days. Apparently there was fighting, maybe about 35 - 40 kilometers from here.
So this could be the signal for them to move in, and again, these are desperate times. They could call for desperate situation happening, if President Taylor doesn't make a move or he doesn't say something, then anything can happen -- Jonathan.
MANN: Jeff Koinange, in Monrovia. Take care of yourself, stay out of harm's way.
We take a break. When we come back, a look at how the world's most powerful military would take on an unpredictable assignment.
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WILLIAM COHEN, FMR. U.S. SECY. OF DEFENSE: I would be very reluctant to send troops to Liberia right now. We have troops, peacekeeping troops, in Bosnia, Kosovo, in Afghanistan. We're now in Iraq.
I think that we are in danger of certainly overstressing those troops.
MANN (voice-over): U.S. officials are not all that keen to play the role of the world's policemen.
Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen says that during the Clinton administration, he was forced to reject calls for the U.S. to lead a peacekeeping force in East Timor, for example.
Cohen and others like him say the U.S. military was stretched too thin then, and it is too think now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Welcome back.
The U.S. has troops in hotspots around the globe. Nearly 150,000 in Iraq alone, 9,000 in Afghanistan. Another 37,000 in South Korea, 43,000 in Japan and smaller forces in the Balkans and parts of Africa.
Are more men and women now on their way to Liberia?
For the latest, we go to our senior Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre.
Jamie, the White House says they haven't made up their minds. At the Pentagon, has any kind of order been given?
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Not yet. Everybody is standing by. Lots of planning going on, both for possible movement of U.S. Marines, a special embassy security reinforcement team that's standing by in Spain, that could be very quickly moved into place, even without a formal deployment order.
And also planning for the possibility that U.S. probably Army troops, Army soldiers, would be involved in an international peacekeeping force in Liberia as well. Some indication that the units may have gotten some preliminary warning that they could be on tap for that mission.
MANN: Now, we tend to throw around the word peacekeeper kind of generically whenever troops are moved into a spot where they're not actually going to take territory or defeat an enemy. We call them peacekeepers, but potentially the range of things that U.S. forces could be up to in a place like Liberia seems like it could be kind of wide if we don't really know exactly what the plans are.
MCINTYRE: Well, remember the days when the Bush administration shied away from the term nation-building. Now they seem to be embracing it more and more often.
Peacekeeping can be involved in anything from just sort of general keeping of order to helping to rebuild the institutions of a country, such as going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it's a wide range of activities, and it can be either fairly benign or pretty dangerous, depending on the environment that the peacekeepers or sometimes peace-imposers or peace- enforcers are put into.
So that's one of the reasons why, of course, the Pentagon is often reluctant to get involved in these kinds of missions, and as you pointed out, the U.S. military is already stretched pretty thin.
Now, the numbers you gave are a little bit misleading, because when it comes to peacekeeping, it primarily falls to the U.S. Army, and right now about 2/3 of the U.S. Army is already forward deployed in some manner of speaking, and the troops that aren't deployed are pretty much needed to relieve the ones that are deployed, so they're pretty tapped out at the moment.
MANN: Jamie McIntyre, at the Pentagon, thanks very much.
For a closer look at what could be a difficult mission for U.S. forces, we're joined now by Colonel Patrick Lang, a former U.S. Defense Department official.
Thanks so much for being with us.
It's not clear what the president would have in mind in Liberia, but given the range of possibilities, does it look like easy, enviable duty?
PATRICK LANG, FMR. U.S. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: No, not at all.
You know, the -- it's very easy to understand why you might want to intervene in Liberia, to evacuate foreign nationals or even to stabilize the situation in the Monrovia area.
But when you start talking about solving the problems of the area by removing one man from office, then you get into the position of saying that, if you remove him, then you're responsible for the solution, and as McIntyre just said, the Army is stretched mighty thin these days, and to add another mission to what they've already got on their plate is a really big undertaking.
This country we're talking about has 18 or 19 different discreet ethnic groups in it. They've been fighting each other for a long time, and this is a big job.
MANN: Now, a big job -- the numbers that have been spoken about are relatively small -- 500 or 1,000 U.S. troops. Can 1,000 men and women make a difference in a place like that?
LANG: Well, it always starts with these small numbers, you know. That's the traditional path to glory in these things.
You start out with a handful of peacekeepers or advisors, somebody like that, and you get on the ground, you find out the responsibility is now yours, and there's nothing you can do except to keep adding forces and resources to this until you solve it.
I haven't seen anybody talk realistically here about an exit strategy for how you would get out of Liberia. So I think maybe somebody ought to think about that before we get in.
MANN: What about adding to that 500 or 1,000-strong force, the troops and assistance of other countries. Would that make it easier? Would it make it terribly slow and difficult to operate?
LANG: I think probably that's the only thing you could realistically do. If you try to do this with American forces alone, we just don't have it in terms of the existing force structure.
You certainly can't take anything out of Iraq and all these other places you mentioned. But if other countries in Africa or other Europeans wanted to participate, that would certainly be a welcome thing, as long as there was a unified command. You can't afford to have people going off in different directions.
But if you get involved in taking responsibility for solving Liberia's societal woes, you'd better expect to be there for a while.
MANN: What about the arrest warrant that's out against Charles Taylor? There's a U.N. court that has indicted him for war crimes. If the U.S. goes there in force, if it takes other nations in to a coordinated military effort to try to keep the peace, will it be legally or morally bound to try to arrest Charles Taylor, not just see him out of office?
LANG: I think there's no doubt about that. We more or less have committed ourselves both to removing him from office, if we intervene in strength, and then the existence of this international arrest warrant would force us to turn him over, and as I said before, that would put us in charge, and make us responsible for the situation.
And I guess we're going down that path, but it's going to be a long and difficult path and we'd better get some friends on the ground with us.
MANN: Now, we just heard from Jamie McIntyre about this. He was kind of polite about it. But when people inside the U.S. military hear the president musing about this kind of mission, are they eager to go or are they angry at the very possibility?
LANG: Well, as he said, it's the Army that's really involved here.
You know, the Marines have a special role as a naval amphibious landing force that doesn't involve them in this kind of thing very much. The Navy has their ships off shore. And the Air Force flies their airplanes, but it's the Army that has all these units that do civil affairs and special forces things with local tribesmen, and it's the Army that's stretched the most thinly.
There are only 480,000 men and women in today's army, and when you count up those deployments, plus the ones in Germany that I didn't hear anything about in your run-up to this segment, that's an awfully big piece of the force.
And these are professionals who have families and about whom you have to worry about retention for their next enlistment, things like that. You know, things are getting mighty tight.
MANN: Patrick Lang, former defense official, thanks so much for talking with us.
LANG: Sure.
MANN: We take another break, but when we come back, what if the president does give the order? What if the United States is even lucky in Liberia? What would a happy ending be like there?
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BUSH: It must be in the national interest -- it must be in our vital interest whether we ever send troops. The mission must be clear. The soldiers must understand why we're going. The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished and the exit strategy needs to be well-defined.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MANN: Just to be clear, that was the younger George Bush when he was still running and hadn't yet been elected president. Pre-White House, pre- Afghanistan, pre-Iraq and pre-Liberia.
Welcome back.
The benchmarks he set though then were clear: a vital national interest, a clear mission, a strong force and a clear strategy how the soldiers would get out.
How does that look now in Liberia? Some people in that nation have an obvious interest in U.S. forces coming to their aid, but do they all, and what does it look like form Washington?
Joining us now to talk about that is Reed Kramer, CEO and founder of AllAfrica.com.
Thanks so much for being with us.
We can imagine in a sense what this would be like, but let me ask you -- imagine success for us. What's the best-case scenario? How quickly could the U.S. do this and what would they leave behind if they succeeded and left?
REED KRAMER, ALLAFRICA.COM: Well, there are a lot of elements that didn't exist in Somalia and other places the United States has gone in.
There's a regional peace initiative well underway that in fact the regional grouping, ECOWAS, has been involved in Liberia since the early 90's and has done quite a lot of stabilization.
There's a peace process, peace talks, going on in Ghana right now, involving all the political groups in Liberia.
So it's not anything that the U.S. is doing unilaterally that's being asked here. And basically, the West Africans are asking Washington for logistical support, for enough troops to help get the West African peacekeeping force on the ground and bolster it in the beginning.
MANN: So following that logic, the United States goes in, it offers this support. They would leave behind a country that was still politically divided between the people who support Charles Taylor, the people who support LURD, the rebel force, the people who support MODEL, the other rebel force, and they'd leave behind political negotiations underway.
Would it end up as a happy ending or in three months, in five months, would here be war once again?
KRAMER: There's always the danger of returning to war in a situation like this, but it would be a little bit different that you described, because there is an interim government in the making right now, in these Ghana talks that would actually run the country, and all -- there's a buy- in for that interim government from all the groups: the armed groups, the political groups, even the current government.
So this will make the process -- give it greater chance of success. It doesn't insure success by any means. People in Liberia.
MANN: I'm going to interrupt you -- forgive me -- while you're talking, we're running some videotape from Monrovia, and we're looking at children carrying guns, an indication of everything that could go wrong. How wrong could this go?
KRAMER: Well, the children carrying arms are a compelling reason why a lot of people think there should be something done by the world community, but in other situations in Africa, where child soldiers have had a lead role, it's been relatively easy to get that -- the children disarmed and to start the rehabilitation process for them.
That doesn't mean there won't be crackpots out there, there won't be people who don't hold on to their weapons, but disarmament can happen if all the groups work together, all the countries involved get behind it and the United Nations plays its role.
MANN: Can the United States go into this and be neutral? The president has called for Charles Taylor to step down. Presumably the United States is going to have to address the U.N. demands for Charles Taylor to be arrested.
Can the U.N. (sic) simply walk in and be an honest broker between the two sides? It seems to have chosen sides.
KRAMER: The -- again, the United States is not in the lead role here, and is not being asked to take the lead role. The West Africans are definitely driving this process, and they're trying to maneuver this difficult situation between the indictment and the negotiations for Taylor's departure.
But they were working on Taylor's departure before the indictment and before the White House started looking seriously at getting involved. So they're the ones that have to try to make it happen, and we'll have to see if they can succeed.
MANN: On that note -- Reed Kramer, of AllAfrica.com, thanks so much for talking with us.
KRAMER: You're welcome.
MANN: That's INSIGHT for this day. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.
END
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