Bush to Taylor: Go, or else

SOME thought North Korea or Iran or maybe Syria might be next on President George Bush’s list for regime change, after Iraq. But it now seems likely that the strife-torn former American colony of Liberia, whose 14-year civil war has inflamed conflicts across West Africa, will be the next to undergo American-led military intervention to bring about a change of government. On Monday July 7th, as Mr Bush was setting out on his first official visit to Africa, a 20-strong American military team flew in by helicopter to the heavily fortified American embassy in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, to assess the security situation. On Tuesday, arriving in Senegal, Mr Bush said he had still not decided whether to send a larger contingent, of up to 2,000 troops, to restore order—and, if necessary, to remove Liberia's president, Charles Taylor. As he was speaking, troops loyal to Mr Taylor prevented the American military observers from visiting a refugee camp outside Monrovia.

Last week, Mr Bush told Mr Taylor he must step down immediately. Mr Taylor said over the weekend that he would accept a proposal to go into exile in Nigeria but that he wanted to wait for America's troops to arrive before resigning. He has offered to resign before, only to continue clinging to power. Unlike in the case of Iraq, American armed intervention in Liberia has the full backing of both the United Nations and France. The French, and several West African states, have offered to contribute to a peacekeeping force for Liberia. West African leaders on Tuesday renewed their calls on Mr Bush to intervene.

Mr Taylor emerged in the 1980s from the training camps of his friend—and America’s foe—the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, with the aim of spreading rebellion around West Africa. He certainly achieved it. After launching a revolt in his own country and establishing himself as its chief rebel warlord, in 1997 Mr Taylor won an election for president, and started sponsoring uprisings in neighbouring countries. He backed Foday Sankoh, a Sierra Leonean rebel (also Libyan-trained) whose troops hacked off the limbs of thousands of civilians, and with whom Mr Taylor traded guns for diamonds. In 1999, the two men backed a rebellion in Guinea. Both uprisings were abruptly stopped when Britain sent troops into Sierra Leone in 2000. Liberians have fought on both sides in the uprising in Côte d’Ivoire. Last year, France sent troops there to keep the peace.

Mr Taylor’s moment of reckoning has been coming for some time now: though they deny it, his neighbours have been backing Liberian rebel groups, which have taken more than half the country in recent weeks and are besieging Monrovia. In June, as he was attending peace talks in Ghana, a UN tribunal investigating atrocities in Sierra Leone’s civil war issued an arrest warrant for Mr Taylor on war-crimes charges. This forced him to flee back to Monrovia, whereupon the rebels launched attacks to try to dislodge him. Amid the worst bloodshed since the civil war’s early days in 1990—which is continuing despite a supposed ceasefire—Liberians have been demonstrating outside the American embassy in Monrovia, between dodging bullets and grenades, to plead with Mr Bush to intervene.

America has been reluctant to intervene militarily in Africa since its humiliating withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, after 18 American troops were killed. But the success of the British and French interventions in Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire shows that a fairly small number of well-armed, professional soldiers can quickly overcome ill-disciplined rebels. Liberia’s various groups of drugged-up, drunken fighters ought, on paper at least, to be no match for even a modest American-led force. Liberia’s troubles threaten to re-ignite the conflicts in neighbouring countries, which is why France, Britain and the UN are pressing America to intervene.

Though American troops may soon arrive in force in Liberia, Mr Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, will not be visiting the country on their tour of Africa this week. Nor will they visit Zimbabwe, whose state-controlled media have attacked Mr Powell for putting pressure on the country's dictatorial president, Robert Mugabe, to resign, by promising that massive American aid would be sent to the impoverished country as soon as he is gone. Zimbabwe’s main opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is widely believed to have been the true winner of last year’s elections, though Mr Mugabe declared himself re-elected. The MDC is challenging the official election result in the courts. Mr Mugabe has responded by putting the MDC’s leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, on trial for treason. Mr Bush will discuss Zimbabwe’s deep political and economic crisis with other African leaders, and MDC officials will lobby him to step up the pressure on Mr Mugabe to quit. On Tuesday, police dispersed protesters in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, who had called on Mr Bush to force Mr Mugabe out of office.

Mr Bush and Mr Powell will be bombarded with demands for attention as they tour Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria—from governments and oppositions, from charities and pressure groups, from businesses and from the UN. Besides pressing Mr Bush to intervene militarily in Liberia, Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary-general, is urging him to contribute troops to a French-led peacekeeping force in the even bloodier conflict in Congo, in which up to 4.7m people have been killed in the past five years. In Sudan’s religious conflict, between a Muslim government and Christian and animist separatists, more than 2m have died since the early 1980s, though progress towards peace is now being made, through American and African diplomatic efforts. Even in Uganda, one of the continent’s relatively peaceful countries, rebels are terrorising villages and kidnapping children to serve as soldiers.

Africa has so many grave problems that not even the world’s superpower has the resources to solve all of them. At least Mr Bush, contrary to initial expectations, is showing resolve to try to tackle some: before setting out for his Africa trip, he announced extra food aid to help avert mass starvation in Ethiopia; and a $100m anti-terrorism programme to improve security at East Africa’s ports and airports. Most importantly, Mr Bush will use his trip to promote his $15 billion plan to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. Congress has yet to approve the spending on the project but Mr Bush says he hopes his African trip will help raise awareness in America about the scale of the continent’s AIDS crisis.

As Mr Bush said in an interview with African journalists ahead of his trip, “It’s in our national interests that Africa become a prosperous place, it’s in our interest that people will continue to fight terror together…It’s in our interest that when we find suffering, we deal with it.” Given that the president has his hands full trying to rebuild Iraq, brokering the peace talks in the Middle East and facing down North Korea and Iran over their nuclear ambitions, it is rather surprising that he has found the time to tackle some of Africa’s problems. Surprising but welcome.