[Radix]

It is going to happen.

I think that we should seriously comsider pulling out of Germany and S. Korea. We are not accomplishing anything there except for propping up the economies of those ingrate Countries.

[roderick]

Why not troops? Heck, we're sending the Africans $15 billion to supposedly be blown on Aids and dictators.

[blackdog]

Uhmmmm, don't get me wrong here but what you say is insane. The war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and anywhere else at this moment is not about WMD's, bad dictators, human rights abuses, suicide bombers, and accept it.

We are at war because of pitiful pacifism and the deep rooted damage it has done to our country and it's security. We blow stuff up and kill people in order to make countries at play today understand we mean what we say. Doing so today will assure our peace for the future. Americans confused the gangs occupying the badlands of the globe since the early 80's. We gave them the tacit go-ahead to do what they will by saying, "please don't do that or we'll be disappointed, and then please don't do that or we might reduce your foreign aide, and if you'll listen to us we'll increase your foreign aide" ad nauseum for twenty years now! The North Korean mess is our doing for being indecisive, transmitting confusing signals, codifying awful governments in the name of cultural respect, and so on......

The cure for this indifference to American requests made in a reasonable, calm fashion, respecting a nation's sovereignty and peoples is to use diplomacy just once and do it loud and clear. If they think we are doing that same o'l carrot-stick routine, destroy them back into the stone age. It's better for us and less confusing to them.

We really do confuse the world with our silly preoccupation with compassion. Not one dictator or Marxist regime in the world gives a wit about compassion, puppies, children, or hunger. To the rest of the world, peoples are an enormous expenditure that is the first to go when expenditures exceed the cost of a new palace or a boatload of long dong II missiles. Their only value is to lay their bloated dead corpses in the street for American media, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera. Who or what killed them is irrelevant. They are off the books.

[kesg]

I doubt that we are overextended, but I cannot think of any vital US interest at stake in Liberia. Can anyone else?

[tkathy]

Let the Israelis go. Then the Liberians could blame all their problems on the jews, just like the Arabs do.

[HAL9000]

Adding Liberia to our list of responsibilities is insane.

Liberia was on our list of responsibilities a long time ago. This is not a new addition.

[Pro-Bush]

Send the troops in to Liberia!

[squidly]

Whether we should go or not, I don't know, but we're not so maxed out that we can't do it. Militarily, we've got the force available. We aren't even going to have to send a whole division, maybe not even a whole brigade.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

Sending our boys to Liberia will result in a Somailia or Beirut incident-- the American people and the military families don't want this.

BS. Didn't happen when the Marines were sent to Liberia in 1990 during Operation Sharp Edge. I'll bet those Americans on the FEBA in Monrovia would gladly welcome the presence of a MEU.

[Sparta]

BTTT

[Tailgunner Joe]

If Howard Dean, Kofi Annan, and Jaques ChIRAQ all think the U.S ahould intervene in Liberia, then why would we think it's a good idea?

Why should the U.S.A. come to the aid of The Axis of Weasels?

[Frances_Marion]

--Despite the fact that during the civil war Charles Taylor commanded one of the most vicious armies of modern times, and is widely believed to have his power for personal enrichment on a grand scale, he has an impressive roster of liberal American friends and acquaintances that includes the Reverend Jesse Jackson and former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Taylor enjoys an especially close relationship with former President jimmy Carter, a fellow-Baptist, who travel frequently to Liberia to oversee "democracy building" and human-rights programs that the Carter Center foundation operates there. Taylor's lawyer and P.R. man in Washington, D.C., is Lester Hyman, a Kennedy protégé and the former chairman of the Democratic party of Massachusetts. Hyman says that when President Clinton was in Africa this spring he telephoned Taylor from Air Force One and gave him a "pep talk that was very encouraging."

Presumably, the Presidential pep talk had to do with Taylor's efforts to keep peace in Liberia. Between December, 1989, and November, 1996, an estimated two hundred thosand people were killed in the war, and as much as eighty percent of the population was displaced. The vilence spilled over into Sierra Leone, which succumbed to its own version of the Liberian nightmare, and Guinea and the Ivory Coast were inundated with hundreds of thousands of refugees. A regional peacekeeping force, the Economic Community of West African States Ceasefire Monitoring Group, or ECOMOG, sent in troops, as did the U.N., and the United States conducted three separate Embassy evacuations. For a time, it seemed that the conflict was unresolvable.

Liberia has always been a harsh place, but for most of this century it was one of the most stable countries in Africa. It had not been colonized by Europeans, and thus avoided the violent independence struggles that began to disrupt the continent in the nineteen-fifties. It wasn't until 1980, when the government was overthrown in a military coup led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, that Liberia was inflicted with the kind of openly despotic misrule that is a feature of life in much of Africa. During the multisided civil war that started nine years later, sadistic teenage killers sporting names like General F*ck Me Quick, Babykiller, and Dead Body Bones arbitrarily executed civilians and decorated checkpoints on the roads with human heads and entrails. Often on drugs, wearing fetishes they believed made them impervious to bullets, and garbed in costumes ranging from novelty-store fright masks to wigs and women's bathrobes, these murderous adolescents raped, pillaged, and slaughtered at will. Many engaged in cannibalism, eating the hearts and genitals of their slain enemies in order to enhance their "power."---

http://www.republicofliberia.com/thedevil.htm

"“Liberia: Joshua Blahyi - formerly known as General Butt Naked and leader of the Butt Naked Battalion in Liberia's recent civil war - says that he now regrets the drunken murderous rampages he led his troops on, and says that he was a ‘slave to Satan.’ Speaking to the press from his new Soul-Winning Evangelical Ministry in Monrovia, General Butt Naked told reporters that at the age of 11 he had a telephone call from the Devil who demanded nudity on the battlefield, acts of indecency and regular human sacrifices to ensure his protection. ‘So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people—so many I lost count. But in June last year God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be, so I stopped and became a preacher.’”

Let's see, 16 different tribes, several militias and rebel groups with commanders who have names like Mosquito Spray, General Housebreaker, Rambo, and Babykiller. Liberia and Sierra Leone are very much connectd, the borders are porous. And these people are on all sides, not just under Taylor. Good luck figuring out who the "good" guys are. And all the bleeding hearts want to get us involved with this?

[ArneFufkin]

We have 1.3 million active duty military personnel. We have 260,000 or so deployed around the world.

We can cobble together a unit if the CIC orders it.