The U.S. squandered its opportunity to send peacekeepers to Liberia

Intervention now could require a larger force prepared to deploy in a combat situation, according to military and regional experts. It may even be too late to oversee a peaceful transition from President Charles Taylor's rule to a new, democratic government, they said.

"It's never too late, but if we go in now it will be entering a combat situation, which is the worst possible point of entry," said Pauline Baker, an Africa expert and president of the Fund for Peace in Washington.
The administration has "squandered the monthlong opportunity it had during which the cease-fire had held," said Susan Rice, a former Clinton administration national security staffer now at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-area think tank. "The U.S. refusal to say what it was going to do led predictably to the situation deteriorating. Neither the rebels nor the government could be expected to pause indefinitely."

Divisions within the administration about whether to intervene militarily in Liberia when U.S. forces are already stretched thin in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots in effect froze policy as Washington waited for Taylor to leave, according to both U.S. officials and analysts familiar with the internal debate. President Bush set Taylor's stepping down as a precondition for American participation in a peacekeeping force.