As more and more American service people and Iraqi civilians are gunned down and blown to pieces in the “liberated” Iraq, where the war is supposedly “over” according to Bush, death is being delivered on an even more accelerated level in Liberia, thus underlining yet another foreign policy debacle of the Bush administration.

Had Bush (currently on yet another vacation in Crawford, Texas after a trip to raise more millions for his re-election) sent in troops when the “ineffective” U.N.’s Secretary General Kofi Annan pleaded with him to do, peace could have been achieved far more bloodlessly. But here we see exemplified the fact that liberation and humanitarian assistance are far from important in the Bush agenda, despite the fact that Bush & Co. now claim that was their goal all along in Iraq. Liberia, after all, has no oil, so as far as Bush is concerned, they can go rot.

Seeing how his inaction has led to such carnage, Bush, in his now well-established fashion, has found someone else to blame: ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), which he claims he has been “waiting on,” though there is no real reason why that should have stopped the humanitarian action from being enacted weeks ago. Alternately, he is blaming it on Liberian dictator Charles Taylor (who has business dealings with Bush ally and evangelist Pat Robertson in the form of gold mine exploitation in that country), claiming that U.S. troops moving in depends upon Taylor first leaving the country, another rather idiotic condition–Taylor, after all, is the prime reason the peacekeepers are needed in the first place.

It’s a sorry mess, compounded by a growing morass of conservative extremist agenda pouring into the promised African AIDS relief; not a good month on the continent.