Leslie
07-07-2003, 10:08 AM
A lot going on....
July 7, 2003
U.S. Soldiers Arrive in Liberia for Humanitarian Mission
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
MONROVIA, Liberia, July 7 — American soldiers landed today at the United States Embassy compound here, the first contingent of a military assessment team that will evaluate humanitarian conditions in this war-ravaged West African country.
The 13-soldier group, the advance team of what will be a full force of 32, touched down in a military helicopter at the embassy compound.
"We are here to inspect and see what we can do," Capt. Roger Coldiron, the commander of the team, said.
The contingent, which arrived from a staging point in Freetown, Sierra Leone, was scheduled to visit several camps of internally displaced people around the city today.
Captain Coldiron said that while there was a security component of the soldiers' mission, their primary task was to make a humanitarian assessment rather than to determine whether the United States should deploy a peacekeeping force. He declined to answer questions about the security component of the trip.
President Bush has been weighing the possibility of sending a peacekeeping force to Liberia to help end years of war. He is scheduled to leave Washington later today to visit five nations in Africa.
"Any decision about a larger peacekeeping mission will be made by President Bush," John W. Blaney, the American ambassador to Liberia, said. "This mission is about humanitarian assistance and the Liberian people."
The arrival of the American assessment team came a day after President Charles Taylor of Liberia, the former guerrilla leader who was recently indicted as a war criminal, announced that he would leave his country and accept refuge in nearby Nigeria.
Mr. Taylor did not say when he would go, but he dangled his earlier promise to step aside once an international force arrived in this country to monitor a cease-fire deal between his forces and the rebels who have sought to topple him. Mr. Taylor has in recent days warned of potential bedlam if his sudden departure leaves a power vacuum.
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Taylor appeared behind a lectern before his own portrait at the V.I.P. lounge of the airport on the outskirts of this ruined capital. He let the man he called his "big brother," President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, do most of the talking.
Mr. Obasanjo, who had met with his besieged Liberian counterpart for roughly 90 minutes, declared that Mr. Taylor had accepted his offer of "a safe haven in Nigeria."
"Charles Taylor is not averse to making the sacrifice of exiting to give the country a chance at peace," Mr. Obasanjo said.
Mr. Taylor did not explain whether his offer included immunity from prosecution for war crimes. Mr. Taylor has been accused of crimes against humanity and of providing support for a war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
But Mr. Obasanjo's parting words made plain that he would brook no criticism for accepting an indicted war criminal. "Nigeria will not be harassed by any organization, or by any country for showing this humanitarian gesture," Mr. Obasanjo said.
Mr. Taylor, who led a guerrilla insurgency beginning in 1989 and was ultimately elected president in 1997, has faced mounting pressure from inside and outside the country in recent weeks. Rebels pushed their way toward Monrovia, the capital, twice in the last month. The Special Court in Sierra Leone unsealed a 17-count indictment against him last month. Then, even as peace talks got under way in nearby Ghana, President Bush called for Mr. Taylor's swift exit.
In Washington, White House officials suggested that Mr. Bush would not be satisfied until Mr. Taylor had followed through on the agreement and left the country.
"As the president has said, Mr. Taylor needs to leave," Jimmy Orr, a spokesman for the White House, said on Sunday. "He needs to leave quickly so peace can be established."
Mr. Orr said Sunday's developments had not led Mr. Bush to make a decision about sending a peacekeeping force to Liberia. He hinted that the president might not resolve the issue before leaving on his trip to Africa this evening.
"No decision has been made," Mr. Orr said. The president, he added, "will not be guided by any artificial deadline."
Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, said on Sunday on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that Congress should take a vote before substantial forces were sent to the region.
Mr. Warner said that while it was a presidential decision, "I think Congress should be a partner and bear the responsibility of this very, very important decision."
The Bush administration, itself under pressure to sort out the mess in this country founded by Americans more than 150 years ago, has said it will consider sending American troops as part of a multinational force to restore security in Liberia.
Liberia was one of the United States' most reliable allies on the continent through the cold-war years.
In a diplomatic dance, Mr. Taylor on Sunday cast himself as acting in concert with Washington, praising President Bush for showing interest in Liberia and saying once again that he would welcome the presence of American troops.
"There is a window of opportunity," he told reporters. "We accept that window of opportunity and act hastily."
Mr. Taylor let his supporters speak for him as well. War veterans lined up on the airport tarmac with carefully stenciled banners. One read, "Drop the Indictment Against Our President." Another asked, "Upon the leaving of our president, what is our future?" A young man lifted his shirt for a cameraman to reveal a jagged scar along his torso, presumably a war wound suffered in Mr. Taylor's service. Men who had lost legs sat on the hot tarmac.
With reporters from all over the world milling around at the airport, the Liberian defense minister, Daniel Chea, called on the Special Court in Sierra Leone to scrap the indictment against his boss. "I don't want a suspension of the indictment," he said. "I want a removal of the indictment. It must be removed for the sake of peace."
Mr. Taylor's spokesman, Vaanii Paasewe, warned of trouble in the streets in the event of a hasty exit for Mr. Taylor. "The government of Liberia has already appealed to the United States to reconsider the immediacy of leaving," Mr. Paasewe said. "The sort of calm you see is really because most Liberians think President Taylor is their choice."
Sunday's dramatic tableau unfolded on the hot airport tarmac. Shortly after 3 p.m., wearing white from head to toe and carrying his signature carved wooden walking cane, Mr. Taylor paraded up a red carpet to greet the arriving Mr. Obasanjo. The Nigerian president, also in white, disembarked with a smile, accepted a live chicken and a plate of kola nuts from a pair of Liberian elders, and strolled slowly alongside Mr. Taylor down the red carpet. Mr. Obasanjo grinned and waved to the well-wishers who lined the red carpet. Mr. Taylor smiled very little.
Ninety minutes later, the two men emerged from their meeting and announced their agreement before a packed hall of reporters. "Liberia needs a lifeline right now to solve its problems," Mr. Obasanjo said. Mr. Taylor said, "I'd like to praise God."
Then, the two men walked back along the red carpet side by side and embraced. Mr. Obasanjo sprinted up the steps to his plane, turned around and waved with both arms. Mr. Taylor waved a white handkerchief.
As Mr. Taylor pulled out of the airport in his convoy of armored jeeps, a crowd of well-wishers, joined by the Liberian Army band, trailed behind with a boisterous version of a popular hymn. "My God will do it," they sang. "You will never understand it. It's a miracle, God."
__________________________________________________
July 7, 2003
New Threats and Opportunities Redefine U.S. Interests in Africa
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, July 6 — President Bush will leave Monday night for a five-nation tour of Africa, turning to a continent that his administration increasingly sees as a source of both threats and opportunities and no longer one that can be left at the bottom of the foreign policy to-do list.
The official focus of the five-day trip — which was originally scheduled for January but was postponed as the president prepared for war with Iraq — is on fighting poverty and disease and promoting democracy. But it has taken on a new cast in recent weeks as Mr. Bush has assertively called for changes of government in Zimbabwe and Liberia and moved to the brink of sending American troops to Liberia as peacekeepers.
In his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president, Mr. Bush will visit Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria before returning home on Saturday. Each of those countries is an economic or political success by African standards, and Mr. Bush's presence is intended both to celebrate their progress and to encourage other African nations to continue the struggle toward free elections and free markets.
His trip comes at a time when Africa is looming larger in calculations of American interests. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States is eager to keep poor nations with shaky governments from becoming breeding grounds and safe harbors for terrorists. It sees Africa as the world's last largely untapped market. It holds out hope that Africa's substantial oil reserves could play a larger role in fueling the American economy and perhaps serving as a counterweight to the influence of OPEC.
At a time when Mr. Bush is widely viewed, at home and abroad, as focused primarily on projecting American power and defending its interests by military means, administration officials say the president is determined to show another face of his foreign policy. They said the United States should be known as much for battling AIDS, helping villages get clean drinking water, supporting education programs and encouraging the resolution of armed conflicts as for exercising its military power.
The president "understands that America is a country that really does have to be committed to values and to making life better for people around the world, that that's what the world looks to America to do," said Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. "It's not just the sword, it's also the olive branch that speaks to those intentions."
It is striking to African leaders and to many analysts in the United States that Mr. Bush, a conservative Republican who won less than 10 percent of the black vote in 2000 and has fought to hold down social welfare spending at home, has pushed this year for large spending increases to fight AIDS in Africa and to help poor nations nurture their economies.
They said they saw in Mr. Bush's engagement with Africa the hand of his two senior foreign policy advisers: Ms. Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the two highest-profile African-Americans in government. Neither Ms. Rice nor Mr. Powell has made a secret of the desire to have Washington play a more active role in a part of the world that American foreign policy long addressed only fitfully or as a pawn in the cold war and to acknowledge more fully the ties between Africa and the United States.
"Africa is part of America's history," Ms. Rice said. "Europeans and Africans came to this country together, Africans in chains. And slavery was, of course, America's birth defect. And we've been trying to deal with the consequences of it ever since."
There is still considerable skepticism, in Washington and in Africa, about the depths of Mr. Bush's commitment, diplomats and analysts said. There is concern among some Africa hands that Mr. Bush's interest will wane after he makes the point to the world that he is more than the unilateralist gunslinger he is often, fairly or unfairly, made out to be. With presidential politics increasingly coming to the fore at the White House, there is also grumbling among advocacy groups that the trip is little more than a way for Mr. Bush to flesh out his "compassionate conservative" platform for his re-election race.
Even diplomats and analysts who say Mr. Bush's interest appears genuine suggested that it is fair to question whether the trip, by a president who has never relished foreign travel, will be anything more than dutiful.
"Is this for real, or is this tourism?" asked Chester A. Crocker, who was assistant secretary of state for Africa in the Reagan administration, at a Brookings Institution symposium on Africa last week.
Administration officials say Mr. Bush's commitment is indeed substantial. They point to quiet but promising efforts made by the administration to broker a peace deal in Sudan. They mention the Pentagon's interest in forging closer military ties with friendly nations, and Mr. Bush's call last month to extend what economists say has been one of the most important elements of policy toward Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade law that allows many African products to be exported to the United States without duties and quotas.
"The president takes seriously Africa, African leaders and the potential of this continent," Ms. Rice said.
There are clearly risks for Mr. Bush, especially as he confronts more directly the problems of countries like Zimbabwe, whose economy is collapsing under the increasingly autocratic rule of President Robert Mugabe. If he sends troops into Liberia as peacekeepers, he will be putting American lives on the line for a nation that has been the site of brutal fighting and the source of considerable instability in the region for years. He would also be reviving the specter of Somalia, where 18 American soldiers died in a failed attempt at peacekeeping in 1993.
Somewhat to their own amazement, many advocacy groups that labored for decades to persuade the United States and other wealthy countries to do more for Africa say Mr. Bush appears intent on really making a difference.
"This trip needn't be just about tourism because there are the beginnings of an historic change in policy toward Africa, permitted by a Republican Congress, we hope, and led by, extraordinarily enough, a Republican president," said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA, a nonprofit group that calls for more assistance for Africa. "That's put us in a fascinating situation."
Mr. Drummond said the real test would be whether the president could win from Congress an agreement to finance fully the two programs that are the centerpieces of his Africa policy. One is a five-year, $15 billion plan to fight AIDS in 14 countries, 12 of them in Africa. The other, called the Millennium Challenge Account, is a pledge to channel $10 billion over the next three years to poor countries that can show that they are making nuts-and-bolts progress toward democracy and capitalism.
Budgets for both programs, however, are likely to be cut in the coming week below the levels sought by the White House. Even as Mr. Bush is putting a spotlight on the programs in Africa this week, a House appropriations subcommittee is planning to trim them back, both because of a budget squeeze and because Republicans on the subcommittee said the administration had not gotten either program fully up and running.
Asked about the $3 billion for next year sought by legislation creating the AIDS program, Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, the chairman of the subcommittee, said, "We're not really prepared in the first year to spend that vast amount on bilateral programs."
Mr. Kolbe said that he was a "big believer" in the Millennium Challenge Account program, but that the administration did not have people and systems in place yet to administer it. "We're not going to be able to do everything in that area, but we're going to do a lot," he said.
Ms. Rice said the president would take on his own party over the issue if necessary.
"The message to Congress is that the president requested funding at the levels he thought necessary to get the job done," she said. "And we are all of us actively engaging with the Congress to try and get full funding."
July 7, 2003
U.S. Soldiers Arrive in Liberia for Humanitarian Mission
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
MONROVIA, Liberia, July 7 — American soldiers landed today at the United States Embassy compound here, the first contingent of a military assessment team that will evaluate humanitarian conditions in this war-ravaged West African country.
The 13-soldier group, the advance team of what will be a full force of 32, touched down in a military helicopter at the embassy compound.
"We are here to inspect and see what we can do," Capt. Roger Coldiron, the commander of the team, said.
The contingent, which arrived from a staging point in Freetown, Sierra Leone, was scheduled to visit several camps of internally displaced people around the city today.
Captain Coldiron said that while there was a security component of the soldiers' mission, their primary task was to make a humanitarian assessment rather than to determine whether the United States should deploy a peacekeeping force. He declined to answer questions about the security component of the trip.
President Bush has been weighing the possibility of sending a peacekeeping force to Liberia to help end years of war. He is scheduled to leave Washington later today to visit five nations in Africa.
"Any decision about a larger peacekeeping mission will be made by President Bush," John W. Blaney, the American ambassador to Liberia, said. "This mission is about humanitarian assistance and the Liberian people."
The arrival of the American assessment team came a day after President Charles Taylor of Liberia, the former guerrilla leader who was recently indicted as a war criminal, announced that he would leave his country and accept refuge in nearby Nigeria.
Mr. Taylor did not say when he would go, but he dangled his earlier promise to step aside once an international force arrived in this country to monitor a cease-fire deal between his forces and the rebels who have sought to topple him. Mr. Taylor has in recent days warned of potential bedlam if his sudden departure leaves a power vacuum.
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Taylor appeared behind a lectern before his own portrait at the V.I.P. lounge of the airport on the outskirts of this ruined capital. He let the man he called his "big brother," President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, do most of the talking.
Mr. Obasanjo, who had met with his besieged Liberian counterpart for roughly 90 minutes, declared that Mr. Taylor had accepted his offer of "a safe haven in Nigeria."
"Charles Taylor is not averse to making the sacrifice of exiting to give the country a chance at peace," Mr. Obasanjo said.
Mr. Taylor did not explain whether his offer included immunity from prosecution for war crimes. Mr. Taylor has been accused of crimes against humanity and of providing support for a war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
But Mr. Obasanjo's parting words made plain that he would brook no criticism for accepting an indicted war criminal. "Nigeria will not be harassed by any organization, or by any country for showing this humanitarian gesture," Mr. Obasanjo said.
Mr. Taylor, who led a guerrilla insurgency beginning in 1989 and was ultimately elected president in 1997, has faced mounting pressure from inside and outside the country in recent weeks. Rebels pushed their way toward Monrovia, the capital, twice in the last month. The Special Court in Sierra Leone unsealed a 17-count indictment against him last month. Then, even as peace talks got under way in nearby Ghana, President Bush called for Mr. Taylor's swift exit.
In Washington, White House officials suggested that Mr. Bush would not be satisfied until Mr. Taylor had followed through on the agreement and left the country.
"As the president has said, Mr. Taylor needs to leave," Jimmy Orr, a spokesman for the White House, said on Sunday. "He needs to leave quickly so peace can be established."
Mr. Orr said Sunday's developments had not led Mr. Bush to make a decision about sending a peacekeeping force to Liberia. He hinted that the president might not resolve the issue before leaving on his trip to Africa this evening.
"No decision has been made," Mr. Orr said. The president, he added, "will not be guided by any artificial deadline."
Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, said on Sunday on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that Congress should take a vote before substantial forces were sent to the region.
Mr. Warner said that while it was a presidential decision, "I think Congress should be a partner and bear the responsibility of this very, very important decision."
The Bush administration, itself under pressure to sort out the mess in this country founded by Americans more than 150 years ago, has said it will consider sending American troops as part of a multinational force to restore security in Liberia.
Liberia was one of the United States' most reliable allies on the continent through the cold-war years.
In a diplomatic dance, Mr. Taylor on Sunday cast himself as acting in concert with Washington, praising President Bush for showing interest in Liberia and saying once again that he would welcome the presence of American troops.
"There is a window of opportunity," he told reporters. "We accept that window of opportunity and act hastily."
Mr. Taylor let his supporters speak for him as well. War veterans lined up on the airport tarmac with carefully stenciled banners. One read, "Drop the Indictment Against Our President." Another asked, "Upon the leaving of our president, what is our future?" A young man lifted his shirt for a cameraman to reveal a jagged scar along his torso, presumably a war wound suffered in Mr. Taylor's service. Men who had lost legs sat on the hot tarmac.
With reporters from all over the world milling around at the airport, the Liberian defense minister, Daniel Chea, called on the Special Court in Sierra Leone to scrap the indictment against his boss. "I don't want a suspension of the indictment," he said. "I want a removal of the indictment. It must be removed for the sake of peace."
Mr. Taylor's spokesman, Vaanii Paasewe, warned of trouble in the streets in the event of a hasty exit for Mr. Taylor. "The government of Liberia has already appealed to the United States to reconsider the immediacy of leaving," Mr. Paasewe said. "The sort of calm you see is really because most Liberians think President Taylor is their choice."
Sunday's dramatic tableau unfolded on the hot airport tarmac. Shortly after 3 p.m., wearing white from head to toe and carrying his signature carved wooden walking cane, Mr. Taylor paraded up a red carpet to greet the arriving Mr. Obasanjo. The Nigerian president, also in white, disembarked with a smile, accepted a live chicken and a plate of kola nuts from a pair of Liberian elders, and strolled slowly alongside Mr. Taylor down the red carpet. Mr. Obasanjo grinned and waved to the well-wishers who lined the red carpet. Mr. Taylor smiled very little.
Ninety minutes later, the two men emerged from their meeting and announced their agreement before a packed hall of reporters. "Liberia needs a lifeline right now to solve its problems," Mr. Obasanjo said. Mr. Taylor said, "I'd like to praise God."
Then, the two men walked back along the red carpet side by side and embraced. Mr. Obasanjo sprinted up the steps to his plane, turned around and waved with both arms. Mr. Taylor waved a white handkerchief.
As Mr. Taylor pulled out of the airport in his convoy of armored jeeps, a crowd of well-wishers, joined by the Liberian Army band, trailed behind with a boisterous version of a popular hymn. "My God will do it," they sang. "You will never understand it. It's a miracle, God."
__________________________________________________
July 7, 2003
New Threats and Opportunities Redefine U.S. Interests in Africa
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, July 6 — President Bush will leave Monday night for a five-nation tour of Africa, turning to a continent that his administration increasingly sees as a source of both threats and opportunities and no longer one that can be left at the bottom of the foreign policy to-do list.
The official focus of the five-day trip — which was originally scheduled for January but was postponed as the president prepared for war with Iraq — is on fighting poverty and disease and promoting democracy. But it has taken on a new cast in recent weeks as Mr. Bush has assertively called for changes of government in Zimbabwe and Liberia and moved to the brink of sending American troops to Liberia as peacekeepers.
In his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president, Mr. Bush will visit Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria before returning home on Saturday. Each of those countries is an economic or political success by African standards, and Mr. Bush's presence is intended both to celebrate their progress and to encourage other African nations to continue the struggle toward free elections and free markets.
His trip comes at a time when Africa is looming larger in calculations of American interests. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States is eager to keep poor nations with shaky governments from becoming breeding grounds and safe harbors for terrorists. It sees Africa as the world's last largely untapped market. It holds out hope that Africa's substantial oil reserves could play a larger role in fueling the American economy and perhaps serving as a counterweight to the influence of OPEC.
At a time when Mr. Bush is widely viewed, at home and abroad, as focused primarily on projecting American power and defending its interests by military means, administration officials say the president is determined to show another face of his foreign policy. They said the United States should be known as much for battling AIDS, helping villages get clean drinking water, supporting education programs and encouraging the resolution of armed conflicts as for exercising its military power.
The president "understands that America is a country that really does have to be committed to values and to making life better for people around the world, that that's what the world looks to America to do," said Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. "It's not just the sword, it's also the olive branch that speaks to those intentions."
It is striking to African leaders and to many analysts in the United States that Mr. Bush, a conservative Republican who won less than 10 percent of the black vote in 2000 and has fought to hold down social welfare spending at home, has pushed this year for large spending increases to fight AIDS in Africa and to help poor nations nurture their economies.
They said they saw in Mr. Bush's engagement with Africa the hand of his two senior foreign policy advisers: Ms. Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the two highest-profile African-Americans in government. Neither Ms. Rice nor Mr. Powell has made a secret of the desire to have Washington play a more active role in a part of the world that American foreign policy long addressed only fitfully or as a pawn in the cold war and to acknowledge more fully the ties between Africa and the United States.
"Africa is part of America's history," Ms. Rice said. "Europeans and Africans came to this country together, Africans in chains. And slavery was, of course, America's birth defect. And we've been trying to deal with the consequences of it ever since."
There is still considerable skepticism, in Washington and in Africa, about the depths of Mr. Bush's commitment, diplomats and analysts said. There is concern among some Africa hands that Mr. Bush's interest will wane after he makes the point to the world that he is more than the unilateralist gunslinger he is often, fairly or unfairly, made out to be. With presidential politics increasingly coming to the fore at the White House, there is also grumbling among advocacy groups that the trip is little more than a way for Mr. Bush to flesh out his "compassionate conservative" platform for his re-election race.
Even diplomats and analysts who say Mr. Bush's interest appears genuine suggested that it is fair to question whether the trip, by a president who has never relished foreign travel, will be anything more than dutiful.
"Is this for real, or is this tourism?" asked Chester A. Crocker, who was assistant secretary of state for Africa in the Reagan administration, at a Brookings Institution symposium on Africa last week.
Administration officials say Mr. Bush's commitment is indeed substantial. They point to quiet but promising efforts made by the administration to broker a peace deal in Sudan. They mention the Pentagon's interest in forging closer military ties with friendly nations, and Mr. Bush's call last month to extend what economists say has been one of the most important elements of policy toward Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade law that allows many African products to be exported to the United States without duties and quotas.
"The president takes seriously Africa, African leaders and the potential of this continent," Ms. Rice said.
There are clearly risks for Mr. Bush, especially as he confronts more directly the problems of countries like Zimbabwe, whose economy is collapsing under the increasingly autocratic rule of President Robert Mugabe. If he sends troops into Liberia as peacekeepers, he will be putting American lives on the line for a nation that has been the site of brutal fighting and the source of considerable instability in the region for years. He would also be reviving the specter of Somalia, where 18 American soldiers died in a failed attempt at peacekeeping in 1993.
Somewhat to their own amazement, many advocacy groups that labored for decades to persuade the United States and other wealthy countries to do more for Africa say Mr. Bush appears intent on really making a difference.
"This trip needn't be just about tourism because there are the beginnings of an historic change in policy toward Africa, permitted by a Republican Congress, we hope, and led by, extraordinarily enough, a Republican president," said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA, a nonprofit group that calls for more assistance for Africa. "That's put us in a fascinating situation."
Mr. Drummond said the real test would be whether the president could win from Congress an agreement to finance fully the two programs that are the centerpieces of his Africa policy. One is a five-year, $15 billion plan to fight AIDS in 14 countries, 12 of them in Africa. The other, called the Millennium Challenge Account, is a pledge to channel $10 billion over the next three years to poor countries that can show that they are making nuts-and-bolts progress toward democracy and capitalism.
Budgets for both programs, however, are likely to be cut in the coming week below the levels sought by the White House. Even as Mr. Bush is putting a spotlight on the programs in Africa this week, a House appropriations subcommittee is planning to trim them back, both because of a budget squeeze and because Republicans on the subcommittee said the administration had not gotten either program fully up and running.
Asked about the $3 billion for next year sought by legislation creating the AIDS program, Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, the chairman of the subcommittee, said, "We're not really prepared in the first year to spend that vast amount on bilateral programs."
Mr. Kolbe said that he was a "big believer" in the Millennium Challenge Account program, but that the administration did not have people and systems in place yet to administer it. "We're not going to be able to do everything in that area, but we're going to do a lot," he said.
Ms. Rice said the president would take on his own party over the issue if necessary.
"The message to Congress is that the president requested funding at the levels he thought necessary to get the job done," she said. "And we are all of us actively engaging with the Congress to try and get full funding."