Protesters piled mutilated bodies outside the U.S. Embassy gates in Liberia on Monday, pleading for the U.S. to intervene in the brutal civil war. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says the bloodshed is such in that nation, which was founded by freed American slaves, that it’s uncertain what the next move should be.Mortar shells exploded in and around the U.S. Embassy compound Monday, though it’s unclear which side in the civil war was doing the shelling. Some 91 Liberians were killed, 360 injured, in the battle. Grassley has said the U.S. has “a special obligation to Liberia as opposed to a lot of other African countries because they’re a country that we helped create in 1822,” but he urges extreme cautionbefore more U.S. troops are sent in. Grassley says he supports sending in troops to stabilize the country but he expresses one concern — that the mission be brief. Grassley says “We need to make sure that we don’t have overcommitment of our troops” when they are needed urgently elsewhere in Afghanistan, Iraq and to maintain national security as part of the war on terrorism.
