Posted on 10/15/2011 7:10:47 AM PDT by AfricanChristian
“Obama announced Friday he is dispatching about 100 U.S. troops — mostly special operations forces — to central Africa to advise in the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army”
Special Ops guys as advisors? The only thing they will be advising is for everyone to get out of the way while they double tap 300-400 guerillas. And call in the drone strikes.
I happened to see that BBC program this morning. Disgusting
beyond belief!
The Lords Resistance Army is really bad news and has been for year (before 1987). You don’t need to depend on new MSM stories about them go back a few years and read about them. They kidnap young kids start training them then make them go back to their original village and kill all their relatives. If they don’t kill their relatives they are killed themselves. The girls they kidnap are turned into sex slaves for the leadership. They are one of the prime creators of children soldiers in the world. They have kidnapped something like 25,000-40,000 children over the years and additional thousands of adults..
I wouldn’t call these guys Christian The wikipedia article on them is a pretty good basic history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Resistance_Army
The question of why now and why there about the actions of the Obama administration are valid, but your reason isn’t valid IMO. One source I’ve read says it’s payback to the Ugandan government for providing troops to aid us in Somalia fighting Islamist there. I don’t trust this administration as far as I can toss a 10 story office building and think they would be perfectly willing to toss Israel under the bus (won’t right now because of the election and their fundraising efforts) and go after Christian groups to prove to Muslims that they are even handed, but this isn’t a case of that.
“No, they’re thugs, rapists, kidnappers, murderers and pretty much anything else you can think of. Just do a little background searching on their history. There is no reason to support these guys just because they claim to be Christians. They are the furthest theing from that.”
Who said anything about wanting to support them?
Some of them are still relevant. But the media, for whatever reason, of late has given them short shrift.
“Any one want to take my bet that Barry’s next ‘job’ will be a dictator in Africa????????? Think about it!”
The Emporer Jones
To be fair, what I have said on this thread could be interpreted as to say I think they should be supported.
I don't.
I also don't think we have a compelling national interest to be there at all.
I do think Obama simply can't resist defending muslims against anything that even claims to be Christian.
YMMV
What would you do if you happened upon Son of Sam and Hannibal Lecter going at it hammer and tong?
Exactly. What f-stop to use?
Notice “Most Brutal”—Most horrible atrocities” Etc ETC
Left loves it when troops are used for humanitarian wars but hate it when used for national security reasons
“Exactly. What f-stop to use?
Ha. I was thinking, what caliber to use.
I dont know any good reason to have our troops there. It boggles the mind.
Then,while watching “Current” tv network, it dawned to me a reason why.
Uganda is a Christian country. they recently tried to passed very strict anti-homosexuality laws. the Clergry is pushing for it and most of the nation stand for it as well. Preachers from the USA have gone down to assist and advise the Ugandian Christians.
Maybe Obama is bowing to the Gay lobby and is using the LRA as a excuse for this deployment.
Maybe I am a crackpot, but with this regime, anything is possible.
I just find it interesting that these groups seem to favor any war as long it’s being started by one of tbeir own.
It’s simple, can’t you grasp it?
You (the US), outsourced your part of your national security policy (Somalia) to the Ugandans. Now they want to outsource part of theirs (LRA) to you.
Do you think the Ugandans are stupid? Do you think that you can simply send foreign soldiers to do your bidding and not be asked to do something risky in return?
These compromises are going to be more common in future (irrespective of which party is in power) - as America becomes more involved in Africa. For example, expect the Nigerians to insist in return for assistance in whacking Al Qaeda in Mauritania that you send a few hundred marines to help in whacking the Niger Delta militants. Expect Kagame in Rwanda to request for US help in whacking Hutu militants or one group or the other in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(Once you start messing around in Congo, know for certain that you’re in trouble).
I don’t know how or when this will end, but it might end in tears. No nation is going to commit its troops in furtherance of America’s strategic objectives without requiring something significant in return.
This takes us to the fundamental flaw in American foreign policy - a failure to take into account the motivations and interests of its partners. If I asked you to name America’s partners in the War on Terror in Africa, you probably could. If I asked to list their strategic interests, even the most experienced State Department officials probably couldn’t.
Also note that the US has a well earned reputation for abandoning its allies. If you start throwing out your allies requests, then you’d merely be cementing this reputation and they’ll look for someone else to do the job (likely candidate: the Chinese).
At some point in the future, the US will be forced to weigh the true costs of engagement with regimes all over the World with the benefits. In future, you might decide that strategic neglect is a wise course of action.
CIA - The World Factbook
This is mixing in African tribal warfare. There have been horrible atrocities committed on both sides. I just hope our troops fare better than the American-trained Guatemalan Special Ops soldiers sent in 2006.
Bingo on your first point about having a bad history of abandoning allies, and then double-bingo on your second point of counting the cost of worldwide engagement.
You've obviously spent a lot of time studying world politics and history. If you're not familiar with Sen. Arthur Vandenberg from Michigan, spend some time reading his conversion from the classical conservative position of isolationism to the conviction that the United States had no choice but to become the leader of the free world in a post-World War II environment. He believed the military situation had fundamentally changed due to the rise of international Communism with access to nuclear weapons which could pose a direct risk to the continental United States. He also saw the collapse of the traditional colonial powers and the very real risk that Communism would take over much of the post-colonial African and Asian nations, and (in a 1940s/early 1950s context) possibly even take over significant parts of Western Europe through the ballot box rather than through bullets. As bad as European-style socialism is, there were active and successful Communist parties in numerous Western European countries, and without the Marshall Plan, they could quite possibly have neutralized several Western European countries that eventually remained American allies.
A huge part of the American problem is that America simply does not have much experience in international affairs and has a very strong contingent within the political class which would like to ignore most of the world outside our borders if we could get away with doing so. That's very different from the British, who at least understood how to run an empire from a millennium of dealing with French, Scottish, Welsh and Irish affairs and three centuries of colonial experience.
Unlike the British, virtually all of our American expansion until the early 1900s was in the continental United States and represented an extension of American culture into the Midwest and West and Southwest with the aid of massive European immigration into our Eastern and Midwestern industrial cities. We as conservatives have not yet had seven decades of agreement that the United States has any business with “entanglement” in foreign affairs at all, and even that was based on an anti-Communist agenda which cannot easily be transferred to an anti-Islamofascist agenda. (Think of the roles of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example.... President Reagan may have thought that Islamic fundamentalists were turbaned Arabic-speaking versions of anti-Communist Southern Baptists and anti-abortion Roman Catholics, but we found out the hard way that the mujahadeen had a very different anti-Communist agenda than ours).
Statistically, Uganda is overwhelmingly Christian. Plus-75% worth. So much for statistics.
Uganda has a reputation for being virulently homophobic. A bill (Kill the Gays Bill)was introduced in their legislature in 2009 that would strengthen existing laws against gays to include the death penalty. Sure hope none of our troopies are actively out of the closet. A romantic interlude on Lake Victoria just wouldn’t be prudent.
in one article the victim of the LRA is described as a speaker of Luo...
Isn’t the Luo Obama’s father’s tribe?
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