Once again, President Obama has ordered U.S. soldiers into harm’s way unnecessarily. Last week, he quietly told the U.S. Congress that he had sent 100 U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers into Uganda to help governments in central Africa fight a rebel army that’s been rampaging through the region for more than 20 years. This is the way the Vietnam War started, with U.S. special forces sent to "assist" a barely democratic government cope with a guerrilla war and a president promising they would not be going into combat. Ten years later, with more than 58,000 American lives and untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives lost, we had learned a brutal lesson – war is too easily escalated by those who do not have to fight or die.
Now, the president seems determined to repeat history, rather than learn from America’s past. According to news reports, the Pentagon has already shipped $45 million in military equipment to the area, including four drone aircraft. The same kind of drones are already being used to bomb targets in Palestine, Yemen, Libya, and who knows where else. The United States has been providing military aide and advisers, to Uganda and other nations in the region, to battle these rebels since George W. Bush was in office. Does America really need another war right now? We can’t even afford the ones we’ve got already!
To make matters worse, rather than meeting its Constitutional responsibility to serve as a check on unbridled presidential power, Congress has aided and abetted yet another foreign interventionist adventure. It was one of those unheralded bipartisan bills, quietly passed with huge support in both houses of Congress and signed by the President in May 2010. Congress not only made it U.S. policy to: "apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield … and to disarm and demobilize the remaining Lord’s Resistance Army fighters," but also directed the president to come up with a plan and strategy to "eliminate" the threat.
President Obama’s order is merely a continuation of the interventionist and imperialist foreign policy supported by presidents and Congressmen from both major political parties. Once again they have sent Americans into danger in a foreign land in the name of "humanitarian relief" and "national security." I am beginning to detect a pattern. Whether it is Libya or Uganda, or seemingly anywhere the ruling elites in America care to send brave young volunteers, it is warmly wrapped in the patriotic garb of humanitarian relief and national security.
