Why is Pres. Obama sending troops to Africa? Read this, please, before forming any quick conclusions.

There’s a lot of buzz about this - as “one more war.” I’m not sure about that. We have been criticizing our government for years for only helping out countries where we have OIL interests. This very small deployment might have what many of us in the peace community have been crying out for all along - a strictly humanitarian effort. I might be wrong about that - but let’s “wait and see.” The Lord’s Resistance Army is evil incarnate, though I am not sure we have any more business there than anywhere else. Anyway, please read this before coming to any conclusions: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/why-is-obama-sending-troops-against-the-lords-resistance-army/246748/

 Excerpt:

 ”If this if the humanitarian mission that the Obama administration says it is, and if it achieves the humanitarian goals it is setting out to achieve, it would be harder to find a more suitable target than the Lord’s Resistance Army. Since World War Two, the U.S. has often presented its military, overwhelmingly the most powerful on Earth, as a force for good and global stability. In execution, it has been a force for furthering U.S., not global, interests — just like every other national military. Some U.S. military actions, such as the intervention in Libya or the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, were sold as efforts for global peace, and that was probably part of the motivation, but they were also designed to promote American interests: to remove threats and replace them with friendly faces.

“It’s difficult to find a U.S. interest at stake in the Lord’s Resistance Army’s campaign of violence. The group could go on killing and enslaving for decades — as they well might — and the American way of life would continue chugging along. It’s possible that there’s some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can’t obviously see. Maybe, for example, Uganda is offering the U.S. more help with peacekeeping and counterterrorism in East Africa, where the U.S. does have concrete interests, in exchange for the troops. But it certainly looks like a primarily or purely humanitarian military mission, if a very small one. The Obama administration is hoping that these 100 troops will succeed where past U.S. assistance against the LRA — intelligence, satellite images, fuel, and millions of dollars — has failed. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. But this seems to suggest a small but important shift in how, where, and why the U.S. uses applies military force.”