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sirius black
Joined: 04 Jun 2010
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 Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 5:28 am Post subject: |
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Only specuation but is this the reason we're there or is it a coincidence? I'm sure there are plenty of hotspots where its morally right to go in and they have some thing, likely natural resources that may be valuable.
If its oil Obama was there for, 100 troops is hardly going to get it. |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 3:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Adventurer wrote: |
| What if thousands of the so-called Lord's Army attacks the 100 soldiers. Now, supposedly there are already some soldiers in Uganda. If there are a few hundred American soldiers who would be backed up the Ugandan Army if need be, then they wouldn't be in danger of being wholesale slaughtered. I am not sure how comfortable I am with deploying more soldiers, but I can't stand that army. It's horrible. Why can't Uganda manage to take the leader out? |
My understanding is that they will act more as trainers and intelligence gathers for the Ugandan army than as frontline troops. If I'm correct than they wouldn't really be put in that situation. Kony's men see him as spirtual figure, and the child soliders are brainwashed. That makes getting intelligence hard, and the area, to my understanding, is easy to hide in. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 5:01 am Post subject: Re: Obama deploys combat troops to Africa |
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| comm wrote: |
| BBC wrote: |
Mr Obama did not provide any details about the deployment duration, but a US military spokesman later told the BBC that the "forces are prepared to stay as long as necessary to enable regional security forces to carry on independently".
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That sounds... vaguely familiar.
I wonder if the Democrats will ever stand up to King Obama... it's sad to see a Republican have to be the one to complain about the President's "coalition of one" putting troops in new countries without even mentioning it to Congress. Oh how I long for the heady days of the Magna Carta. |
Ummm...Have you been listening to ol' Rush L. or are you just subject to Obama Derangement Syndrome?
Had you read anything about this issue, you would know that in 2009 Congress passed the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament & Northern Uganda Recovery Act which says: "providing political, economic, military, and intelligence support for viable multilateral efforts to protect civilians from the Lord�s Resistance Army, to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the continued absence of a negotiated solution, and to disarm and demobilize the remaining Lord�s Resistance Army fighters".
Given that this is an official, legal, debated-and-passed act of Congress, how you can state as a fact that it hadn't been mentioned to Congress, well, I will never understand, unless you operate only in the universe of Rush L. and his friends.
I'm going to have to say: knee-jerk anti-government point of view with a goodly dollop of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Hmmm...maybe that should be vice versa. I report, you decide.
Having said all that, I do think we as a society need to sit down and have a serious discussion about how to deal with a world situation in which nation-states are no longer a threat to us, but non-state actors of whatever stripe can be and sometimes are harmful to our interests...and which and who and how we should deal with them needs to be debated.
It would help if people who engage in the discussion would distinguish between war and War. (Confession: I don't consider people who conflate illegal immigration with mass murder as serious people. If you have a 12-year-old's understanding of the world, that is fine. Go talk to other 12-year-olds but leave me alone.)
As I see it, the current world situation is constructed in such a way that relatively small groups of people armed to the teeth with guns (largely produced in the US) can destabilize large swaths of territory (sometimes in order to produce drugs that are highly prized in the US but illegal). Some of these groups need to be confronted with bazookas or drones. Some need to be dealt with by local state actors. Others need our engagement.
The Constitution gives the president power over the military. He can send troops into wars, but not Wars. The War Powers Act is not a sufficient law to discriminate. To deal with terrorism, we need to work out a way to clarify what is and is not an acceptable use of our military, and more importantly, our civil society. (Be it known: I do not consider random slaughtering of foreigners as a way to eliminate our 'enemies' as acceptable.)
Our new engagement in Uganda is a serious matter and deserves a serious discussion. To start out with a blatant falsehood does nothing whatsoever to further the discussion. |
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comm
Joined: 22 Jun 2010
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 9:07 am Post subject: Re: Obama deploys combat troops to Africa |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
I'm going to have to say: knee-jerk anti-government point of view with a goodly dollop of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Hmmm...maybe that should be vice versa. I report, you decide. |
On the contrary, that was a knee-jerk "Our military shouldn't be in other people's countries unless we're at war with them" point of view with a goodly dollop of "If it were my country, I'd probably be resentful of the foreign troops". You really need to stop assuming that everyone is as much of a slave to the Democrat VS Republican mentality as you are, YaTa. Some of us think outside the 2-party box (make that 1-party box when it comes to foreign interventionism).
The Congressional authorization is the kind of thing we should be able to expect to see reported in the original article. Since it wasn't reported, I was not aware that it existed.
I'll still fault Mr. Peace Prize for putting troops in another country, even if Congress says its ok. I think it's setting an international precedent that we will come to regret. |
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Ineverlie&I'malwaysri
Joined: 09 Aug 2011
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 12:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Leon wrote: |
| My understanding is that they will act more as trainers and intelligence gathers for the Ugandan army than as frontline troops. If I'm correct than they wouldn't really be put in that situation. |
Were you born yesterday? Just about EVERY war from Vietnam on has begun this way. |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 3:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Ineverlie&I'malwaysri wrote: |
| Leon wrote: |
| My understanding is that they will act more as trainers and intelligence gathers for the Ugandan army than as frontline troops. If I'm correct than they wouldn't really be put in that situation. |
Were you born yesterday? Just about EVERY war from Vietnam on has begun this way. |
This is almost too silly to respond to. We have troop on training missions every year on every continent on the globe. At least 80 such deployments have happened in the last few years. How many of thoose have turned into war? |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2011 2:29 am Post subject: Re: Obama deploys combat troops to Africa |
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| comm wrote: |
| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
I'm going to have to say: knee-jerk anti-government point of view with a goodly dollop of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Hmmm...maybe that should be vice versa. I report, you decide. |
On the contrary, that was a knee-jerk "Our military shouldn't be in other people's countries unless we're at war with them" point of view with a goodly dollop of "If it were my country, I'd probably be resentful of the foreign troops". You really need to stop assuming that everyone is as much of a slave to the Democrat VS Republican mentality as you are, YaTa. Some of us think outside the 2-party box (make that 1-party box when it comes to foreign interventionism).
The Congressional authorization is the kind of thing we should be able to expect to see reported in the original article. Since it wasn't reported, I was not aware that it existed.
I'll still fault Mr. Peace Prize for putting troops in another country, even if Congress says its ok. I think it's setting an international precedent that we will come to regret. |
The first paragraph is just defensive and not worth responding to.
"not aware that it existed"...understandable, but it should be a cue to do more reading before jumping to an opinion. Given the hyper-partisan nature of our current media, that goes double.
You're entitled to disagree with a policy, even after it is adopted. However, the overwhelming majority of both parties, many of whom have access to information the public does not have, believe offing Kony is a good thing. It could even be in our national interest to defeat a militia that is destabilizing three or four countries, a couple of them important to us.
"I think it is setting an international precedent that we will come to regret" is pretty broad, unspecific and since others have pointed out that it is done all the time is not all that much of a precedent, it makes me wonder what your objection is. A shot in the dark here--are you an isolationist? |
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