Skip to main content

Obama to deploy heavy combat brigade to Africa: no end to the wars he'll fight

This is just what we need, he said sarcastically.

Having created AfricaCom, then mission creeped in Somalia, in Nigeria, and now Uganda, we are now on the road to constant US military intervention in Africa.

But there are other nondemocratic regimes there that might need propping up:

Current wars in Africa (not counting the Libyan
intervention). Roughly 25% of the continent is
at war--and the US wants to be involved!!??

The strategy is characterized by military aid to and reliance on brutish, undemocratic regimes, proxy militias, and targeted special operations as opposed to full-scale invasion and occupation. All of this is done without the consent of Congress or the American people.
The Obama administration has deployed Marines and assisted a spate of African tyrannies engaged in warfare. Murky justifications of al Qaeda-like enemies color the stated mission, but these expansions of empire into Africa are a prime example of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
Through the Pentagon’s Africa Command, the U.S. is now training and equipping militaries in countries including Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia in the name of preventing “terrorists from establishing sanctuaries.” 
Of course, there is this to think about, the concept that Ron Paul calls "blowback":
The strategy appears irreconcilable with recent history, however, given the US-sponsored invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in 2006 gave rise to the militant group al-Shabaab – now ironically justifying current interventions. 

Unfortunately, within the current two-party system there is no real alternative:  both President Obama and Governor Romney are dedicated military interventionists.  Whether Dr. Paul will have some influence on that part of the Republican platform remains to be seen.

Libertarian presidential Gary Johnson is not an interventionist, but. . . [you could tell that "but" was coming, right?] has supported humanitarian interventions to prevent genocide like the hunt for Joseph Kony.  I tend to see his position as realists, though the possibility of mission creep worries me.  On the other hand, if he actually cuts the Defense budget by 43%, then there is a lot less excess capacity sitting around to intervene with.

Nonetheless, Governor Johnson should be clear that if he wants the votes of Ron Paul supporters that anti-interventionist call will have to be both loud and consistent.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?