Do you agree with President Obama's decision to send troops in Uganda?

No. It’s like backing into yet another war. We need to stop all the wars, bring home ALL of our troops from overseas, use the money saved to pay down the national debt, and use the troops to man our borders.

Provided they stick to intel and are there solely at Museveni’s invitation I’ve got little issue with it. Though I’d appreciate it if Uganda offered to pick up some of the tab for the deployment.

I actually mirror John McCains stance on it.

In principle, I approve of the idea… helping eliminate evil people who are plaguing an area and killing many innocent people.

But you obviously have to be careful, the best laid plans with the best of intentions.. can often lead to bad things.

For now I’ll hold my judgment though.

The last time the US publicly sent advisers to a war zone was Kennedy in May of 1961. It has to be done very carefully.

It’s 100 guys who won’t actually be fighting directly. And the LRA sounds (1) genuinely evil (2) not popularly supported locally.

So I don’t have a problem with it. Assuming America is going to exert military force around the world, I feel like this is among the more justified uses of it in our history.

No.

Apparently Rush Limbaugh is saying that the Lord’s Resistance Army—the cult group that routinely abducts children to rape or enlist as child soldiers in their maurading campaigns—is the cat’s pajamas, and is criticizing Obama for sending US soldiers to fight a Christian group that is resisting Muslims in Africa.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/limbaugh-defends-lords-resistance-army/?hp&gwh=341450F537018D125C32A4DBFB61D542

Always classy that Limbaugh.

It’s only a matter if time before it becomes justified to send troops to Wall Street. And Im not talking about for the banksters.

Its amazing to me that the only thing that the left and right can agree on and does so quite often, is legalized murder(war) and eroding our civil liberties(Patriot Act, FISA, Military Commissions Act,etc.)

@SquirrelEStuff, what are you talking about?

Is there some cult on Wall Street or in OWS who has literally murdered hundreds of people in the area, maimed and raped many more, and is kidnapping children to use as soldiers?

Sometimes things that happen are not actually part of some overarching ideological pattern that you perceive.

Actually, let me ask you this:

What should be done about the Lord’s Resistance Army?

If you’re an isolationist and you don’t think US should involve itself in other continents’ problems, fine. What should Uganda do? To what degree should we help Uganda non-militarily?

@Qingu

My point is that we are at the point where the President points at someone and says they are doing evil and the next thing you know, we are sending troops there. I have heard some vicious things from main stream Republicans about Occupy Wall Street. Some that are pretty close to “just send a drone over there.”

There is NO discussion in Congress. No declaration of war. Nothing. Just one man(not just Obama, but the President in general) who gets to say who the bad guys are. No one seems to see the big picture.

Everything starts out small and is justified through propaganda, but no one asks, “where does it end?” DIgital licenses, surveillance cameras, wiretapping, reading emails, never-ending wars, hackable voting machines, corporate owned media, drones…. Where the hell does all of this stuff end? Go read 1984 again and you’ll see where all of this is headed.

I will admit, I know very little about what is going on in Uganda, probably because I’m having a hard time keeping up with all of the other countries we are bombing and/or occupying, along with the domestic issues that I feel are much more important than what is going on, on the other side of the world. Maybe we should stop arming almost every god damn country in the world and we wont have to help out when those arms start being used on their own people.
I dont know what to do about the “Lord’s Resistance Army,” nor should I. Neither should you. When it comes down to it, Congress should be making the decisions on what to do, not the President. Not the media. All they do is justify things anyway they want, to keep us arguing and divided on stuff that does not effect us in any way, shape, or form, so that we can be distracted from the things that do actually effect us.

Funny, just a week ago, America was talking about the “hero,” Steve Jobs, and how great he was. Not a mention about the kids being used to make iphones, or the nets put around the buildings of where iphones are being manufactured to stop workers from jumping out of the building. But here comes the moral authority all of a sudden to help the children in Uganda.
The hypocrisy is sickening…

@SquirrelEStuff to be fair, congress approved the president’s taking action in this case sometime last year.

Look what I found. I guess I do know a little bit about Uganda now. In Jan 2011, the East African Petroleum Conference and Exhibition was held in Uganda. Just look at the list of Sponsors or Attendees.
http://www.eac.int/eapce/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=141:uganda-albertine-graben&catid=60:pre-conference-excursions&Itemid=155

Another oil well found in Uganda
SUNDAY, 10 JULY 2011 16:01 JOSEPH OLANYO

@WestRiverrat
Can you please provide a reference?

@SquirrelEStuff, I find a lot of what you say completely un-nuanced. We are bombing a total of four countries; we are occupying a total of one country, and nobody is bombing or occupying Uganda. You are upset about something that is not even happening; we are not using military force in Uganda; the 100 people are military advisers, a common role for special forces. And as @WestRiverrat points out, Congress approved this to begin with.

And I disagree that Congress should be making decisions about what to do with the Lord’s Resistance Army. That’s against the Constitution. The executive branch is designed to have broad powers over foreign policy and war. Now, if we were to stage an invasion of Uganda or use airstrikes, I think that should require Congressional approval (I’m pissed Obama didn’t get approval for Libya).

But guess what? It’s not like you don’t have oversight over this process. You have the power to vote for the executive branch. Foreign policy is the #1 reason I voted for Obama over crazypants warmonger McCain. And while Obama hasn’t been a hippie peacenik, I am largely happy with how he has wielded our military power. If you don’t want a president who uses military power willie-nilly, you should work hard to make sure someone like that doesn’t get elected.

I also think the idea that Congress, the most dysfunctional branch of our government, would somehow save America from imperialist overreach if only Obama consulted them is absolutely ludicrous. We are talking about the Congress that approved the Iraq War, right? The Congress that can’t even put together a moderate plan to claw us out of recession? Give me a break.

And here’s another thought: maybe you should learn something about the LRA before criticizing our foreign policy towards it? I mean, reasonable people can disagree about isolationism, but it makes no damn sense to abdicate all responsibility for learning about LRA to friggin’ Congress.

Here’s the source:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/10/obama-sends-100-us-troops-to-uganda-to-combat-lords-resistance-army/

The president in his letter noted that Congress passed “the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act,” signed into law on May 24, 2010, in which, the president said, “the Congress also expressed support for increased, comprehensive U.S. efforts to help mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the LRA to civilians and regional stability.”

Also, what on earth are you trying to say with your list of corporate sponsors? What does that have to do with the Lord’s Resistance Army? You’re like Glenn Beck drawing “connections” on his chalkboard.

As long as the advisors just do that advise and train the Ugandan toops I have no problem with them being there.

The problem I fear is it will happen just like it did with Kennedy and Vietnam. They advisors went in first to advise and train the local troops. Then a few got shot so they were allowed to carry personal defense weapons. Then a new president took over and engineered an incident so that he could escalate the US advisory teams into a full scale military operation.

This is nothing like Vietnam. In Vietnam Western countries were propping up a vastly unpopular dictatorship against a broadly popular Communist movement consisting of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

In Uganda? We are talking about a small cult that is universally hated by everyone in the area.

@Qingu it is close enough that someone in the Whitehouse or Defense Department intent on starting a shooting war can.

Very few Americans cared or knew about Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

@Qingu

We are bombing at least six countries that I know of: Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan , Iraq, Afghanistan,, and we recently sold drones to Uganda and now we are sending troops over there to fly them.
How many troops from other countries do we have stationed in the US? How many foreign bases are here? If we did, would we consider them an occupier of our country? I would. According to Politifact, we have troops in 148 countries. IMO, we occupy 148 countries. Do you really think that we do not occupy Iraq?

The #1 reason why I voted for Ron Paul in 2008 over war-mongererS Obama and McCain(and any other candidate other than Gravel and Kucinich), was also foreign policy. Im not too crazy about murder in any form, including war.
These drones we are using and bases we keep building do not make for a good foreign policy. It doesnt make people like us. It helps create the “Underwear Bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. It helps to create 9/11. The CIA calls it blowback.
Read what the Underwear Bomber said about why he did what he did. Read Osama Bin Ladens reasons for 9/11. They all have the same thing in common. They hate us because of what we are doing over there.
How come Canada isnt too worried about terrorism? Maybe, just maybe, its because they are up there minding their own damn business, not running around building bases, dropping bombs on villages.

I point out the fact that Halliburton is on that list of the conference in Uganda at the beginning of the year, and now I’m Glenn Beck? Do you own their stock or something? Maybe stock in one of the other handful of corporations that make money on legalized murder?

@SquirrelEStuff we have several hundred to several thousand foreign national troops in the US at any one time.

Most of them are being trained in what was called the School of the Americas when I was in the service. Basically we are teaching them how train their troops to use the equipment we have provided through the DoD and the State Dept foreign aid programs. We are also teaching counter terror and drug interdiction procedures to many of them.

Also how many of those 148 countries are the military there as part of the embassy protection details?

@SquirrelEStuff

Great answer!

@SquirrelEStuff, I don’t think we’re bombing in Iraq, but I had forgotten about Somalia (and you’ve forgotten Libya).

I don’t think selling drones to a country counts as “bombing.” You know that the main purpose of drones is survelliance, right? Predators and Reapers are armed with hellifire missiles, but the BBC article doesn’t state what kinds of drones we’ve sold.

Anyway, I respect your foreign policy views, I really do. I am not an isolationist like Ron Paul but I think it’s one of his more reasonable positions. However: it simply makes no sense to bring up jihadists or Halliburton in this context. Yes, you are absolutely right: drone warfare has been a propoaganda coup for al-Qaeda and their allies. However, the LRA is not Islamist —they’re actually despised by Muslims in the area. Yes, Halliburton got a windfall out of the Iraq War… that has absolutely nothing to do with the LRA.

You seem obsessed with a narrative: “corporations are pulling the strings and leading us into warfare.” And in some cases this narrative does actually help explain the situation. This is not one of those cases.

Also: you never answered my question. I asked what you think should be done about the LRA, and you said you don’t know anything about them. Is that it? I mean, this is ultimately why I’m not an isolationist, even though I respect it. But what do you do with death cults? Leave it to their local governments? Well, what if their local governments can’t handle them?

@Qingu I would prefer to have the Ugandan sgts, captains and majors brought over here and trained by our forces on our turf. Then send them back to train their lieutenants, privates and corporals.

Then they can fight their own battles.