President Barack Obama said Friday he's dispatching roughly 100 U.S. troops to central Africa to help battle the Lord's Resistance Army, which the administration accuses of a campaign of murder, rape and kidnapping children that spans two decades.
In a letter to Congress, Obama said the troops will act as advisers in efforts to hunt down rebel leader Joseph Kony but will not engage in combat except in self-defense.
Pentagon officials said the bulk of the U.S. contingent will be special operations troops, who will provide security and combat training to African units.
This is something our military is used to doing. And we're good at it. So you'll hear no complaints from me. The LRA is a brutal outfit. Uganda is helpful in Somalia. And the new Republic of South Sudan could use the help, too, since the LRA plagues them, too.
I hope that the forces we send have access to gunships and drones for fire support. We did a lot in El Salvador with a cap of just 55 advisors to defeat communist insurgents as long as they had the gunships overhead to really rip up the rebels. Liberals screamed in anger if an American advisor was photographed with a rifle in his hand out in the bush with the El Salvadoran army, never understanding that the radio link to the gunships was the only weapon that really mattered.
Also, given that our El Salvador effort really angered our domestic Left against the Reagan administration, will President Obama's decision lead to angry leftist protests?
