Our Troops Have Work To Do Before Acting As Red Cross

September 16, 2014

Our Troops Have Work To Do Before Acting As Red Cross

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Boots On The Ground: The president declares that ground troops are a non-option against the Islamic State, then orders 3,000 troops to Africa as a surrogate Red Cross. The U.S. military should be too busy for that.



Operation United Assistance — that's the big new war effort against, um, Ebola. Ayatollah Ebola? Who is that, IS's chief mullah?



Radical Islam may be a disease that must be eradicated, but the president who promised the Democratic Party's base he would end wars has decided we can't even consider committing ground forces to combat the latest, terrifying outbreak of it in Iraq and Syria.



We can, however, have our men and women in uniform coordinate international relief efforts in the Third World against a virus.



Ebola is a serious threat, and our military can and often has engaged in humanitarian activities abroad. But with our forces spread thin and under strain in the Mideast, and with this president shrinking the U.S. Army to pre-World War II levels and even scrapping a whole class of Air Force attack jets, one wonders if the commander in chief is demoting the U.S. military to a global EMT squad.



The decision to send thousands of troops to Liberia to combat Ebola comes after public pressure from Doctors Without Borders and other groups.



But the president should be more concerned with America's superpower status and ability to wield power than our image as globetrotting do-gooder. Otherwise there will ultimately be a lot more corpses than even the hundreds of thousands in Africa now at risk of succumbing to the deadly virus.

The so-called coalition we are depending on to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS may well let us down in the end, if not sooner. Syrian rebels, for instance, have reportedly made a cease-fire deal with IS, and Islamofascist Iran — surprise, surprise — hasn't accepted under-the-table U.S. overtures to help us, even though they're Shiite and the IS is Sunni.



So our forces may very well have a very big, ugly job to do in Iraq and Syria. Are they going to have their hands full instead airlifting medical supplies?



This president, who claims to hate theatricality and photo-ops, visited the Centers For Disease Control to be briefed by medical experts.



Why not just read the briefing, as he usually does in the case of his Daily Intelligence Briefing?



Obama doesn't seem to like the personal presence of military experts wearing medals and brass, who might throw some informed disagreement at him about his approach against U.S. adversaries around the world.



But he's apparently all too happy to fly to Atlanta and hear a bunch of global health bureaucrats outline how to spend billions more dollars of U.S. taxpayer money on the other side of the world.



This president seems to believe his own myth.



Osama may be dead, but that doesn't mean our military's next job should be Ebola on the assumption the global war on terror has been won. The emergence of the Islamic State was a consequence of withdrawn U.S. power, and that is where that power is needed the most now. Not in Africa as a Red Cross auxiliary.