Troops to Africa Won't Fix a Failed Presidency

Take up the White Man’s burden –

The savage wars of peace –

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease...

– from Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” [1899]

If the telephone rings early in the morning, it’s not likely to be good news. Someone you know and care about is probably dead, or dying. It’s best to roll over and go back to sleep. The bad news will still be there waiting when you get up.

I didn’t heed my own advice this morning.

“I’m going to Africa,” my brother’s voice greeted me.

“When,” I asked, rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“I’m at Fort Meade, in Maryland, right now,” he said. “They say we’ll be ‘boots on the ground’ in 30 days.”*

“Where?” I knew the answer, but didn’t want to hear it.

“Monrovia, Liberia,” he said.

“How long,” I asked, not wanting to hear the answer to that question either.

“Nine to 12 months,” he said, “plus 21 days of quarantine. That means I’ll probably miss two Christmases at home.”

“Christ,” I said, rubbing my forehead.

My brother is a counter intelligence officer with the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. After ten months in Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division, getting shot at as an infantryman, he changed jobs – thankfully. Now working out of an office in Miami, Florida, he regularly describes his life there as boring and routine, spending lots of time writing reports and surfing the Internet. I took it for granted that he wouldn’t be sent into harm’s way again.

Then it hit me. “Tell me you’ll be armed, at least.”

That raised a slight chuckle. “This is a ‘humanitarian mission’ – we won’t even have security,” he said.

“After two decades of stirring up Africa – turning Libya into a hellhole, empowering Boko Haram and riling up al Shabaab – now the moron in Washington wants to send you to Liberia – unarmed?”

I was incredulous.

“It’s worse than that,” he said, seriously. “I’m going to a country where the crime rate is so high, people don’t even report crimes anymore.”

Great.

It’s no coincidence that President Obama is trying to look, well, presidential right now. After having been voted the worst president of the last half century, his signature piece of legislation widely hated – and for good reason – and his party facing defeat in the upcoming mid-term elections – a defeat that would be a massacre, if not for the utter contemptibility of the opposition party – he’s desperate for a legacy.

Like everything else, this action too will suffer from The Sadim Touch. I just hope my brother doesn’t come home with Ebola – or in a box – to satisfy El Jefe’s vainglory.

If President Obama is serious about tackling Ebola, he should look to individual intiative, as Ron Paul has advised. He writes in his weekly column, “Firestone Tire and Rubber Company has successfully contained the spread of Ebola among 80,000 people living in Harbel, the Liberian town housing employees of Firestone’s Liberian plant and their families. In March, after the wife of a Firestone employee developed Ebola symptoms, Firestone constructed its own treatment center and implemented a program of quarantine and treatment. Firestone has successfully kept the Ebola virus from spreading among its employees. As of this writing, there are only three Ebola patients at Firestone’s treatment facility ... Firestone’s success in containing Ebola shows that, far from justifying new state action, the Ebola crises demonstrates that individuals acting in the free market can do a better job of containing Ebola than can governments.”

*No, this is not secret information.