Mistake to send troops to fight Ebola

By Isaac Yetiv, Ph.D.

Isaac Yetiv, PhD
Isaac Yetiv, PhD

LA JOLLA, California — When I first heard on the radio that President Obama had decided to dispatch 3,000 troops to Africa to fight Ebola, I thought I was mistaken; I couldn’t believe my ears. But later the same day, it was clearly confirmed.

This is another unilateral executive decision that does not pass the tests of reason, common sense,and national security interests. It is intrinsically wrong in and by itself, and it is wronger when put in the context of the grave situation in the Middle-East and its threats to our national security.

In and by itself :  We have an all-volunteer military whose primordial duty is to protect the life of its citizens and to safeguard national security. It is not their job to fight a deadly virus in foreign countries.

They are not trained and equipped for this task; nor had they signed up for it.

It is , of course, noble and laudable to extend humanitarian assistance to other peoples in distress, and America is second to none in its altruistic and charitable endeavors, but this task is better suited to health professionals and social workers like the Peace Corps or Medecins Sans Frontieres  who have devoted their life and talent for that purpose. And even they should volunteer for this dangerous assignment and not be coerced by an order from the Commander-in-Chief as in the case of the military.

I am not even sure if this order is legal. There is a pending fear of a mutation of the virus which will make its transmission much easier. This will not only endanger the life of the soldiers but also of their spouses and families and the community if , inadvertently and unknowingly,  they return home as carriers of the deadly virus.

Besides, where are  the UN, the World Health Organization, and other specialized agencies for which we pay the largest share of their budgets? Where are the other big countries, Europe, Russia, China and others? How ridiculous it is , and irresponsible, to borrow money from China –our coffers are empty and our national debt is approaching 18 trillion dollars– to help  Africa which China is busy buying and colonizing!

In the context of the dangerous Middle-East situation:  This humanitarian sudden “decision” came on the heels of months of military  “indecision,” tergiversations, dithering, contradictory information, and an embarrassing rebuke by the military professionals of the civilian Commander-in-Chief. No less than eight generals, active and retired, and three Secretaries of Defense (one active and two retired) expressed unambiguously their disagreement with the president on the need for “booths on the ground” and that “the job cannot be done with air strikes alone.”

And then, the pathetic begging of other nations to put their “boots on the ground” because America is tired of war. Indeed,it is. But the question is : “Is it an American national interest to arrest the advances of ISIS ? Or is it just a humanitarian effort to help others? Here, everybody agrees, including the president, that the “Islamic State” is a threat to America. Then, why ask others to defend America? Why not LEAD a coalition of the threatened , if not of the willing, or worse, the unwilling?

Why the temporizing, the dissembling, the stupid semantic terminology and distinctions without a difference coming from the spokesmen and women, the staff,  the political hacks,and the president himself? Like the non-sensical ” we are not at war”  or “they are not Islamic, they are not state.”

To borrow another infamous question, “What difference does it make if they beheaded Americans,  crucified, raped, forced others to convert or die…? “all in the name of Islam (their self-proclaimed leader has a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, they say) , an extremist Islam but Islam nevertheless.

The flip-flops and about faces of the president add confusion to the chaos: A few months ago, he derisively dismissed ISIS as an insignificant JV (Junior Varsity) squad but after the beheadings, he changed his appraisal of the enemy which has now metamorphosed into “a network of killers, of pure evil.” He joked about a Syrian rebel group ,”made up of lawyers and pharmacists” not a match for the Syrian dictator ,and refused to help them, saying “it is a fantasy to arm the rebels.” But recently, he asked the Congress to give them 500 million dollars to fight both Assad and ISIS simultaneously.

He successively, in the space of one week,  declared “We have no strategy against ISIS” to “We can make the problem manageable,” to ” we will degrade ISIS” to finally “We shall degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS.” No wonder why other prospective “allies” did not rush to sign up.

Kerry invited Iran to be part of the “coalition,” knowing full well that the price to pay would be unacceptable, no less than allowing them to produce the bomb, a prospect much more dangerous that ISIS itself, and contrary to repeated past declarations of the president. Israel and the Sunni Arabs in the Middle-East proclaimed their fearful opposition..  PM Rouhani of Iran rejected the offer; he said “the US strategy is a mistake”  and he mocked the US Secretary of State, and the president, publicly. Later he declared that Iran is still negotiating with the US and other nations on how to increase the number of centrifuges (it has now 19,000) for its production of “nuclear energy for peace.”

This lack of leadership is the result of ideologism aggravated by incompetence. The president, and all his handpicked advisers, first set as axiomatic certain beliefs , and if the facts do not match them, then so much the worst for the facts. Until many of their fellow Democrats and what I call the trio of  “Media, Academia, and Comedia” usually his allies who routinely cover for his blunders, and, in this case, the entire National Security team, dare ring the alarm bell and wake him up to Reality.

In the words of former Secretary of Defense Gates, Obama is “trapped,” a prisoner of his own pronouncements such as, “I was elected to end wars, not to start them,” and now, with the bombings in Syria, he seems to have started another war.

I said “incompetence” too, because a competent president would have felt intuitively the need for pragmatism: Things change. True , the trauma of two bloody and expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made the people, and any president, very cautious. As the saying goes,”A burnt cat dreads the fire.” But , as wisdom dictates, one can never say never. Obama is learning it very painfully.

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Yetiv is a lecturer and freelance writer on international affairs.  He may be contacted via isaac.yetiv@sdjewishworld.com