Once again, President Obama has ordered U.S. soldiers into harm’s way unnecessarily. Last week, he quietly told the U.S. Congress that he had sent 100 U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers into Uganda to help governments in central Africa fight a rebel army that’s been rampaging through the region for more than 20 years. This is the way the Vietnam War started, with U.S. special forces sent to "assist" a barely democratic government cope with a guerrilla war and a president promising they would not be going into combat. Ten years later, with more than 58,000 American lives and untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives lost, we had learned a brutal lesson – war is too easily escalated by those who do not have to fight or die. 

Now, the president seems determined to repeat history, rather than learn from America’s past. According to news reports, the Pentagon has already shipped $45 million in military equipment to the area, including four drone aircraft. The same kind of drones are already being used to bomb targets in Palestine, Yemen, Libya, and who knows where else. The United States has been providing military aide and advisers, to Uganda and other nations in the region, to battle these rebels since George W. Bush was in office. Does America really need another war right now? We can’t even afford the ones we’ve got already!