{"id":68465,"date":"2016-10-17T10:39:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T14:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=68465"},"modified":"2016-10-17T10:40:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T14:40:49","slug":"th-expanding-us-role-in-somalia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=68465","title":{"rendered":"The expanding US role in Somalia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/10\/16\/world\/africa\/obama-somalia-secret-war.html?_r=0\">The New York Times<\/a> writes about the role US troops have been fulfilling in Somalia during the Obama years;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Somalia campaign is a blueprint for warfare that President Obama has embraced and will pass along to his successor. It is a model the United States now employs across the Middle East and North Africa \u2014 from Syria to Libya \u2014 despite the president\u2019s stated aversion to American \u201cboots on the ground\u201d in the world\u2019s war zones. This year alone, the United States has carried out airstrikes in seven countries and conducted Special Operations missions in many more.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>In its public announcements, the Pentagon sometimes characterizes the operations as \u201cself-defense strikes,\u201d though some analysts have said this rationale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is only because American forces are now being deployed on the front lines in Somalia that they face imminent threats from the Shabab.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ya know, for a Nobel Peace Prize winner, this president sure does use US military forces a lot. I guess that&#8217;s probably because, like the rest of America, he&#8217;s finally realized that they&#8217;re the only government workers who do what they&#8217;re expected. However, there&#8217;s not one thing in Somalia worth the life of one American.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>About 200 to 300 American Special Operations troops work with soldiers from Somalia and other African nations like Kenya and Uganda to carry out more than a half-dozen raids per month, according to senior American military officials. The operations are a combination of ground raids and drone strikes.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The strikes have had a mixed record. In March, an American airstrike killed more than 150 Shabab fighters at what military officials called a \u201cgraduation ceremony,\u201d one of the single deadliest American airstrikes in any country in recent years. But an airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were American allies against the Shabab.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s tough to kill bad guys when you&#8217;re pretending that you&#8217;re not at war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times writes about the role US troops have been fulfilling in Somalia during &hellip; <a title=\"The expanding US role in Somalia\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=68465\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The expanding US role in Somalia<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}