The Obama Administration has deployed some 150 Marines to a military base in Djibouti, with an eye toward intervention in South Sudan’s growing civil war.
The Marines were a “crisis-response team,” according to officials, and had previously been located in Spain, but were ordered to Djibouti after the wounding of four US troops in weekend evacuations of Americans from South Sudan.
South Sudan blamed the rebels for firing on a US warplane involved in the evacuations, and as rebels take control of oil-rich regions of the fledgling nation, the administration is likely to see growing pressure to intervene on behalf of the government to “protect” foreign investment in those regions.
The conflict follows a failed military coup by troops loyal tol former Vice President Riek Machar, and a split along ethnic lines between the Nuer and the Dinka.
It's springtime for Obama in Africa.
Oh boy! Another war in the making!
The Obama-Bush administration has nothing else to do but going to war.
Arnold Lockshin, political exile from the US living in Moscow, Russia
Obama fomented and supports the blood-soaked Egyptian coup, but warns there better not be a coup attempt in South Sudan.
Somalia and South Sudan were the only other two countries who would not ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. They have now ratified it, so the only country in the world that will not is the USA. Obama hasn't touched it. The Convention is unlikely to be ratified by the USA in the near future because it forbids both the death penalty and life imprisonment for children. Obama has, however, lifted the ban on the US giving support to countries that use child soldiers (meaning younger than US child soldiers).
Obama: Are you going to be using your ethnically cleansed military base on Diego Garcia for this war? You came up with the idea of turning it into a "marine reserve" to make it so the Chagossians could never come home, but your murderers and weapons could remain. That could come in handy, here.
Maybe your friends in the Bahraini dictatorship you are backing, who are systematically torturing children, can help you out, too.