There are not many trolls who have been here 8.5 years longer than you.
I don’t know how severe this Ebola outbreak may become and neither do you, but the panic that would be set off by severely curtailing air travel and cancelling 200,000 visas would make things much worse. If 3,000 troops setting up 1,700 hospital beds gives the locals confidence to weather the outbreak in place or gives our government an opportunity to test treatments and vaccines, that sounds like very important work to me.
Obama may be wrong about many things, but even a broken clock is right twice each day.
Keep them out of contact with locals, no crowd/border control role what so ever.
I fear mission creep will ONCE AGAIN get us and our troops into trouble in West Africa, a place were we really have no business going without broad international support.
I don’t know where the worst case people are, usually they are giving the end of the world scenario.
These troops could be Obama’s insanity, or it could mean that the people on the inside have seen information and speculative tables that is worse than we know, and which makes this desperate action, with all the pitfalls that we can imagine, a necessary thing to do.
In other words, what if things are so much worse than we know, that we have to risk this, what if this outbreak really is the big one.
One way we can get clues is to watch what the other advanced nations are doing, if they are also showing signs of panic and desperate involvement to contain it, then that would be evidence that they know something the public doesn’t know, and that perhaps the risks are justified and unavoidable.