Chad’s Morning Brief: Obama Announces War on Ebola, Ground Troops Might Be Used Against ISIS, and Other Top Stories
Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of September 17, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.
Ebola War
According to Reuters, over 3,000 troops will be sent to Africa to help battle the Ebola outbreak.
U.S. lawmakers called for a government-funded "war" to contain West Africa's deadly Ebola epidemic before it threatens more countries, building on an American pledge to send 3,000 military engineers and medical personnel to combat the virus.
"Here's the hard truth. In West Africa, Ebola is now an epidemic, the likes" of which have not been seen before, President Barack Obama said during a meeting with top U.S. public health officials.
"It's spiralling out of control, it's getting worse," he said at the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he flew to outline the plan to deploy 3,000 troops to West Africa.
The deployment represented a ramping-up in the Obama administration's response to the worst Ebola outbreak on record. It comes after repeated calls for governments to step in and help West African countries whose healthcare systems have been overwhelmed by the epidemic.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers said further measures should be considered in the coming weeks.
"We need to declare a war on Ebola," Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said during a congressional hearing on the U.S. response to the outbreak.
Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said the country should view the threat of Ebola "as seriously as we take ISIS," referring to the Islamic State militant group in Syria and Iraq.
Acknowledging that the epidemic represented a national security crisis, U.S. administration officials said the focus of the military deployment would be on Liberia, where the threat of chaos is greatest. The disease has also hit hard in Sierra Leone and Guinea, and has turned up in Nigeria and Senegal.
Under the plan, engineers, medical personnel and other service members would build 17 treatment centres with 100 beds each, train thousands of healthcare workers and establish a military control centre for coordinating the relief effort, U.S. officials told reporters.
Officials said the Defence Department had sought to reallocate $500 million in funds from fiscal 2014 to help cover the costs of the humanitarian mission.
The virus has killed nearly 2,500 people out of 4,985 cases in West Africa. United Nations officials said on Tuesday they would need a $1 billion response to contain the outbreak to tens of thousands of cases.
The World Health Organization has said it needs foreign medical teams with 500 to 600 experts as well as at least 10,000 local health workers. The figures may rise if the number of cases increases, as is widely expected.
"If we do not act now to stop the spread of Ebola, we could be dealing with it for years to come, affecting larger areas of Africa," Dr. Beth Bell, CDC director of the National Centre for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told a hearing before the Senate Committees on Appropriations and Health, Education, Labour and Pensions.
TURNING AWAY THE SICK
The Obama administration has requested an additional $88 million (54.08 million pounds) from Congress to fight Ebola, including $58 million to speed production of Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc's experimental antiviral drug ZMapp and two Ebola vaccine candidates.
Liberia, founded by descendants of freed American slaves, appealed for U.S. help last week as the outbreak in the country ran unchecked. [ID:nL5N0RE12I]
One U.N. official in the country has said her colleagues had resorted to telling locals to use plastic bags to fend off the killer virus, due to a lack of other protective equipment.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the international charity that has been leading the fight against Ebola, said it was overwhelmed and repeated its call for an immediate, massive deployment.
"We are honestly at a loss as to how a single, private NGO is providing the bulk of isolation units and beds," MSF's international president, Dr. Joanne Liu, said in a speech to the United Nations in Geneva, using the acronym for "non-governmental organisation."
She said the charity has been turning away sick people in Monrovia, Liberia's capital.
U.S. officials stressed that it was very unlikely the Ebola crisis could come to the United States. Measures were being taken to screen passengers flying out of the region, they said, and protocols were in place to isolate and treat anyone who arrived in the United States showing symptoms of the disease.
The U.S. effort in West Africa will also focus on training. A site will be established where military medical personnel will teach healthcare workers how to care for Ebola patients, at a rate of 500 workers per week for six months or longer, officials said.
Ground Troops Might be Used
After President Obama closed the door on ground troops being used to fight ISIS, that door was opened on Tuesday by General Martin Dempsey according to FOX.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey addressed the possibility of U.S. ground forces getting involved in the fight against the Islamic State during blunt testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. He said he would consider recommending that option if the international coalition being formed proves ineffective.
"My view at this point is that this coalition is the appropriate way forward," Dempsey said. "I believe that will prove true, but if it fails to be true and if there are threats to the United States, then I of course would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of U.S. military ground forces."
The comment is a departure from what Obama vowed in his address to the nation a week ago, and from what the president's top spokesman said just one day before Dempsey's testimony. And it marks the latest mixed message to emerge from the administration on the fight against ISIS, which for weeks U.S. military advisers have described in more urgent and dire terms than others in the administration.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said: "I can say definitively that the president has ruled out sending American boots on the ground to be engaged in a combat role in Iraq and in Syria."
He was echoing the president's pledge in his address last Wednesday that the expanding campaign "will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil."
Earnest, asked Tuesday about Dempsey's latest comments, stressed that the Joint Chiefs chairman was referring to a "hypothetical scenario." But he said Obama has been clear that he does not believe it would be in the country's security interests to deploy ground combat troops.
Dempsey said Tuesday that ground troops are not needed at the moment but made clear he could change his recommendation if he found circumstances "evolving" in the region. He said he would recommend advisers accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against Islamic State targets if he comes to believe that's the right course.
Dempsey provided one example of a scenario where he might recommend U.S. ground forces, saying they could be used to help Kurdish and Iraqi forces retake Mosul, now controlled by the Islamic State, or ISIS, by accompanying them or providing close-combat advice.
The statement comes as the administration faces a deep divide in Congress that muddies traditional partisan lines over the possibility of ground forces being introduced. Many Democrats and Republicans oppose U.S. combat troops entering the fight. But some Republican lawmakers have criticized the president for appearing to rule out that option.
"ISIS is an army," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., top Republican on the committee, said Tuesday. "It will take an army to beat an army."
I still believe that ground troops will be needed if the United States wants to defeat ISIS. If our goal is to only contain ISIS, then troops may not be needed.
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