Published Oct 17, 2011
In the abstract, I’m all for going against the Lord’s Resistance Army; they seem to be really, really bad people who should be dead or maybe in prison.
But, in reality, I’m not sure what we hope to achieve by getting involved in there. It’s not that we can’t kill LRA members; it’s that the Ugandans already did a good job of that, destroying their military capability and driving them into Congo. The problem seems to me to be that, now that they’re in the stateless east of Congo, the tiny (250 men?) LRA is guaranteed endless space to retreat into and to be generally strong enough to annihilate any small village.
All that adds up to: what does having, or not having, Americans achieve in all of this? I can’t imagine we’d help the Ugandans, Rwandans, or Congolese at junglecraft; that’s why I look to you, my intrepid readers, to explain to me what the larger geopolitical picture I’m missing is.