{"id":12248,"date":"2011-10-14T14:42:48","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T22:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=12248"},"modified":"2011-10-14T14:42:48","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T22:42:48","slug":"ivan-eland-in-2009-on-us-interventions-against-ugandan-lra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/14\/ivan-eland-in-2009-on-us-interventions-against-ugandan-lra\/","title":{"rendered":"Ivan Eland in 2009 on US Interventions Against Ugandan LRA"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m going to repost a large portion of Antiwar.com columnist Ivan Eland on US interventions in Uganda against the LRA during the Bush administration<\/a>. It went horribly wrong back then, directly resulting in runaway LRA forces expanding into other villages and murdering even more civilians. I wonder how much worse it could end up this time, what with actual troops on the ground.<\/p>\n

Ivan Eland<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Pentagon\u2019s new Africa Command bureaucracy, which was created largely to defend oil produced on the West African coast (itself a dubious objective), has already branched out to fight \u201cthe war on terror\u201d elsewhere in Africa \u2013 with disastrous results.<\/p>\n

Typically, around the world, the United States needlessly makes enemies by training indigenous militaries to fight terrorist groups that didn\u2019t focus their attacks on U.S. targets.\u00a0 As a superpower, the U.S. hates \u201cinstability,\u201d no matter how far from U.S. territory or interests it develops. Thus, the U.S. military has been training the Ugandan military in counterterrorism.<\/p>\n

For more than a generation, the Ugandan military has been fighting a brutal Christian terrorist organization \u2013 the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) \u2013 which originally wanted to overthrow the Ugandan government but now slaughters and maims people (for example, by cutting off their lips) in the name of fighting for the ten commandments.\u00a0 Five years ago, the Ugandan army drove the L.R.A. into the remote Garamba National Park in the Congo, which is on the border of Uganda and Sudan.<\/p>\n

Recently, the Ugandan military asked for the Bush administration\u2019s help in going into the Congo after these Christian terrorists (which I will deem \u201cChristianists\u201d).\u00a0 According to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, then-President George W. Bush, ironically an aggressively oriented Christian himself, approved U.S. military assistance to the Ugandan military to wipe out his violent religious brethren.\u00a0 The U.S. military helped plan and finance the Ugandan cross-border operation in cooperation with the Congolese government.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the operation was bungled badly and as many as 900 innocent civilians paid the price with their lives.\u00a0 Many more were maimed, raped, and had their villages razed.<\/p>\n

The botched U.S.-assisted Ugandan and Congolese invasion of the park allowed the L.R.A. Christianists escape routes and then did not guard nearby Congolese villages.\u00a0 In response to the invasion, the Christianists went on a crusade, brutally sacking village after village in northeastern Congo.\u00a0\u00a0 The Christianists burned villages, heinously murdered innocent Congolese civilians, and raped many women.\u00a0 The Christian terrorists even tried to twist off the heads of small children and kidnapped older children to fight in the L.R.A.\u2019s conscripted (slave) army.\u00a0 Even worse, the Christianist forces have split up and remain on the rampage.<\/p>\n

If the definition of terrorism is killing innocent civilians for political gain, the Christian L.R.A. are clearly terrorists.\u00a0 But what about the Bush administration\u2019s actions?\u00a0 The L.R.A. had been driven to a remote national park full of impenetrable swamps.\u00a0\u00a0 President Bush then approved assisting and financing an eradication operation that had no direct relevance to U.S. national security interests and had substantial downside potential if the Ugandan and Congolese militaries \u2013 not renown for their competence \u2013 made a mess of the operation.\u00a0 Human rights organizations have heaped scorn on the operation as needlessly poking a hornet\u2019s nest.<\/p>\n

Even though President Bush didn\u2019t intend to assist a foreign military incursion that resulted in substantial civilian deaths, isn\u2019t he morally culpable for those deaths because he recklessly aided an operation unneeded to ensure U.S. security and with the tremendous risk of incompetent militaries generating a violent backlash from the Chrisianists with a botched operation?<\/p>\n

Read the whole column here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to repost a large portion of Antiwar.com columnist Ivan Eland on US interventions in Uganda against the LRA during the Bush administration. It went horribly wrong back then, directly resulting in runaway LRA forces expanding into other villages and murdering even more civilians. I wonder how much worse it could end up this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12249,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12248\/revisions\/12249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12248"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}