Ivan Eland in 2009 on US Interventions Against Ugandan LRA

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 time, what with actual troops on the ground.

Ivan Eland:

The Pentagon’s 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 “the war on terror” elsewhere in Africa – with disastrous results.

Typically, around the world, the United States needlessly makes enemies by training indigenous militaries to fight terrorist groups that didn’t focus their attacks on U.S. targets.  As a superpower, the U.S. hates “instability,” 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.

For more than a generation, the Ugandan military has been fighting a brutal Christian terrorist organization – the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) – 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.  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.

Recently, the Ugandan military asked for the Bush administration’s help in going into the Congo after these Christian terrorists (which I will deem “Christianists”).  According to the New York Times, 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.  The U.S. military helped plan and finance the Ugandan cross-border operation in cooperation with the Congolese government.  Unfortunately, the operation was bungled badly and as many as 900 innocent civilians paid the price with their lives.  Many more were maimed, raped, and had their villages razed.

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.  In response to the invasion, the Christianists went on a crusade, brutally sacking village after village in northeastern Congo.   The Christianists burned villages, heinously murdered innocent Congolese civilians, and raped many women.  The Christian terrorists even tried to twist off the heads of small children and kidnapped older children to fight in the L.R.A.’s conscripted (slave) army.  Even worse, the Christianist forces have split up and remain on the rampage.

If the definition of terrorism is killing innocent civilians for political gain, the Christian L.R.A. are clearly terrorists.  But what about the Bush administration’s actions?  The L.R.A. had been driven to a remote national park full of impenetrable swamps.   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 – not renown for their competence – made a mess of the operation.  Human rights organizations have heaped scorn on the operation as needlessly poking a hornet’s nest.

Even though President Bush didn’t intend to assist a foreign military incursion that resulted in substantial civilian deaths, isn’t 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?

Read the whole column here.

Obama Invades Uganda, Only the Latest Intervention Against LRA

The wars are piling up for the Nobel Prize winner, war-monger-in-chief. By arbitrary presidential decree, Obama has involved America in another war without asking for approval from Congress and without even giving an explanation as to how in the world it serves our “national security interests” at all.

A little background on the conflict and our newfound Ugandan rebel enemies, the Lord’s Resistance Army, from Danger Room’s David Axe. Sadly, this isn’t our first intervention against the group:

The LRA has its roots in a bloody civil war in Uganda in the 1980s and ’90s. Chased out of their home country by the army and angry civilians, the pseudo-religious LRA spent a few years doing the bidding of Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir before international pressure ended that arrangement and the LRA fled south into the thick, roadless forest of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and southern Central African Republic.

…Though the danger to American lives is probably minimal, any effort against the LRA poses serious risks. Previous operations targeting Kony have ended badly. In 2006, a squad of Guatemalan commandos trained by the U.S. infiltrated an LRA encampment. But Kony was away. In the ensuing firefight, LRA troops wiped out the entire eight-man commando force and beheaded their commander.

Three years later, a small team from U.S. Africa Command helped the Ugandan army plan a complex series of raids on LRA camps, codenamed “Operation Lightning Thunder.” But the Ugandan air and ground forces could not coordinate their attacks. The enraged rebel survivors fanned out, killing more than 600 civilians as they fled deeper into the forest.

After the disastrous Operation Lightning Thunder, Africa Command assumed a lower profile in Congo, sending small numbers of trainers on short-term missions aimed at boosting the Congolese army. Meanwhile, aid groups and civilian militias ramped up their efforts to guard against LRA attacks, employing homemade shotguns and a DIY radio warning network. And advocates of greater U.S. involvement continued pleading their case, culminating in today’s announcement.

Of course, there’s always the risk of mission creep; just look at how the American efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan have metastasized, for instance. That’s one reason why Center for a New American Security analyst Andrew Exum called the idea of U.S. intervention in Congo “not quite New Coke, and it’s not as ill-advised as signing up to be al-Qaeda’s #3, but this is a pretty bad idea.”

Wondering how bad this could get? Yeah, me too.

Update: As for those “national security interests”…Obama couched them in terms of humanitarian intervention. But something tells me this, instead, isn’t so irrelevant (a report from back in July):

‘Uganda’s Oil Potential Arouses International Interest’

Recent discoveries of vast oil reserves, particularly the oil rich Albertine Graben, with estimated reserves of at least 2.5 billion barrels of oil, mean Uganda is set to become a key oil producer on a part with other African oil producing nations, such as neighboring Sudan, Angola, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea. Some estimate place the Albertine Graben reserve as high as six billion barrels of recoverable oil.

On the basis of such reserves, government analysts estimate that Uganda will be able to support production of over 100,000 barrels of oil per day for the next two decades.

Pentagon’s Doomsday Looks a Lot Like 2007

The Project on Defense Alternatives sends along “Pentagon Cuts in Context: No Reason for ‘Doomsday’ Hysteria” [.pdf].

Key points:

* The Budget Control Act (BCA) provides for assured caps and reductions on Pentagon spending only if the Joint Select Committee – the “super committee” – fails in its mission or if Congress fails to accept the Committee’s plan. This would trigger caps and reductions in Pentagon spending resulting in a ten-year budget about $1 trillion below the plan originally submitted by President Obama in February 2011. This is the so-called “doomsday scenario.” It is the only provision in the Act that would directly cap Pentagon spending.

* Doomsday equals 2007. The “doomsday scenario” would produce average annual DoD base budgets equivalent to the 2007 level of funding, adjusted for inflation. The average annual base budget for 2012-2021 would be about 13.6% below the 2011 level in real terms. However, total spending during 2012-2021 would be only 6% less than total spending during the previous decade, 2002-2011.

* The so-called “doomsday” scenario entails a decade-to-decade reduction far less severe than that experienced after the Cold War ended. The decline in DoD budget authority would be only one-quarter as steep.

* What makes the “doomsday” scenario impractical is the manner in which the Budget Control Act would implement reductions, which is precipitous. This is intentional. The provision is meant to motivate, not mitigate, tax increases and entitlement cuts.

* A gradual approach could achieve equivalent savings with much less disruption — for instance, by reducing the Pentagon base budget step-by-step to $490 billion over four years and then allowing it to increase by inflation only. This would require reducing the budget by only 4% in real terms for each of four years, starting with 2012. Over ten years, this saves the same amount, but without pushing the Pentagon off a wall.

* The “doomsday” scenario can be averted if the Joint Select Committee produces a plan that becomes law and saves at least $2 trillion via cuts, revenue increases, or both. In that case, the BCA ensures at least $841 billion in discretionary budget savings, as measured against the March 2011 CBO baseline. This is the officially preferred or “non-doomsday” scenario. But it involves no direct caps on the Pentagon base budget. Lawmakers are left free to seek proportional savings from the Pentagon or not.

* The Administration and Congress are both disinclined to seek proportional savings from the Pentagon. For the next two years, the International Affairs budget is likely to pay the price. After 2013, the BCA allows more of the burden to be shifted to non-security accounts.

* Proportional cuts equal 2008. Proportional reductions in the DoD’s discretionary base budget would entail a real reduction of 8% from the current level of expenditure. The average Pentagon base budget would be rolled back to the level of 2008, adjusted for inflation. Comparing decade to decade, total base budget expenditures for 2012-2021 would be the same as the total for 2002-2011 in 2012 dollars.

‘Only Criticize the Crimes of Our Enemies,’ Says the War Party

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged the Canadian government to arrest George W. Bush when he visits next week. This has hurt the feelings of Elliot Abrams:

What does one make of organizations that wish to see George W. Bush behind bars—but have never expressed similar sentiments about Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, or Hassan Nasrallah?

…Amnesty and HRW are outspoken only with respect to certain officials. Bashar al-Assad visited Paris in 2008 and 2009: silence. Putin hit Brussels this year: silence. When in good health Fidel was a world traveler: silence. No calls for prosecution for the many killings such people have ordered. When it comes to enemies of the United States (recall Yasser Arafat as well) there may be an appeal to release a certain prisoner or a demand for more political rights, but there is no call to bar travel or to advance criminal charges. I am aware that heads of state have sovereign immunity, but why do these organizations not call for indictments by the International Criminal Court or at least demand that they be refused entry into decent countries altogether?

Remarkably, Abrams embarks on this impulsive tirade without realizing that he is engaging in exactly what he accuses Amnesty and HRW for engaging in. He is upset because he thinks they only criticize people like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Hosni Mubarak, King Hamad Khalifa, and others of his ideological ilk. Yet nowhere in his moaning complaint does he exercise the objectivity he urges of Amnesty and HRW. He doesn’t even address – or deny! – the horrible, deadly, torturous crimes the Bush administration implemented. He merely suggests they criticize others for crimes, instead of Bush. He is pathetically blind to the fact that he is engaging in precisely the logical fallacy he blames them for.

Even if it were true, which it is not, that Amnesty and HRW were withholding criticism of those Abrams mentions, it wouldn’t erase the fact that their criticisms of Bush for his massive crimes are entirely valid. Apparently, Abrams is at least smart enough to recognize that, which is why he doesn’t even dare claim that they’re invalid. He cleverly chooses to ignore the criticisms of Bush’s crimes, because he knows he cannot deny them. These are the argumentation tactics of a seven year old.

Confusing All Around: The Air and Space Museum Bumrush

Yesterday I read with excitement that otherwise docile protests in Washington, DC — the merging of the pre-planned October2011 rally with the spontaneous “Occupy” movement — rushed the Air and Space Museum and got it shut down. Guards shot pepper spray at the crowd, affecting several. The Museum, at the Smithsonian on the Mall in the capital, was featuring an exhibit about drones.

Today it turns out the most active participant in this rush was one Patrick Howley — a writer at the American Spectator. And he openly admits in his column that he ended up as an agent provocateur after first only planning to infiltrate and write a hit piece on the “socialist” movement and its apparent “indoctrination” techniques. But aside from this, the story is pathetic all around.

Howley reports the protesters, ever-bolder as they marched to the museum for a planned action, slowed down as they approached the building’s steps. Only about half rushed up them and tried to enter the building; only Howley and another protester actually got in the doors past the guards. In the ensuing moments, Howley and the protester were pushed and then pepper sprayed, and apparently the spray reached several others. Howley then ran through the museum thinking he had opened the way for the other protesters to streak through and hang banners and whatever other actions they planned. He turned around, squinting through his mace-swollen eyes to realize nobody had followed him.

Creepily, Howley is proud of the guard who sprayed him — he and the other guards “acted with more courage than I saw from any of the protesters.”

Now, the lefty blogosphere is outraged. This isn’t journalism! they shriek. Well, yes and no. It’s legitimate to infiltrate a movement in order to report; that’s classic stuff. But the result by Howley is less journalism than goofy slander — the piece he intended to write would have been rather weak without his little adventure.

But what’s puzzling is that Charlie Grapski of FireDogLake seems to have been snookered into kneejerk opposition to Howley’s actions, not just their intent. Sure, Howley did something he himself thought was terrible and would set-up and implicate the antiwar protesters as disruptive hoodlums. So… Grapski — and hundreds of commenters — agree with Howley? Yes, apparently.

“In light of his detailed description of his activities today the fact that they clearly document the commission of the crime of trespassing on federal property, if not the intent to incite a riot there, these admissions should not be taken lightly or ignored. … the presence and admitted activities of this self-proclaimed agent provacateur should be brought to the attention of federal law enforcement officials. … Who was really to blame for the chaos and disruption of a Federal Museum?

Blame? Surely, Grapski means who was the unintended hero in the righteous disruption of a museum that engages in imperial propaganda, when all others stood back and cowered? We’re supposed to be in solidarity with the masses of Tahrir, no? Well they burned down the party headquarters, buddy. If protesters had smashed up a few papier mâché drones in a museum wouldn’t exactly make Gandhi cry.

It’s time to embrace these nonviolent tactics that may happen to break the rules. It’s time to take some clues from the Occupy Boston participants who told the cops “No.” Let them eat their free-speech zones. They certainly have the seasonings handy.

Why is FireDogLake opposing this “crime of trespassing on federal property” — at all? This is the ONE truly heroic hardcore direct action against authority and the glorification of violence that we’ve seen! Smashing up a publicly owned shrine to remote death from the air — hurting nobody — is nonviolent. A sit-in — oooh, trespassing! — is also nonviolent and absolutely just. Who owns that museum? What crimes is that museum complicit in pimping to American children as legitimate?

Shutting it down was right. And sadly, it took some provocateur asshole to show us how it’s done.