Hey, Did Ya Hear that We're at War in Uganda Now?

You learn the darndest things on Fridays, with the Obama administration around.

Two days ago President Obama authorized the deployment to Uganda of approximately 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to help regional forces “remove from the battlefield” – meaning capture or kill – Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and senior leaders of the LRA.

The forces will ultimately go to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the permission of those countries.

The president made this announcement in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Friday afternoon, saying that “deploying these U.S. Armed Forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.”

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So we’re going into Africa to go after some obscure nominally Christian militia, a war brought to you by the same administration that ran guns to drug cartels in Mexico. It was good of Obama to tell Boehner in a note, I suppose, but this move is the Mother of all Headscratchers.

The apparent legal basis for the kinetic military action is an obscure law passed when the Democrats still held Congress. This episode seems to back up an epiphany I had during the Darfur debate a few years ago. At that time, the very same Democrats who wanted US troops inserted into Darfur were totally against the ongoing war in Iraq. Never mind most Democrats supported that war when it was voted on. They wanted us out of that war, but into Darfur, despite the fact that there were no evident US national security interests at stake in Darfur.

The epiphany that this led to: Democrats support US intervention in foreign conflicts in inverse proportion to the US national security interests at stake.

Find an obscure conflict with no obvious US interests at stake, and Democrats will clamor to get US troops involved. But show them a situation where US national interests are clearly at stake, and they will find a thousand reasons for not intervening. “That’s somebody else’s war,” or even”Well we caused the problem in the first place” is their excuse.

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By the way, this carries over into other spheres. Check out how the Democrats view the .083 Percenters occupying Wall Street, versus the real millions of Tea Party activists who protested ObamaCare. It’s in inverse proportions to the Tea Party protesters’ legitimate grievances and their legitimacy as business owners and productive citizens. The Tea Partiers got called terrorists and dismissed by the very same Democrats who toss a “God bless ’em” at the .083 Percenters.

(h/t Ace)

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