YES! I FOUND IT!
God damn, this was frustrating to find. But yeah, here’s the example of very, very, very unsound policy (MOAR WAR!) advocated by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.
And Wronging Rights did a superb job of summing up everything that is wrong with his assessment.
What should be done about the LRA? Humanitarian intervention is usually incredibly political, but what alternatives are there? While Kony and the LRA have branched out and are thought to often be in Sudan, Congo, or CAR, they still reign terror on Ugandans as well. And they’ve been doing this for a very long time.
I’ll be upfront… I haven’t yet had a chance to review Obama’s plan to handle the LRA (so can’t say whether I agree with it or not), but I did work with Enough and other orgs to help get that law passed that required him to come up with a plan to help Uganda.
I will say allAfrica.com has a thoughtful article on why Obama’s plan in Uganda will fail, but again, I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the plan itself just yet with my own opinions.
I agree with most of this, in that humanitarian intervention can be a bullshit excuse and the confusion between military action and humanitarian aid is getting worse, only causing more problems, and that it is a newer form of imperialism (A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis does a great job talking about this)… but I also think that, unfortunately, sometimes there is a time and a place for “humanitarian intervention” as well.
I guess the question is… can it ever not be political? Will countries and governments intervene for purely altruistic purposes?
