Why are U.S. troops going into Uganda to take sides in a civil war?

By David McElroy · October 15, 2011

Right after World War II, a revolutionary group forced the Vietnamese emperor to resign and then declared Vietnam independent of French colonial rule. The emperor headed to the southern part of the country and established a new capital in Saigon, where he got his new government recognized by the U.S. and French governments.

In 1949, U.S. President Harry Truman ordered U.S. military advisors into the country to train the South Vietnamese forces in how to use American weapons. From that tiny detachment of advisors grew a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans, some of whom hadn’t even been born yet when the advisors were first sent.

I couldn’t help thinking about that as I read Friday about Barack Obama sending about 100 armed U.S. troops into Uganda to train government forces fighting rebels for a religious group calling itself the Lord’s Resistance Army. Will more Americans get sucked into a conflict that we know almost nothing about? I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that there’s no reason for U.S. taxpayers to be paying for training another country’s army in a civil war.

One of the things politicians of both major parties agree about is that the U.S. military is the world’s policeman. If there’s a problem anywhere, the response from some Democrat or Republican (usually whoever’s in the White House) is to send in troops (as advisors or “peacekeepers”) or to send in bombers to reduce the country to rubble. While this death and destruction is going on, most Americans go blithely about their business, unaware and unconcerned that their tax dollars are financing the killing of many people in other parts of the world.

As Americans, we tend to be happily in a little bubble where we believe “our troops” are the good guys everywhere they go — and that they’d never do terrible things the way the other guys do. But have you ever heard of the My Lai massacre? A company of U.S. soldiers murdered somewhere between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including many women and babies. Many of the women were raped and many of the bodies were mutilated. The bodies in the picture above are only a few of the victims. Only one U.S. soldier was ever held responsible for anything related to these murders — and he only served three and a half years under house arrest. There are plenty of other atrocities that you’ve never heard about.)

We’ve seen plenty of reports (many substantiated) of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. forces. It’s not a uniquely American thing. Unfortunately, it’s what men do when they go to war and get numb to killing. It’s always been done and always will be done, just as long as humans exist and send soldiers off to kill each other.

When we get involved in other countries’ wars, we’re dragging ourselves into fights that shouldn’t be ours and we’re setting ourselves up to be responsible for more death and destruction. It’s foolish. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s immoral.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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