Kids are great at a lot of things, like being naive, innocent and murdering entire villages full of people.
It has been a while since we’ve talked about Joseph Kony and his child army and understandably so.
After Jason Russell, Kony 2012 Director and Co-founder of Invisible Children Inc., was caught running around naked, masturbating on a sidewalk in San Diego, the movement lost a little credibility.
But that hasn’t stopped Uncle Sam from getting involved.
After the YouTube film detailing Kony’s brutal kidnap and conscription of Ugandan children into his evil cult/army went viral, the U.S. decided to intervene — despite the fact that, at least according to the Ugandans, Kony has probably been dead for a while now.
In October 2011, President Barack Obama deployed a contingent of 100 U.S. military advisers to assist the Ugandan Army in its posthumous hunt for the long defunct madman.
But that’s not all he did.
Using his keen mind for military tactics, Obama knew the only way to fight fire was with fire — or rather to fight a bunch of starving brainwashed kids with another bunch of starving brainwashed kids.
So the president promptly granted immunity to the Congolese National Army, among others, and continued to fund them despite the fact they were employing the exact same tactics Kony used.
To do this, Obama waived a section of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 that forbade the U.S. from sending military aid to any country that enslaved children under the age of 18 to fight on the battlefield.
When asked by child-advocacy groups why the U.S. simply didn’t withdraw funding for those specific elements of our allied governments that enslave children, the White House responded saying “the approach had been weighed but rejected as unwieldy.”
Let me be as clear as possible: The President of the United States, Barack Obama, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, personally directed the U.S. government to continue giving money to organizations that forced children to fight and die.
An example is South Sudan, where soldiers forced the children of refugees fleeing from Darfur into army units.
Or in Chad — where the Chadian Army refused to discharge their thousands of combatants under the age of 15 because, according to the Washington Post, “[they] fight against al-Qaida militants.”
Apparently Obama’s child army has worked so well, he waived the immunity again in 2012, and will presumably do so again later this year.
In fact, the president has been waiving or ignoring this provision every year since he took office.
Why? National security, of course. How funding “allied” armies that conscript and employ children to do their dirty work benefits the security of the nation absolutely eludes me.
I understand the material side of the equation — what better way to end child soldiering than to fund an army of children?
Children are compact and quick, they don’t require much food, and they’re much easier to trick into running through mine fields.
I just thought humans, as a species, had decided that sort of thing was incredibly immoral.
Whatever “national security” advantages we get from fielding our own Childrens Crusade are probably washed out by the rest of the world assuming we’re just as evil and hypocritical as the terrorists, like Kony, we claim to oppose.
Obama should either quit giving these maniacs money or he should have to give back that Nobel Peace Prize.
Preferably both.
