A response

After posting my blog discussing the Invisible Children, a student who-shall-not-be-named raised quite a stink. Although I assured him that I was not in fact against the charity or anything they stood for, but rather against their new Obama initiative, he still had more to say.

Him: "Do you not think genocide is a problem?"
Me: "Of course I think it's a problem. It's just not Obama's problem at this moment in time, since it isn't occurring in the country he actually has jurisdiction over."
Him: "We have the resources! We could help!"
Me: "Like we helped in Iraq, removing Saddam? Everyone seems to be so pleased about that intervention."
Him: After a pause, "Was there genocide in Iraq?"
Me: "He was gassing his own citizens."

After this short exchange, my adversary shut up, but I realized what misconceptions he was operating on. His belief was that, by removing Kony (the man in charge of the child army), we would save Uganda. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

My adversary is correct, we do have the resources to hunt down and capture Kony, although a time frame is vague. However, he fails to understand that capturing Kony is only the tip of the iceberg.

Again, using Iraq as an example, simply removing Sadaam Hussein was not enough. We hung him in 2006, and nearly four years later, we're still occupying the country. This is because simply removing the root of the problem is not enough, because we still have to save the rest of the tree. And American certainly does not have the resources for that.