Ted Galen Carpenter: Skepticism Needed About “Freedom Fighters”
Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America. He is also a contributing editor to The National Interest.
As if Rush Limbaugh didn’t have enough problems following his defamatory rants against Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University Law student who dared to speak out on the ongoing contraception controversy, critics have now dredged up his astonishing October 2011 statements regarding the infamous African warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. Not only did Limbaugh criticize the Obama administration’s decision to send one hundred U.S. troops to aid Central African governments that were battling the LRA (which was a perfectly legitimate criticism), but he also went on to praise Kony and his insurgent force. The Lord’s Resistance Army “are Christians,” Limbaugh thundered. “They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops, to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them.” He then read from the LRA’s “manifesto,” which included commitments to democracy and eliminating oppression. “These are the objectives of the group that we are fighting,” Limbaugh said with exasperation.
Limbaugh’s statements have become an acute embarrassment, especially since the release of the video documentary on the “invisible children,” which exposes the LRA’s many abuses against some extraordinarily young victims. But Limbaugh is hardly the first prominent American to have expressed ill-considered support for sleazy foreign political movements. One need only recall such naive backing for fascist and communist movements in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s and for communist movements in the Third World during the Cold War.
Unfortunately, that type of poor judgment has repeatedly plagued portions of the opinion elite in the United States. President Ronald Reagan once described the Nicaraguan Contras as the moral equivalent of America’s own founders—an assertion that probably caused Washington, Jefferson and Madison to whirl in their graves. Americans across the political spectrum reflexively praised the Afghan mujahedeen as “freedom fighters,” even as evidence mounted that the anti-Soviet resistance was dominated by the most reactionary, authoritarian religious elements. Contrary to the assertions of American admirers, even the term mujahedeen meant “holy warriors,” not freedom fighters—a very different connotation indeed...