No help for the Congo

Newsweek reports:

While the world wrings its hands over the fate of an estimated quarter million people caught up in the roiling conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it seems likely that little will actually be done about the long-running African civil war. The best bet for stopping the violence, the United Nations' 17,000-strong multilateral peacekeeping force, known as MONUC, is spread thin and considered ineffective; it will take months to increase its presence in the country. The European Union is reluctant to deploy a crack force, and southern African leaders have committed only to sending in a "technical team." The world's response, in the words of Henri Boshoff, a military expert for the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, is likely to be "too little too late."

And herein lies my frustration with the Iraq war. I won't even begin to describe what I think about the feckless, ineffective, shameless United Nations--but the US should not be tied down either in foolish wars or in the foolish exercise of protecting ungrateful allies from threats they denounce as false...