Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror

Author (The Invisible Cure), journalist (The New York Times), public health consultant, and professor (human rights & global public health, Bard Coll.) Epstein weaves the life story of Ugandan journalist, political activist, and professor Kiwanuka Lawrence Nsereko into the modern history of Uganda to expose the unconscionable decades-long support by the United States and other Western governments of President Yoweri Museveni, a murderous dictator who has plundered foreign aid and natural resource funds to gain wealth and power and install and maintain similar strongmen in neighboring African nations. Epstein demonstrates how Museveni played U.S. administrations from Reagan through Obama by selling himself as the bulwark of democracy against Islamist extremism in East and Central Africa, building an army to intervene in (and exacerbate) conflicts in neighboring countries on behalf of "Western interests" in the "war on terror." Though others have written about Uganda in this context (Epstein cites particularly Ogenga Otunnu's Crisis of Legitimacy and Political Violence in Uganda), Epstein's book is well written, well documented, and brief enough that it should be widely read.