How many more innocents had to die in order to do justice to the relative handful of evil men leading those nations?

You’ve got Hitler, Goebbels, Mussolini, and Hirohito in a jail cell. You can kill them, but in order to do so, you’ve got to kill 10,000 innocent civilian women and children first. Otherwise, you have to let those four men be sentenced to exile…but the innocent civilians live.

This isn’t a made-up choice. This is the choice the UN faced with Idi Amin in Uganda in the 1970’s when it was seen that he was committing genocide, and — according to rumor — eating some of his victims. The UN could invade and take him down and execute him after trial at The Hague, but that would have cost many thousands of lives and billions of dollars and would have resulted in the ruin of the nation’s infrastructure. What the UN did instead was to allow some Arab oil tycoon to pay Idi Amin a “generous subsidy” to step down and live in exile for the rest of his life in Saudi Arabia.

Was that justice? Surely not. But many thousands of Ugandans are alive today because of the choice the UN made. Today, Uganda’s one of the more prosperous nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

I’d like to see your response to this.