Michael Gerson also weighed in with his opinions on the LRA in Friday’s Washington Post. I give Gerson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, credit for writing on issues like the Lord’s Resistance Army and Darfur at a time when they often don’t get a great deal of attention. Gerson is absolutely correct in making the case that Joseph Kony, head of the LRA, is as loathsome as possible, and in urging the international community to reach some resolution to the conflict. But I do worry that his account of the recent raid by the Ugandan military against LRA forces sounds just a little too tidy. Military operations in that corner of the world are rarely pretty, and initial indications from our field people suggest the operation had some real problems on the ground. This is not to rule out the military option against Kony, only to be honest about its potential implications and degree of difficulty.