Despite lingering concerns about the cost and scope of the mission, President Obama’s recent decision to send 100 combat-equipped Special Forces to quell the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA—a group of insurgents marauding around Central Africa—was met with a decent display of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill this past month. Senator Jim Inhofe is on board. So is Obama’s old nemesis, John McCain, albeit with reservations. (As for Rush Limbaugh—well, he’s getting plenty of pushback from his own side of the aisle.) And cooperation on this issue is nothing new: Last year, in May of 2010, Obama signed into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, a piece of legislation which had overwhelming bipartisan support, and which gave the White House the mandate it needed for the current deployment.

It’s no accident that conservatives and liberals alike feel compelled to intervene in this conflict. For years, they've been hearing reports about the terrible crimes perpetrated in Uganda by the LRA. (The country is a favorite destination of evangelical missionaries, many of whom have publicized the crisis in D.C.) Over the past several decades, the militia—whose purported goal is to overthrow the Ugandan government and create a Christian theocracy ruled by its long-time leader Joseph Kony—has displaced millions from their homes and murdered tens of thousands. The LRA has also specialized in particularly heinous acts of brutality: grotesque mutilations (the routine slicing off of victims’ lips and ears), pre-pubescent child soldiering, forced fratricide, and the widespread massacres of entire villages—all done with the goal of cowering civilians into submission and swelling the ranks of its forced conscripts.

And yet, while U.S. activism has largely been couched in the language of humanitarianism, there are also important, and surprising, strategic issues at stake. Of course, eliminating the LRA will bring a measure of peace to Central Africa. But the Obama administration’s deployment is also intended to counter the regional ambitions of the rogue state of Sudan, and to maintain stability in the newly independent country of South Sudan. In that way, the humanitarian rhetoric in Washington has deflected attention from some of the major rationales for the military mission—and it may confuse how we eventually evaluate its success.

FOR MOST OF SUDAN’S post-colonial history, the country has been in the throes of civil war, pitting different regions against one another, but especially the South against the North. Historically, Uganda, which was Sudan’s southern neighbor, had backed the South in these conflicts.

When Uganda’s current president, Yoweri Museveni, swept the state in 1986, he made a renewed commitment, both logistical and material, to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army, which at the time was only the latest in a string of southern rebels fighting a quasi-secessionist war against the Sudanese government in Khartoum. (Today, the SPLM/A is the main governing party in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan.) President Museveni had a strategic rationale for intervening in Sudan, but he was also motivated ideologically—that is to say, by the perceived racism of Sudan’s Arab-dominated government. In an official Ugandan government profile, Museveni proudly declares himself “a lone figure in speaking out against the human injustice meted out on the Black people of Southern Sudan by racial bigotry.”