Well ain’t that nice: Bono got another award. That’s what will help our world be a better and nicer place, Bono getting another award. What makes this one even more sickening than the rest is the name of the award: “Man of Peace.” That’s right: in case any of you had any doubts, on December 16, 2008, a bunch of moldy international moochers got together and officially named Bono this year’s man of peace.

There are a lot of people worth hating in this world, but I can’t think of anybody more in need of two bullets in the torso and one in the head than our friend Bono. Or whatever his name is; “Bono” is the name he took when he started his little Christian-classic-rock ensemble U2. I guess it was an homage deal to Sonny and Cher: “Saint Bono, who was martyred by a ski-slope tree.” And the wacky name they gave their band, , U2, like “you too”—how’s that for witty and inclusive at the same time, the kind of humor even liberals can get. These guys were like the wits of the eighties, as you can see. Bono’s boyfriend from their Christian high school renamed himself “The Edge,” which is even funnier. When you think edgy, you sure think of guys like the boys in U2, edgemeisters like Bono who once booked a first-class airline ticket for his cowboy hat.

So here’s my contribution to fair and balanced: I’m inaugurating the first annual Man O’ War O’Wardz to commemorate the people who are trying to make the world a better place through war.

And I’m dead serious about that. There are times and places when war helps and “peace” hurts. Like the case of the man who gets our first MO’W O’Ward: General Laurent Nkunda, leader of the Tutsi militia in Eastern Congo. Nkunda is not only the coolest-looking guy on the planet, like a praying mantis in human form, he’s probably the most brilliant commander actually working on a front line right now. With as few as 3000 men, he’s in effective control of a huge chunk of Eastern Congo.

And he’s doing good by making war. A lot more good than Bono’s doing. Bono’s approach to Africa is to treat Africans like retards who need fulltime care. He wants the West to be Quakery with Africa, forgive them their debts so the sleazy leaders can run up some more billions to spend on estates in Europe. Send them more free food so the birthrate can rise without a hope in Hell of jobs and an infrastructure to support the kids they’re popping out. The idea behind Bono’s plan, if you can even call it an idea, is something like, “They’re so hopeless we have to give them everything and hope for the best.”

Now take my man, Laurent Nkunda. He came up out of nowhere, never asked anybody for a thing. Nobody even knows much about him because he’s always played his biographical details very close to the flak vest. He whipped a small Tutsi militia into such fantastic shape that it chased the gigantic robbin’, rapin’ army of Congo right out of the bush. And he did all this while his people, the Tutsi, were being slaughtered all through Rwanda. Nobody helped him or the Tutsi. Not Bono, not nobody. The first time the bleeding hearts got worried about Rwanda, and this is a matter of “historical record” as they say, was when RPF, the Tutsi militia, chased the Hutu genocidaires out of Rwanda with their pangas still dripping Tutsi women and kids’ blood. Then the UN came out in force, with all the free food and sympathy even Bono could ask.

The Tutsi didn’t complain. They don’t do complaining. They’re like the Prussians, tall and grim, and just as likely to be wiped out, too. They took back Rwanda and forgave the Hutu murderers.

The Tutsi, this little tribal army carved out of the survivors of the worst genocide in decades, kept walking west out of Rwanda and walked into a giant vacuum called “Congo.” The Congo Army was a dirty joke and collapsed when the disciplined Tutsi units approached, and the little army marched all the way to Kinshasa, where the leaders, including Nkunda, were fobbed off with fancy titles while the Kabilas, father and son, went about making the usual sleazy Congo deals with the Katanga rich boys, divvying up the country fresh. Nkunda was promoted to general in the Congo Army in 2004, but as he watched his friends from the bush picked off one by one, framed for treason or other joke crimes and disappeared, he got the idea that Kinshasa wasn’t a healthy place for a real man of war. That kind of peace was too dirty for him.

And there was work for a soldier back in eastern Congo. The Hutu genocidaires, those wonderful specimens of humanity who were sulking in the forests there after being forced out of Rwanda before they could finish off “the work” of killing every last Tutsi infant, responded to the Tutsis’ totally unprecedented softness and failure to take revenge by massacring and raping all the Tutsi civilians they could catch in Congo. It was like they decided to franchise Tutsi genocide to their new location.

That’s when Nkunda’s little army went in, to flush them out and protect his tribe. By this time Nkunda was commanding Tutsi units that had been “integrated” into the Congo Army, the 81st and 83rd Brigades. His units quit the Congo Army (which is run by and for Katanga mining barons and their tame officers) and fanned out through the bush to scatter the Hutu death squads, who fled without putting up a fight as usual.

If it weren’t for Bono and the UN and all the other Good People, the Tutsi would keep marching to victory. They’d carve out their own country in Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern Congo. And it would get rich in a couple of generations, once everyone around learned not to mess with it. And then there’d be actual peace in Central Africa, a kind of peace made by the locals, on local terms that everybody could understand: this is Tutsi country, so behave. We’re tougher and smarter and better-disciplined than you, and we want things productive and calm.

Well, that’s a natural, sensible outcome, so the Good People can’t stand the idea and they’ve declared Nkunda a “war criminal” in spite of the fact that the Tutsi forces have shown unbelievable restraint by any standards, never mind Congo standards.

As far as I can tell, it’s because Nkunda is a great man that the Good People hate him so much. Bono and his billionaire friends don’t want Prussian Africans. They want basket cases they can get their pictures taken giving handouts to. So excuse me if I say Nkunda, the man of war, is a better man on his own terms and in terms of making a better Africa, than Bono O’Phoney will ever be.

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

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