Dear Ambassador Bolton:

Welcome to Philadelphia. I know your time is valuable, so let me get into business right away. It's about a matter that has waited and waited and waited. It should linger no longer.

The U.N. Security Council has a very real chance to end the 20-year war between a rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army and the government of President Yoweri Museveni in northern Uganda.

As wars too often do, it has killed thousands, emptied communities, sundered families. But this conflict has an added quality: More than any other in the world, this war is aimed directly at children.

Here's the BlackBerry-brief recap: The Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, began fighting the government in the 1980s when Museveni seized power in a military coup. The Acholi people dominate the north and have legitimate grievances against Museveni, who is not Acholi.

Acholis, though, reject the extremist Joseph Kony as their messenger. His way of punishing them - he thinks of it as cleansing them - for their disloyalty is to kidnap their children. He has abducted about 30,000 children so far and forced them to become soldiers and sex slaves.

These atrocities have earned Kony and his crew a spot on the U.S. terrorist list, and indictments from the International Criminal Court on war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Twenty years. Think about it, Ambassador Bolton.

You were born in 1948 in Baltimore, right? You graduated from the McDonogh School in Owings Mill, Md., in 1966. In 1968, when you were about 20, you were midway through earning your bachelor's degree in political science from Yale.

That's a lot to accomplish in your first 20 years. And those decades prepared you for your many achievements to come.

As the U.S. representative to the United Nations and the Security Council, you have the chance to give the kids of northern Uganda some opportunities in their lives - other than rape and abduction.

That's the moral and spiritual case for leading this charge. Set Christmas as the goal for when the violence will end for these mainly Christian children.

A national security case also demands U.S. leadership on this.

We should be seeking to avert the instability the LRA is stoking in eastern and central Africa.

The LRA has long operated in northern Uganda and southern Sudan, where it has gotten support from the same Sudanese government that stalks civilians in the Darfur region.

Recently, LRA fighters have spread their mayhem to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which itself is trying to come out from a long war. Unconfirmed reports suggest the group also has been in the Central African Republic.

Chaos is exactly what al-Qaeda looks for when shopping for hideouts. That's the appeal of Somalia, where al-Qaeda is thought to be setting up shop.

As with Darfur, the humanitarian catastrophe in northern Uganda cannot be resolved without sustained attention and pressure from the United States and the United Nations.

Here is what you, Mr. Ambassador, can do to be a leader on this issue among your Security Council colleagues. Propose a resolution that includes these provisions (some of which come from civil society groups working in northern Uganda):

Name an expert panel to track the LRA and identify its financial and materiel supporters.

Devise a process, with benchmarks for action, to place sanctions on those people identified as supporting the LRA.

Urge combatants to establish an immediate cease-fire.

Call on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to appoint a special envoy to the region in which the LRA operates.

Press Museveni to use his troops to protect his own civilians, and to address more aggressively, in tandem with aid groups, the north's sour humanitarian situation.

The next point may be cynical, but so be it.

This war, according to experts within Uganda and outside of it, can be resolved. There may be other challenges, but there is no oil in Uganda to gum up Security Council action as has been the case with the genocide in Darfur. "Never again" could actually be achieved in Uganda with enough effort from the United States and the Security Council.

President Bush has been having a tough political time lately. Wouldn't it be satisfying if he could help the children of northern Uganda grow in peace for the first time in their lives? Wouldn't that be a wondrous Christmas gift?