US president Donald Trump announced on social media that the US military had fired missiles at targets in northwest Nigeria on Christmas Day.
Early reports at the scenes where the bombs landed in Sokoto State suggested that they went down like lead balloons. Ladan Salihu, a former director-general of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria took to Twitter to describe what happened:
Norman Finkelestein once said: “If you ever feel useless, remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars and four US presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban”. One would think this type of record should discourage any Nigerian supporter of Trump’s declared aim to destroy “Terrorist Scum” in Nigeria. But critical thinking is not a trait you would associate with many of them.
Additionally, there is zero evidence since 1945 of US intervention improving things for any country. Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria, etc have all been the same tale of making a bad situation worse.
Then you have the smell around all this of diversion from a sex scandal. On 20 August 1998 US president Bill Clinton, claiming to fight terrorism, ordered a cruise missile attack on a pharma plant in Sudan that produced 90% of the country’s supply. Most observers agreed that the president’s actions were to divert attention from his troubles at home with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Trump is in a similar pickle with the drip, drip release of The Epstein Files.
His involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged paedophilia has troubled his Christian Evangelical base. He may think posturing as a defender of the faith worldwide, with a symbolic strike at “that discredited country” may appease his critics. These points were made in an RT interview by Adamu Garba, a former Nigerian senator. Garba added that oil had been discovered in the “Sokoto Basin”. This may be the backdrop for Trump’s decision to ignore Nigeria’s northeast, where there is an established ISIS presence and is in line with the US president’s sabre-rattling against oil rich Venezuela, claiming the government is involved in drug trafficking.
As if all these were not bad enough, very few Nigerians have asked themselves why bombing has been the standard operating procedure for the US in allegedly fighting terror. The British military fought with the IRA in Northern Ireland for 30 years and never once deployed bombs in IRA strongholds in the province. You didn’t need to be a military strategist to recognise they wanted to avoid civilian casualties.
This type of courtesy doesn’t seem to be accorded to black or brown people. Trump’s white supremacist thinking is hardly surprising, but Nigerians, who should know better, have been bamboozled by such odious notions and have contributed in normalising them.
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