The American war machine never needs much of an excuse for sending in the drones and imperial stormtroopers in the global crusade for financial plunder and corporate profits but nothing sells with the low-information types like a good old humanitarian intervention. Team America world police has just had exactly that drop into their laps with the kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by Muslim group Boko Haram, a perfect scenario for one of those good movie style commando raids to win hearts and minds in The Homeland. President Barack Obama got all choked up and vowed that there would be US help to find the missing girls and his spouse Michelle shamelessly milked their plight by using her weekly address to pander to female voters: "... what happened in Nigeria was not an isolated incident. It's a story we see every day as girls around the world risk their lives to pursue their ambitions" and promise US intervention "I want you to know that Barack has directed our government to do everything possible to support the Nigerian government's efforts to find these girls and bring them home," the first lady said. "In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams, and we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now". No mention of course of the untold thousands of dead children who have been the victims in America's ongoing phony war on terror - collateral damage.
Whenever it comes to American military incursions in foreign places there is no more prominent a pitchman for our exceptional acts of aggression than Arizona Senator John McCain and he is once again in rare form. Taking a break from palling around with his neo-Nazi pals in Ukraine, America’s preeminent warmonger and lunatic is calling for a full scale military intervention in Nigeria. McCain is a deranged old man who should long ago have been put out to pasture in any decent society continues to exert undue and enormous influence on US foreign policy and is braying for blood. The Pentagon pimp and media darling has called for sending US special forces into Nigeria without that country's permission and has taken to such childish (or senile) tactics as making fun of the Nigerian president's name - no wonder why Americans are hated throughout the world with guys like this as our public face. The surveillance drones are already flying over Nigeria - which they probably were even before the kidnappings took place - and you can bet that plans have already been concocted and only have to be given the green light by currently sitting Emperor Obama. McCain may be a mockery to anyone with any common sense and decency but the neocon megaphone Washington Post has his back as could be expected because there is never a military option that the editorial board won't shill for nor a country that they wouldn't have invaded by the USA, USA, USA.
Being that this is an election year and the feckless Democrats are terrified of being called out as chicken it is only a matter of time until Obama gives the order and the television lobotomized flock of star-spangled sheep will get a satisfying sniff of that intoxicating American whup-ass. There is never any money to rebuild infrastructure, bail out anyone who is not operating out of a Wall Street ivory tower or provide assistance to the ever besieged small business owners but there is always money for more militarist masturbation. For another viewpoint that you will find nowhere in the putrid excuse for a national media I would recommend this piece by Glen Ford over at the Black Agenda Report entitled "Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa" from which I excerpt the following:
A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the “international community” and the Nigerian military “Do something!” about the abduction by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the average U.S. consumer of packaged “news” products for knowing next to nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been “doing” to suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley pointed out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks carried “not a single television news story about Boko Haram” in all of 2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting over the past year.) But, that doesn’t mean the Nigerian army hasn’t been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of, mainly, young men in the country’s mostly Muslim north.
The newly aware U.S. public may or may not be screaming for blood, but rivers of blood have already flowed in the region. Those Americans who read – which, presumably, includes First Lady Michelle Obama, who took her husband’s place on radio last weekend to pledge U.S. help in the hunt for the girls – would have learned in the New York Times of the army’s savage offensive near the Niger border, last May and June. In the town of Bosso, the Nigerian army killed hundreds of young men in traditional Muslim garb “Without Asking Who They Are,” according to the NYT headline. “They don’t ask any questions,” said a witness who later fled for his life, like thousands of others. “When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot,” said a student. “They catch many of the others and take them away, and we don’t hear from them again.”
“When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot.”
The Times’ Adam Nossiter interviewed many refugees from the army’s “all-out land and air campaign to crush the Boko Haram insurgency.” He reported:
“All spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert, sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram — a shadowy, rarely glimpsed presence for most residents — for the violence. But the overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their country because of it.”
In just one village, 200 people were killed by the military.
Of course the indiscriminate murdering of Muslims is completely acceptable in America because the phony war on terror is indeed a war on Muslims and while the bewildered herd may be down with that and in many cases are inclined to invoke Jesus while throwing in with the slaughter those who are being targeted get it as do their loved ones who understandably will desire vengeance against the Great Satan. The war on terror is a masterful con job in that the September 11. 2001 attacks have been used for nearly thirteen years now to justify murder, torture, domestic surveillance and repression and most of all murdering Muslims. The hypocrisy over the weeping and gnashing of teeth over 300 kidnapped girls in Africa is as commonplace in 2014 as it is nauseating for anyone still possessing a soul.
