Nigeria & America

When Nigeria rises to the surface of America's (mis)information streams and you're even asked a question by a family member on the South Side, you need to write. After my first time in Nigeria a decade ago, the number of times I've had discussions on Nigeria with my fellow Americans can be counted on one hand. Telling most Americans you've worked in Nigeria, not once, but twice, they just stare back dumbfounded.

Another pressing need to write comes when the NYT publishes two articles in two days siting "experts." Just like yesterday, I'm still waiting a call. To the Times credit, in the third paragraph, it quotes Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto saying Sokoto, where the cruise missiles struck, does not have a Christian persecution problem. Though it says everything that the Times didn't talk to the Bishop himself, they pulled the quote from the net. The rest of the article is a mishmash of mostly BS that over the years no entity has helped perpetuate more than the NYT.

First and foremost, the administration claims they bombed ISIS. The Times does question the assertion, but since its formation, the Times has endlessly claimed ISIS as some sort of global existential menace. The administration's just following the Times well established lede.

Remember, it was the US invasion and occupation of Iraq that created ISIS. They brutally wreaked havoc on Iraq, the country we had pummeled to rubble to save us from fictitious "weapons of mass destruction." Remember too, the NYT endlessly propagandized those weapons to push for the invasion. Is what's ever left of ISIS today have any connection to Sokoto? Not likely.

Secondly, it gets even more depressing when you're reminded "Little Marco" and the whacked out Christian Princeton grad of the newly christened "War Department" are running things. You want to ask have they confused Nigeria and Venezuela?

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu agreed to the strikes and the Nigerians provided the targets. Phew, one needs to ask who was sought to be skewered here?

One of Nigeria's opposition parties wagged, "This is what happens when a government behaves as though governance is all about revenue collection." Say what you will about the Tinubu, he's spent a life making a lot of money in all sorts of ventures. No doubt just as our Tech boys in the Valley, the Asiwaju understands there's no greater fatted calf on this planet than the American military industrial complex. Those twelve Tomahawks slammed into Sokoto cost at least $25 million. Though no one really knows the costs, certainly not the members of our infamously split Congress who just voted – 312 to 112 in the House and 77 to 20 in the Senate – a trillion dollars in war spending for one year.

No good will come out of this. You'd be hard pressed to look at any actions taken by America's National Security State over the last 75 years and say they've accomplished anything more than sorrow, tears, and blood.

I recently read Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. It was written in the throes of Europe destroying itself in World War II. It has a great history of how all nationalism was birthed from brutal force. She wrote the only true feeling one could have for the nation state is one of pity. Poor Nigeria. Poor America.