The Niger Junta has decided that the U.S. military presence in their country is "no longer justified." I am long out of touch with our strategy in West Africa, but it is my understanding that our airbase, just outside of Agadez, Niger, has been an important part of our grossly ineffective effort to stabilize West Africa. I presume that we operated strike as well as recon flights out of the base in some sort of "over-the-horizon" strategy against jihadist terror throughout the region. Up until the coup that brought the present military junta to power, France provided ground forces in country that I presume coordinated their equally ineffective anti-jihadist activities with us.
Because of lingering antipathy that originated long ago, during France's colonial control of West Africa, the French troops were thrown out of country immediately after the coup, but we managed to hang on for some time, because we were also providing significant economic aid to the corner stone of our West African strategy. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but I suspect that we demanded that the former president be reinstated and the coup reversed. We have long made a very big deal about our belief that democratic Niger was the shining light in West Africa. Last December, we told the junta that we were willing to restore aid and security ties with Niger if it met "certain conditions." I think that we were just told to go screw ourselves.
I do not, repeat do not, underestimate the difficulty that we face in dealing with the challenges involved in eliminating the instability that exists, not only in West Africa, but throughout most of the world, to include our own ghettos, but I continue to believe that unless we do, we will destroy ourselves, one way or the other, but most probably in a nuclear holocaust. Were I sufficiently influential, I would mount a concerted effort to address root causes of political instability all over the planet even though all of our well-meaning efforts to do precisely this have failed in the past. Those efforts were defeated by base corruption, stupidity, and impatience, all of which we are very familiar with here at home. There is a very real possibility that large assemblages of humans are incapable of finding their way through this minefield, but I argue that we must try if we are to avoid nuclear obliteration.
As you can readily understand, I do not see either Biden or Trump to be at all interested in mounting the effort that I favor. Both men would tell me that the American people are not in the slightest interested in doing that. I completely agree, and I believe that is what is destroying our leadership outside of our non-existent borders - not the specific blunders of either politician. Inside those same non-existent borders the disease is rooted in base stupidity and intellectual cowardice. We are smart enough to understand, but are afraid to do so. We invent other problems to argue about, because the real ones are too horrifying to consider seriously. The age of the fetus, the price of gas, the number of potato chips in the bag, pronouns, and our precious feelings are safer things to argue about.
The reason that we do not produce the leadership that we need is that you and I are afraid to think about the problems that we need to address. They are too monumental for our puny minds to encompass and so we look for leadership that will address the problems that we are willing to think about. We can't vote for Trump because be brags about grabbing a woman by the pussy. We can't vote for Biden because he can't figure out where to stand when he reads his speech. We cloth our "debates" in high sounding clap trap that fools absolutely no one other than ourselves.
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