The Inevitable Karma that Attends Looking for Trouble — the United States Has Now Established a Drone Base in Niger (Africa) — and Anti-Terrorist Imam Boureima Abdou Daouda Sums the Risk in a Simple Metaphor

26 March 2013

While Congress and the American public rest complacently in the arms of America’s drone murder program—

The Obama Administration is expanding its drone reach across an ever widening expanse of the Islamic resistance that it itself repeatedly inflames with stupidly provocative actions.

This illegal and geopolitically witless policy grows like cancer within a cancer.

American drones are now in Niger, Africa

From Craig Whitlock at the Washington Post:

Since taking office in 2009, President Obama has relied heavily on drones for operations, both declared and covert, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.

U.S. drones also fly from allied bases in Turkey, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines.

Now, they are becoming a fixture in Africa.

The U.S. military has built a major drone hub in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, and flies unarmed Reaper drones from Ethiopia. Until recently, it conducted reconnaissance flights over East Africa from the island nation of the Seychelles.

The Predator drones in Niger, a landlocked and dirt-poor country, give the Pentagon a strategic foothold in West Africa.

Niger shares a long border with Mali, where an al-Qaeda affiliate and other Islamist groups have taken root. Niger also borders Libya and Nigeria, which are also struggling to contain armed extremist movements.

Like other U.S. drone bases, the Predator operations in Niger are shrouded in secrecy.

“So what’s the problem, Pete? There are bad guys there.”

Sure there are. And I don’t like them, either.

But it apparently hasn’t occurred to the Potentate in the White House that killing innocents, as well as terrorists, with drones just expands the scope and ferocity of Islamic extremism across wider geographic swaths.

In Niger, for example, 90 percent the population is Muslim. In that important regard:

(1) At present, most Nigeriens seem to favor anti-terrorist action, so that the trouble which France is fighting in Mali doesn’t slop over into Niger. And, says Whitlock, civilian attired American military types only rarely venture off the drone base.

(2) But secrecy and America’s penchant for escalating surveillance into death-dealing has the already much demonstrated potential elsewhere for changing Nigerien opinion.

How Nigerien opinion might change

Secrecy works two ways. First and favorably, what you don’t know can’t hurt you:

“We just know there are drones; we don’t know what they are doing exactly,” said Djibril Abarchi, chairman of the Nigerien Association for the Defense of Human Rights, an independent watchdog group.

“Nothing is visible. There is no transparency in our country with military questions. No one can tell you what’s going on.”

But second and unfavorably, what you don’t know can piss you off, when you finally learn about it.

In this regard, Nigerien Imam Boureima Abdou Daouda — who is part of a religious organization that works to oppose terrorism — cautioned that:

[A]s in many African countries, the presence of foreign troops is a sensitive issue given the history of colonialism in Niger.

Daouda warned that the government could face trouble if it doesn’t shore up popular support and do a better job of publicly explaining why the American drones are necessary.

“Someone with bad intentions could say, ‘They are here to cause strife with Muslims,’ ” he said.

“People might demonstrate. They might riot. Big flames begin with little flames.”

The moral? — The Imam is prescient, big flames do start with little flames

The United States seems to be especially bone-headed in its repeated failure to consider the karmic downside of indulging in the perpetual provocation of other peoples.

Even if one does not grant me my premise that drone murder (done the way the Obama Administration does it) is both illegal and immoral — one should consider the possibility that the program is stupidly provocative in its overreaching scope.

Offsetting the convenience of basing drones close to the area where one might want to use them is the historically proven cost of upsetting the population the base sits among. When you stick an often blatantly Christian American military (or intelligence apparatus) among an Islamic public, problems are going to almost inevitably flare.

And that point doesn’t even get us to the problem of the rage that the drone killing of innocents does America’s image.

While the American public and Congress sleep on this issue, the Obama Administration is laying global ground for an eventual tide of anti-American backlash.

That is obviously not in our national interest. But Potentate Obama and his Spy Apparatus ignore the cost. Playing with murderous remotes is just so much fun. And it gives them (and us) a sense of global omnipotence that we do not actually possess.

Hubris still stains our souls. Even after Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In our unwarranted and continuing arrogance, we have (apparently) become a stupid and self-destructive people.

PeteFree.com

The Inevitable Karma that Attends Looking for Trouble — the United States Has Now Established a Drone Base in Niger (Africa) — and Anti-Terrorist Imam Boureima Abdou Daouda Sums the Risk in a Simple Metaphor