It seems that no one pays attention to Africa, except when it comes to Egypt and Libya recently. Egypt is right on the border of Israel, and Libya (as was said here at FR multiple times by several people in the past) is a major provider of oil to France and Germany and other Western European countries. That may be why we went in...
Neither Bill Clinton, George Bush and Obama, too, paid much attention to sub-Saharan Africa, despite the massive atrocities in Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere...
I don’t know about presidents, but they don’t matter as much as people pretend, anyway. You better believe the U.S. has been paying attention to Subsaharan Africa, just like it pays attention to everywhere, because we are World Police. We meddle in everything!
Do you really maintain Clinton didn’t pay attention to Somalia? I suggest you rent “Black Hawk Down.” We have this thing called Africom, which has official dominion over the whole thing. Then there’s the CIA, which goes anywhere and apparently is subject to none of the laws of God and man. I wouldn’t be surprised whatsoever if Boko Haram’s leadership had been trained by us in Somalia or other places we’ve been active: the Sudan, Algeria, Mali, Kenya, Uganda, maybe outside of Africa in Afghanistan and elsewhere, even. This is how our empire works.
Africa has long been a battleground in the amorphous War on Terror, during which our main strategy has appeared to be to go where terrorists aren’t and beckon them with our idiotic policies. We have friendly countries (for now) like Ethiopia, Uganda, etc., which we use as bases for airstrikes against enemies like Somalia, as well as for secret CIA prisons and the like. We fund Strongmen to run these countries, as well as militias to fight the other militias that we don’t like, which often were funded and/or trained by us in the past. We also send our own ground troops in to protect our allies when they feel shaky, as Obama did in Uganda in 2009. Kenya, one of our gang, invaded Somalia a few years ago; I bet you forgot about that. Don’t get me started on the Congo. If things get bad enough we invade, unplug and replug the cord, and boot the country back up. But that’s only if the people can be goaded into caring enough.
As for Rwanda, that appears on everyone’s list of shoulda-been wars—when I say everyone, I mean the everyone that matters, as in the ones who want to start wars everywhere—so I understand why it’d lead you to believe we’ve been hands-off. But just because there was better reason to be there than, for instance, the moral swamp that was Kosovo doesn’t mean our fingers haven’t been in the African pie. The very fact that there’s so much second guessing of our nonintervention implies to me that we were right there to intervene, and that our not doing so was our acting like the non-Samaritans in the Good Samaritan story. You have to be right there not doing anything to be the foil for the Samaritan. It doesn’t work if you’re halfway across the globe and self-involved, as used to be the case long, long ago.
The tragedy of Africa isn’t a result of our meddling. It’s been a basketcase since Europe pulled out, and it was a sob story during the colonial era, with parts of it being hearts of darkness, of course. Anyway, the point is we’ve been there kindling the fire, even if we didn’t start it. And nothing ever happens quite to our liking, whether it’s our fault or not. But it’s definitely not because we’ve been ignoring the Subsaharin part. Because we haven’t, though the MSM may not have informed you. I can’t help but feel one of the few reasons we’re hearing about Boko Haram now, aside from the fact that it too obviously has had outside influence, perhaps from Al-Queda, is that Nigeria is a large oil exporter.