The Left Just Broke the Dial on Niger

Four American soldiers were killed in Niger by jihadis. People unclear on the concept of what goes on during a war have twisted the volume dial way past 11.

If a United States senator is unaware of what America's military is doing in Niger, he hasn't been paying attention. Just reading this blog would get you back to the Obama and Bush administrations (with bonus drone base news here and here!).

Liberals seem to be trying to make the ambush in Niger that killed four of our special forces soldiers (along with Nigerien troops) a scandal on par with Benghazi. But while there may have been some failings in the mission that we can learn from, the fact that troops die during war is hardly a scandal.

And inconveniently, I heard on CNN that low-flying planes unable to drop ordnance because of Niger policy did scare off the jihadi attackers. I do believe I (and others) wondered why we didn't try that tactic at Benghazi.

We're waging a war, nimrods, to keep problems from growing to Boko Haram or ISIL scale. Indeed, one reason I promoted modularized auxiliary cruisers for AFRICOM was to provide off-shore back-up for deployed forces. That capability wouldn't have helped so far inland in this case, of course, unless a force based on such a ship forward deployed to an inland base. But the need is there.

As I noted in the "Obama" link, if what AFRICOM does works well we'd never know about it. A small portion went wrong in Niger, and so all of a sudden a lot of people are aware of what has been going on in plain sight. But just because it is new to them doesn't mean it is new.

Apparently, because of this ambush, leftists have gone from the butterfly effect to the Trump effect--anything bad anywhere traces its cause back to Donald Trump.

Noted military strategist and geography major Rachel Maddow drew a connecting line from Chad being on our travel ban, to Chad's withdrawal of troops from Niger, to the ISIL attack that killed four American four special forces soldiers there.

Yet there is no relationship between America withdrawing from Iraq in 2011 and the rise of ISIL to take over northwest Iraq in 2014. Got it.

Look at a map, people. Chad withdrew troops from eastern Niger and the attack took place in western Niger. And Trump is the magical link between places as far apart as Detroit, Michigan and Jacksonville, Florida? Get a grip people. Turning the dial to 11 every damn day hasn't been enough?

Actually, if Maddow would focus the power of her ginormous and nuanced brain, there is a link: jihadis.

Chad is on the travel ban list because it can't reliably verify that people coming to America from there aren't jihadis; and American troops along with Nigerien troops were killed in Niger because of jihadis.

So the link is jihadis who live to kill. Perhaps Maddow and her ilk will get right on examining that problem. There are effects all over the world because of Islamist killers.

[As a side note, sometimes my weekend data dump is an incubator for ideas I promote up to an individual post. This started as three different notes in that category.]

UPDATE: Dial it back, people. There is no excuse for leaders to claim they did not know what we've been doing in Africa for quite some time now.

NOTE: I fixed a small grammar error for clarity.