Former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) says if he were president he’d send special forces to
Nigeria to rescue nearly 300 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram last
month whether the Nigerian government wanted to or not.
The Daily Beast reports:
“If they knew where they were, I certainly would send
in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would,
without permission of the host country,” McCain told The Daily
Beast on Tuesday. “I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of
permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan,” he added,
referring to the president of Nigeria.
The U.S.
offered to send a team of specialists to help the Nigerian
government find and rescue the kidnapped girl, pressuring Nigeria
until it definitively accepted the effort. McCain said the U.S.
shouldn’t wait for Nigeria to ok a military operation because the
government “such as it is,” would be grateful after the fact, and
said it would bring a “high point” of popularity for President
Obama.
McCain said he would have the right to act militarily under the
United Nations charter, because he considers the kidnapping a
“crime against humanity.” As The Daily Beast notes, McCain
has for a long time consistently been in favor of an aggressively
interventionist U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, his
justification for U.S. action in Nigeria mirrors the kind of
justification regularly deployed by the Obama administration, from
the intervention in Libya, for which President Obama did not seek
authorization from Congress, to the attempted intervention in
Syria.
That line of thinking, broadly called “the responsibility to
protect,” is not so significantly different from the justification
for intervention used by more traditional neoconservatives; making
the world safe for democracy. Both justifications ignore the
constitutional process by which the U.S. ought to make war and
conflate U.S. national security interest with broad humanitarian
concerns, and both have the effect of expanding the reach of
American empire.
Related:
read four reasons U.S. intervention in Nigeria would be a bad
idea, because McCain won’t.
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