It is not US President Donald Trump’s untrue claim of a genocide against Christians in Nigeria, his claim of affinity to ‘cherished Christians’ when he does not go to church, or his threat to come ‘guns-a-blazing’ to Nigeria that worry me today. He said Nigeria is now a ‘disgraced country’ because killings, state sponsored or not, religiously specific or not, amount to genocide and a country stands disgraced if it cannot end it.
Mr. Trump, could you kindly stop the genocide against school pupils in the US? Between 2000 and 2022 alone, more than 300 school shootings occurred in the United States. The deadliest ones include the April 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia [33 people killed, 23 others injured]; 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut [28 deaths]; 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas [22 killed]; and the 2018 Parkland High School shooting in Parkland, Florida [17 dead]. Stop this genocide against cherished schoolchildren!
The 1978 genocide at Peoples Temple in Guyana was a religious genocide that disgraced the United States. Reverend Jim Jones, after killing visiting US Congressman Leo Ryan, ordered his temple’s members to lick cyanide. 913 of them did while Jones shot himself; it was a disgraceful genocide. As was the 1993 FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents’ 53-day siege of the religious cult Branch Davidians’ compound at Waco, Texas, led by Reverend David Koresh. Fire then engulfed the compound and 86 people died, a disgraceful genocide of a cherished Christian sect.
If Nigeria is disgraced because security forces have not succeeded in crushing insurgents and terrorists who are fighting asymmetric warfare, then the US was disgraced because it deployed 775,000 troops in Afghanistan over a 19 years and ten months’ period, at a cost of $2 trillion, with 2,459 soldiers killed and another 20,000 wounded, yet turned tails and ran and the Taliban were back in power. Anything more disgraceful than that? Except perhaps Vietnam where, between 1955 and 1975, US deployed half a million troops, spent $168 billion ($1 trillion in today’s dollars), had 58,220 killed and 300,000 troops wounded, while it killed an estimated two million Vietnamese. After 20 years, US troops escaped from Saigon Embassy rooftops and the Communists captured all of South Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive of January 1968 was very disgraceful, using Mr Trump’s definition. On Tet [the lunar new year], North Vietnamese and Communist Viet Cong forces launched a coordinated attack on South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon and 36 of the country’s 44 provincial capitals. The attackers even penetrated the presidential palace and the U.S. embassy compound. It was a big disgrace that the same US Air Force and US Navy that used napalm against Vietnamese troops, buildings, jungles and railroad tunnels came back 28 years later looking for Saddam Hussein’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, which didn’t exist.
Korean War of 1950 to 1953 was a big disgrace, using Mr. Trump’s parameters. By the time it ended with the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, exactly where it started three years earlier, 36,574 U.S. service members were killed, including 4,800 troops who were missing and presumed dead. Meanwhile, up to four million people died in that war.
Nigeria cannot protect all its troops and policemen from terrorists, but did the US protect its troops from the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut in October 1983? A suicide bomber rammed a truck bomb into the barracks, killing 220 Marines and 21 other service personnel. President Reagan then ordered the Marines to escape from Lebanon, a very big disgrace if you ask me. In nearby Yemen in 2000AD, US lost 17 sailors with 38 others wounded when suicide terrorists exploded a small boat next to the destroyer USS Cole.
Or even protect its embassies. In August 1998, bombs exploded almost simultaneously in front of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the heart of Africa. Two hundred and twenty-four people died in the blasts, including 12 Americans, and more than 4,500 people were wounded. Much more disgraceful was the episode nine years earlier when revolutionary Iranian students captured the US Embassy in Tehran and held 66 American diplomats and civilian personnel hostage for 444 days. When a US military mission was sent to rescue them, one helicopter collided with a transport plane in the Iranian desert and the mission ended in abject failure.
Another disgraceful episode was the 2012 attack on the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, where U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were all killed, a big disgrace for then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even though we understood that it was supposed to be a humanitarian mission to save Somali people from the chaos of clans warfare, was the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu not an absolute disgrace for the United States? Rag tag Somali insurgents shot down a Black Hawk chopper and downed another one that came for rescue. And US troops soon escaped from the country with their tails between their legs.
What about the December 1981 abduction of Brigadier James Dozier, a top American official at NATO headquarters in Verona, Italy by the Marxist–Leninist guerilla group Italian Red Brigades? He spent 42 days in captivity, and was only found with help from the Italian Mafia, with which the Italian police struck a deal. In Nigeria here, do we have a La Cosa Nostra to help us find the hiding places of abducted people? Even the ‘vaunted’ planes that Mr. Trump is threatening to send to strike terrorist targets in Nigeria, is he sure it will not end in a big disgrace, like the May 1960 incident when the US Airforce U-2 reconnaissance plane and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, were shot down over the Soviet Union? Although US government at first denied it, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev later displayed the captured pilot and wreckage of his plane, to permanent American disgrace.
Instead of protecting its embassies and officials, US was busy deploying military might against tiny countries, such as its 1983 invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada. Even there, it suffered 135 casualties. The big North American bully, disgracefully, regularly invades small countries in the neighbourhood, such as its 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, leading to a year’s occupation. It wasn’t even the first; US disgracefully invaded Dominica in 1916, occupied it until 1924, and it even wanted to annex it.
Only that, the big bully met a very big disgrace when, in April 1961, CIA sponsored 1,500 Cuban exiles to launch an invasion of the Bahía de Cochinos [Bay of Pigs] coast of Cuba in order to overthrow the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. They were disgracefully repelled; many were killed or captured; two US B-26 bombers were shot down and four Americans were killed. Did Nigeria ever invade any country just because it did not like its government? Cuba was neither the first nor the last disgraceful American invasion of small countries because the CIA sponsored a coup in Iran in 1953 that overthrew Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh because he nationalised Iranian oil fields. And the disgraceful 1973 CIA-sponsored coup in Chile that led to the killing of President Salvador Allende Gossens, to the consternation of the whole world.
Look, you superpower guys were caught napping on 7 December, 1941 when the Imperial Japanese Navy fleet commanded by Admiral Yamamoto crossed the vast Pacific Ocean under radio silence, sneaked up to your naval base at Pearl Harbour, destroyed sixteen ships and many aircraft and killed
2,390 of your service men. How can you now call Nigeria a disgrace because our North East Theatre Command did not detect the movement of an ISWAP suicide bomber squad?
Mr. Trump, your country’s Civil War of April 1861 to May 1865 was big disgrace. 618,222 people were said to have died, 360,222 from the Union side which won the war, and 258,000 from the Confederate side that lost the war. If not disgraceful, where else did the winner of a war suffer more casualties than the side that lost the war? While your civil war lasted a whole four years and a month, our Nigerian Civil War was over in 30 months, which shows we were more humane than you guys were.
In Nigeria, we have protected our leaders from assassins much better than you guys did. Only two of our heads of government were killed while they were in office, in 1966 and in 1976. What about you guys, with your ‘vaunted’ Secret Service, FBI, CIA, National Guard and many city police forces? President Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865; President James Garfield was shot in 1881; President William McKinley was shot in 1901 and President John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. President Reagan narrowly escaped assassination in 1981 and Mr. Trump had his ear grazed by a bullet. In the 1960s alone, your prominent citizens Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy were all assassinated, so which one is more disgraceful?
You said we allowed Shekau, Al-barnawi, Dogo Gide, Bello Turji, Ado Aleiro and Gwaska Dankarami to run amok in our localities. You guys, didn’t you let Al Capone, Ma Baker, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratiano and John Gotti loose in your biggest cities? Was that not a big disgrace?
