Richard Fernandez:
A video showing abducted Nigerian schoolgirls converting to Islam may cast doubt on narratives that Boko Haram problem is really about patriarchal fears of women’s education (“why are men scared of smart girls”) or simple “ethnic tensions” in Nigeria.
Boko is wired. Heather Murdoch of the Christian Science Monitor writes: “three weeks after hundreds of teenage girls were abducted while taking exams, it remains unclear how many girls were taken, who they are, who did it, at what time, and exactly how.”
On the same day that a man looking nearly identical to Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau released a video of 100 girls kidnapped by his group – the official Nigerian response in the nation’s capital was to claim that Mr. Shekau is dead.
Actually, the government’s position is that Shekau has been dead for some time – a position widely seen here as a form of counter-propaganda designed to dispirit Boko Haram members.
Nobody becomes that invisible without influence. The terror group Hillary never wanted to name seems to have an influence all out of proportion to its rag-tag appearance. Maybe there’s another root cause for Boko Haram. How about oil? The left-wing Guardian actually advances this thesis, only it uses the word “climate change” in place of hydrocarbons. “Islamist militancy in Nigeria is being strengthened by western and regional fossil fuel interests.” Boko Haram is about climate change.
Close but not quite. Boko Haram might be about oil. The Voice of America noted in Feburary that Boko Haram had threatened to destroy oil refineries. After all, Nigeria sells about 40% of its oil to the United States, of which it is a major supplier. And Nigeria a big player on the world market. Big enough to make oil producers in the Gulf care what happens to it.
Wikipedia says “Nigeria’s proven oil reserves are estimated by the U.S. United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) at between 16 and 22 billion barrels (3.5×109 m3), but other sources claim there could be as much as 35.3 billion barrels (5.61×109 m3). Its reserves make Nigeria the tenth most petroleum-rich nation, and by the far the most affluent in Africa. In mid-2001 its crude oil production was averaging around 2.2 million barrels (350,000 m³) per day”.
So maybe it’s not about climate change. Not directly anyway. Across the Pacific China is openly moving oil rigs into the South China Sea. The Wall Street Journal’s latest article is succinctly titled: “China Answers Obama. An 80-ship flotilla plants a Chinese oil rig in Vietnamese waters.”
Less than a week after President Obama’s Asian Reassurance Tour, Beijing offered its rejoinder, sending a flotilla of 80 military and civilian ships to install China’s first oil rig in disputed South China Sea waters, well within Vietnam’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone. When some 30 Vietnamese naval vessels demanded the rig’s withdrawal on Sunday, China’s ships responded by ramming several of the Vietnamese boats and injuring six sailors. …
The truth is that this is China’s latest attempt to revise the East Asian status quo through intimidation and force. China claims sovereignty over some 90% of the 1.35-million-square-mile South China Sea, and it is staking that claim by flexing its muscle around the sea’s outer reaches. Along the eastern edge, China seized Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012. Since March it has blockaded Philippine Marines on Second Thomas Shoal.
This week’s oil standoff also wasn’t begun on a whim. China developed the CNOOC 0883.HK +1.08% 981 rig so it would not depend on foreign companies to drill in contested waters. “Large deepwater drilling rigs are our mobile national territory,” explained Wang Yilin, chairman of state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation, in 2012. The sea grab follows several years of gradually intensifying pressure—from Chinese tourist boats landing on disputed South China Sea islands, to Chinese fishing vessels cutting the acoustic cables of Vietnamese oil exploration ships.
As Chinese-Vietnamese relations have worsened, Hanoi has procured new military hardware—including Kilo-class submarines, guided-missile frigates, land-based antiship cruise missiles and jet fighters—and sought closer ties with India, Japan and the U.S. The Vietnamese and U.S. militaries held their first joint naval exercises in 2012, a year after a U.S. Navy ship called at Cam Ranh Bay for the first time since the Vietnam War.
It looks like China suspects what game is afoot and, like some supersized Oklahama land-man, is acquiring all the drilling acreage it can, while in the West the media prattle on about “smart girls” and “Islam being hijacked” and “climate change”.
Even the Washington Post is yelling and screaming at the Obama administration. The editorial board wrote: “A Beijing power play in the South China Sea is met with U.S. inaction”. Not to worry. A State Department hashtag is probably being crafted as we speak.
WITH A $1 billion oil rig the size of a football field, China has literally laid down a new marker in its ambition to dominate the South China Sea — and challenged President Obama’s “rebalancing” policy in Asia, only weeks after the president’s tour of the region. The rig is about 130 miles off the coast of Vietnam, in waters that Vietnam claims as an exclusive economic zone under international law. China’s claim is more tenuous, but it is backed up with a flotilla of some 80 ships that for a week have engaged in a dangerous contest of ramming and water-hosing Vietnamese vessels.
The message of the deployment is as simple as it is provocative: The regime of Xi Jinping intends to unilaterally assert China’s sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea without regard for the competing claims of five other countries or Mr. Obama’s newly restated commitment to uphold defense agreements with two of those nations. In that sense, the rig, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is a fundamental challenge to the international order the United States has tried to preserve since the end of the Cold War.
Japan certainly gets it. Defense News reports that a Japanese commission will probably recommend revising the country’s pacifist constitution.
You read this and you wonder; what IS the next Dem presidential candidate going to run on?
Certainly NOT Obama’s record of foreign and domestic failure.
But then what?
@Nanny G:
Probably the discarding of the US Constitution, and the assimilation of this nation into a united one world government under UN rule as a means to “world peace.”
Of course they’ll come up with some inane marketing catch phrases to sell it to the low information lefties, like “Dream of Peace” or “Hopey Changy II”
@Nanny G: They don’t have to run on anything. The MSM takes care of those troublesome details, digging relentlessly for dirt on the Republican (creating it, if need be) and running interferrence for the selected Democrat, hiding the warts and glorifying the failures.