Obama can find a way to make just about anything about him.
I’ve been thinking about this global social media campaign surrounding the Nigerian school girl abduction, and I fear the attention delivered to al-Qaeda’s Boko Haram is going to end up backfiring negatively upon the kidnapped. The value of the abduction to Boko Haram has increased exponentially as the entire world is now looking at, and listening to, them.
Quiet and decisive military action within 72 to 96 hours of April 14th could have produced a good outcome. But a touchy feely media attention campaign, 3 weeks after the event, I fear has done nothing but provide time for AQIM to coordinate a hostile strategy. I hope I’m wrong….
WASHINGTON DC – President Obama said he wakes up thinking of the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Islamist extremists and facing a life as sex slaves, and wishes he “could reach out and save those kids.”
“We only need to look at today’s headlines — the devastation of Syria, the murders and kidnappings in Nigeria, sectarian conflict, the tribal conflicts — to see that we have not yet extinguished man’s darkest impulses,” Obama said at a Los Angeles fund-raiser late Wednesday.
“I have this remarkable title right now — president of the United States,” Obama said. “And yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria . . . there are times in which I want to reach out and save those kids.”
Obama, speaking at an event for the Steven Spielberg-backed USC Shoah Foundation, was frustrated over the lack of a quick fix.
“Having to think through what levers, what power do we have at any given moment, I think, drop by drop by drop, that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so destructive, that we can tell a different story,” he said. (read more)