Troops from Niger ousted the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, last week. One of the coup leaders had previously received training from the U.S. government, becoming the 11th coup in the region led by U.S.-trained officers since 2008.
The article makes this point too though.
The US has a military base in Niger as does France, and Mohamed Bazoum is a close ally of the West.
Niger is also a big uranium exporter.
Of course the US is not trying to stage a pro-Wagner coup there.
That would not make any sense, and it’s not what this article is suggesting at all. I don’t think it’s a “hit piece”, it simply provides a lot of nuance to the Sahel situation.
If that was the case, why open with such a framing remark.
Stating they’re US trained before any other information is purely to make readers think it’s US caused.
At best it’s simply clickbait, most likely it’s deliberate anti-US propaganda/misdirection , and I say this as someone who really fucking hates America.
Hmm, I’m having trouble understanding why you still think this is propaganda now that you’ve read the article.
I say this as someone who is a lot more interested in the Sahel than I am in US roles in geopolitics.
I posted it in good faith because I think it is a good article especially for people who are puzzled by the coup background now that Niger is in the Western news cycle for a change.
Can’t please everyone though.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me about it by the way.
Did the US provide direct training in how to destabilize and overthrow a government? Because they have teams that can provide that training. It’s routinely used in the Western hemisphere. If they gave the coup leaders anti-insurgency training, that’s an entirely different situation.
The problem is probably more coincidental. US training makes units better. There’s a base level of thought in the US military though which you can describe as “you follow orders of the duly elected representatives of the US government.” If you don’t instill that base thinking, all the training does is make military units that are going to succeed at coups.
So is this article dealing with the reality of trying to rewrite a foreign military’s thought process and it’s relationship to its civilian government? Does it discuss the difficulties in doing that while trying to train them for counterinsurgency operations? If it’s just making a casual (not causal) connection between the coup leaders and the fact that at some point those leaders had US training, it’s propaganda.
I don’t think it’s making a 1:1 causal connection at all.
I’m sorry if this is impolite of me, but have you read the article itself?
The headline is unfortunately clickbaity and it seems to have attracted a few people who want to argue with what they think the headline alone implies about the US, but the subeditor who wrote it is not on the same page as the interviewee.
It’s a pity, but I don’t like editorialising titles for anything other than clarity. I might have to rethink that.
As far as the interview goes, if there is a correlative connection in there it’s to do with the rise of terrorism in the Sahel region during the “war on terror” and obviously that has a lot to do with the militarization of enforcers for oil and mining companies.
The main thing that makes it a hit piece is that it buried the lede about the US’s efforts to stabilize the situation, it blatantly words the headline in a way to make those people who just read headlines say “US sponsors a coup in Niger” that’s the way it sounded to me until I read the article. Without the detail that these officers were trained for in counter terrorism to fight a very real terrorist threat the headline absolutely makes it sound like the US was training these guys to go coup’ing. It’s a fairly typical tactic that the Intercept and other less than reputable news organizations use to push their agenda.