Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Do you hear anyone in the US claiming that military intervention in Africa is necessary, desirable, or consistent with US interests? It's actually one of the few things almost everyone seems to agree on.
Yes since the end of the Cold War US interference in Africa has reduced. This has left a void for China to fill and now we see an increase of Al-Qaeda activity. Maybe not such a clever move after all?

I suspect the only way you'd get significant US military action in Africa would be a major terrorist attack emanating from an African country. Even then, I'd expect it to be far more limited than what we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan... Americans will need a few more decades to forget that tossing a regime out is easy and building a new one is very hard.
Watch what's happening in Yemen and Somalia. Won't be long now.

If you toss out a regime who says you have to build a new one?

If the US government or any significant section of the populace thought military intervention in Africa was in the US interest, don't you think you'd see a bit more of it? Don't you think you'd hear more people demanding it? It's fairly obvious that this is not something Americans at any level want to get involved in, for equally obvious reasons.
Nobody is asking for US military intervention is Africa. It is the interference by proxy that has been the problem. Now if it was not in the US interest why do you think they interfered?

If military intervention has generally not had positive consequences, why should we not conclude that "getting it right" would mean less intervention?
Read that list again. Direct US military intervention in Africa has been minimal.

There is of course AFRICOM (United States Africa Command) which is appropriately based in Stuttgart, Germany. The reason for their existence? It appears that by 2015 25% of US oil imports will be from Africa. I suspect we shall see more of the US around in the future.

If the question is "can democracy thrive in Africa", my opinion would be that it can... eventually, though it might well take a few generations.
You need to read more widely to understand that there is growing pressure from within Africa itself to democratise. That the US is seen to be in league with that club of thugs that make up the AU (African Union) means that Africans are happy to receive stuff out of Hollywood but are correctly cautious about comes gift wrapped from the State Department.

If the question is "is American intervention likely to advance the progress of democracy in Africa" - a completely different question - I'd answer "probably not, though there might be a rare and unlikely exception somewhere along the line".
That's your opinion and you are entitled to it.

Support of democracy and democratic institutions in Africa is a low cost option for the US.

Humanitarian intervention with good intentions is always welcome like in Somalia before some hot-dogging cowboys went and screwed it up. So much so that when the real big crisis occurred Clinton sat on his hands and let a million people get butchered in Rwanda. It is just that the US displays such bad judgement so often. What the hell goes on in the State Department?