"Wait, we can not break bread with you.
You have taken the land which is rightfully ours.
Years from now my people will be forced
to live in mobile homes on reservations.
Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs.
We will sell our bracelets by the road sides,
and you will play golf, and eat hot h'ors d'ourves.
My people will have pain and degradation.
Your people will have stick ****fts.
The gods of my tribe have spoken.
They said do not trust the pilgrims,
especially Sarah Miller.
And for all of these reasons I have decided
to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."
- Wednesday, Addams Family Values
More Blood for Oil
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=11869
Forget about all that stuff about Ethiopia having a 'tacit' o.k.
from Wa****ngton to invade Somalia. The decision was made at the
White House and the attack had military sup****t from the Pentagon.
The governments are too much in sync and the Ethiopians too dependent
on the U.S. to think otherwise.
And, it didn't just suddenly happen. Ethiopian troops,
trained and equipped by the U.S. began infiltrating into
Somali territory last summer as part of a plan that began to
evolve the previous June when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC)
took control of the government. In November, the head of the
U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid (until last week
he ran the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq)
was in Addis Ababa. After that, Ghanaian journalist Cameron Duodu
has written, Ethiopia 'moved from proving the Somali government
with 'military advice' to open armed intervention.'
And not without help. U.S Supplied satellite surveillance data
aided in the bombardment of the Somali capital, Mogadishu and
pinpointing the location of UIC forces resulting, in the words
of New York Times re****ter Jeffrey Gettleman, in 'a string of
back-to- back military loses in which more than 1,000 fighters,
mostly teenage boys, were quickly mowed down by the better-trained
and equipped Ethiopian-backed forces.'
As with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the immediate question is
why was this proxy attack undertaken, in clear violation of
international law and the UN Charter?
And again, there is the official line, the excuse and
the underlying impetus. The official line from Addis Ababa
is that it was a defensive act in the face of a threat of
attack from Somalia. There's nothing to sup****t the claim
and a lot of evidence to the contrary.
As far as the Bush Administration is concerned,
it was a chance to strike back at 'Islamists' as
part of the on-going 'war on terror.' For progressive observers
in the region and much of the media outside the U.S.,
the conflict smells of petroleum.
'As with Iraq in 2003, the United States has cast this
as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is to
obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region
by establi****ng a client regime there.,' wrote Salim Lone,
spokesperson for the United Nation mission in Iraq in 2003,
and now a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya.
'The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just
miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage
of large numbers of oil tankers and war****ps through the Red Sea.'
In a television interview broadcast on the day of
the full-fledged Ethiopian assault, Marine General James Jones
(who ironically, like Abizaid, recently lost his position),
then-Nato's military commander and head of the US military's
European army, expressed his concern that the size of
the U.S. army in Europe had 'perhaps gone too low.'
Jones went on to tell the CSpan interviewer the
US needed troops in Europe partly so that they could be
quickly deployed in trouble-spots in Africa and elsewhere.
'I think the emergence of Africa as a strategic reality
is inevitable and we're going to need forward-based troops,
special operations, marines, soldiers, airmen and sailors to
be in the right pro****tion,' said Jones.
'Pentagon to train sharper eye on Africa,' read the headline
over a January 5 re****t by Richard Whittle in the
Christian Science Monitor. 'Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda are leading
the US to create a new Africa Command.'
'Africa, long beset by war, famine, disease, and ethnic tensions,
has generally taken a backseat in Pentagon planning - but US officials
say that is about to change,' wrote Whittle, who went on to re****t
that one of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's last acts
before being dismissed from that position was to convince President Bush
to create a new Africa military Africa command, something the
White House is expected to announce later this year.
The creation of the new body, he quoted one expert as
saying, reflects the Administration concern about
'Al Qaeda's known presence in Africa,' China's developing relations
with the continent with regards to oil supplies and the fact
that 'Islamists took over Somalia last June and ruled until
this week, when Ethiopian troops drove them out of power.'
Currently, the US gets about 10 percent of its oil from Africa,
but, the Monitor story said but 'some experts say it may need
to rely on the continent for as much as 25 percent by 2010.'
Re****tedly, nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields
were allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco,
Chevron and Phillips before Somalia's pro-U.S.
President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in January, 1991.
Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman,
said the division for African military operations
"causes some difficulty in trying to ... execute
a more streamlined and comprehensive strategy when
it comes to Africa." According to the plan, the
Central Command will retain responsibility for the
Horn of Africa for about 18 months while
the Africa Command gets set up. The Pentagon's
present Horn of Africa joint task force,
headquartered in Djibouti, includes about 1,500 troops.
African countries won't see much difference in the
US military presence on the ground under the
new command, Herman Cohen, assistant secretary of State for African
affairs under the first President Bush, is quoted
as saying. "They're already getting a lot of attention
from the US military.' The Defense Intelligence Agency
"has built up its offices throughout Africa in US embassies.
Right after the cold war, they reduced a lot,
but they've built back up."
"When the Cold War ended, so too did the interest
of the USA in Africa...for a while. Particularly following
September 11, 2001, the interest of the Bush administration in
Africa increased several fold,' says Bill Fletcher, Jr.,
visiting professor at Brooklyn College-CUNY, former president
of TransAfrica Forum. 'Their interest was, first, in direct
relation****p to the amount of oil in the ground.
Second, it was in relation****p to a country's attitude
toward the so- called "war against terrorism."
Irrespective of the character of a regime,
if they were prepared to provide the USA with oil
and/or sup****t the war against terrorism, the USA would
turn a blind eye toward any practices going on.'
"The second piece of this puzzle, however, is that the
new interest in Africa was accompanied by a new military
approach toward Africa,' says Fletcher. 'This included both
the development of the so-called Trans Sahel project,
which supposedly concerns training countries to fight terrorism,
as well as the deployment of military bases and
personnel to Africa. Specifically, and beginning around
the time of the initiation of the Iraq war,
US military planners began discussing relocating US forces
from Europe into Africa, and specifically into the
Gulf of Guinea region, a region rich in oil reserves.
"It is clear, once again, that in all of this,
the character of any regime is secondary to the
regime's compliance with the interests of the
Bush administration and their economic/strategic priorities.
The net effect of this could be the introduction of
US military personnel into extremely complicated
internal struggles not only in the Gulf of Guinea region,
but in other locations, e.g., Somalia, allegedly in the
interest of fighting terrorism and protecting strategic oil reserves."
Describing the Trans Sahel project, which covers a
swath of North Africa, Foreign Policy in Focus commentator
Conn Hallinan wrote recently, 'The Bush Administration
claims the target of this program, called the Trans-Sahara
Counter-Terrorism Initiative is the growing presence of
al-Qaeda influenced organizations in the region. Critics,
however, charge that the enterprise has more to do with oil
than with Osama bin Laden, and that stepped up military aid
to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia will most likely
end up being used against internal opposition groups
in those countries, not 'terrorists' hiding out in the desert.'
An apt example of how the charge of terrorism becomes cover
for suppression of local democratic or leftist dissent is Nigeria.
A major focus of U.S. oil interest is in that country and
the Gulf of Guinea region. There, activists reflecting
popular demand for retaining more oil revenues for local
development and an end to environmental chaos,
have been labeled 'terrorist' and are being brutally
suppressed by a U.S. trained and equipped military.
Southern Africa scholar George Wright observes that
the development of military ties to government and
'rebel' groups in Africa, in pursuit of U.S. geo-strategic
objectives, is long standing but has accelerating
over recent years. Between 1990 and 2000, military
arrangements were concluded between governments or opposition
groups in 39 countries on the continent. These involved
weapons supplies, military training, shared intelligence
and surveillance. The aim, he says, has always been to
secure neo-colonial relations with African countries.
However, since 9/11, Wright says, the process has been
accelerated and taken on an increasingly militarist character
'under the guise of fighting terrorism.'
Fighting proxy war is credible as long as there is a
chance of holding sway but history has repeatedly
demonstrated when that doesn't work out, the end is
often direct involvement. That explains why the 2007
U.S. military sets funding for Special Forces to
increase by 15 percent. According to the 2005 Quadrennial
Defense Review, these Special Forces 'will have the capacity
to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously -
relying on a combination of direct (visible) and
indirect (clandestine) approaches.'
The Ethiopian government has said it does not have the
resources for an extended stay in Somalia even though
the projection is that it will take many months to 'stabilize'
the situation in the invaded country. As of this writing,
the Bush Administration was having difficulty raising
troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job.
Only Uganda seemed a sure bet. Assistant U.S. Secretary of
State for Africa, Ms Jendayi Frazer, told journalists:
"Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised U.S.
President George Bush in a recent phone call that
he could supply between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect
Somalia's transitional government and train its troops.
We hope to have the Ugandans deployed before the end of January.'
Shortly after the invasion, Frazer told re****ters there
had been no request for U.S. troops or military assistance so far,
but she did not rule out that it could be requested
and supplied later if necessary. Later came quickly.
On Sunday, U.S. AC-130 gun****ps began bombarding sites
within Somalia and Hawkeye reconnaissance planes took to
the air pinpointing locations for attacks by jet aircraft.
Although the announced purpose of the bombing was alleged
al-Qaeda personnel, media re****ts indicated the target
were 'Islamic fighters', meaning troops of the UIC government.
"The US has sided with one Somali faction against another,
this could be the beginning of a new civil war ...
I fear once again they have gone for a quick fix based
on false information, one 'highly respected regional analyst'
told the Times of London. 'If they pull it off, however, it
could be a turning point. The stakes are very high indeed, now.
I fear they are repeating the mistakes of the past,
not only in Somalia but in Afghanistan and Iraq and will
end up creating a new insurgency which could destabilize
this entire region.'
|
