Crossed Crocodiles

In which we find the real Iraq wall, and otherwise catch up on current events.

I am a member of a commission that awards about half a dozen scholarships per year to the local community college. A scholarship pays for a full year of in state tuition, and students can reapply for more than one year. This two year college does a very good job of educating students who come from all over the world, providing them with associate degrees that will give them chances to get better jobs, and to further their careers. Many of the applicants come to the US from other countries. Most came here with their families when they were younger. Some are separated from their families. Many of them were displaced from their homes by war. And the US has often had varying degrees of involvement or responsibility for these wars.

Last night we reviewed the applicants for this year. They were a good group, most with real potential. There was one girl applying this year who fled Sudan. Her family fled and she heard her father had died. Her mother kept them together, fed and sheltered. But war came again. Her mother had a breakdown, and they had to drug her in order to bring her with them when they fled. Eventually she and her family arrived in the United States, and she attended public schools. Another young applicant had fled war in Guatemala, a country in which the US has had a long involvement, managed to get to the United States and attend public schools. Over the six years I have been on this commission we have read many biographical essays by many students who have fled horrors, and suffered here, but refuse to quit.

There are opportunities in the United States, but it is not a kindly place, particularly these days. If you are undocumented it can be brutal. People here, including citizens, often live isolated lives with no support network. If you have a child, or children, there is often no one to turn to for help. And undocumented immigrants often have no legal protections. Many immigrants, in fact many citizens, have to work multiple jobs, because one job may not even pay housing costs. The young applicants we review lead complicated lives, and their stories are often heart breaking. Making the scholarship decision is often very difficult because all the applicants have financial need, and all are deserving. Not all our applicants are immigrants, among those who are immigrants, some are economic refugees, but many are here because their families fled war. In their essays many of these young people say they wish to be back in their own countries, without war.

After spending my evening reviewing these applicants and their stories, and the mostly glowing recommendations from their teachers, this morning I read the latest post from Riverbend in Baghdad. She and her family are leaving Baghdad. She writes:

The Great Wall of Segregation…

…Which is the wall the current Iraqi government is building (with the support and guidance of the Americans). It’s a wall that is intended to separate and isolate what is now considered the largest ‘Sunni’ area in Baghdad- let no one say the Americans are not building anything. According to plans the Iraqi puppets and Americans cooked up, it will ‘protect’ A’adhamiya, a residential/mercantile area that the current Iraqi government and their death squads couldn’t empty of Sunnis.

The wall, of course, will protect no one. I sometimes wonder if this is how the concentration camps began in Europe. The Nazi government probably said, “Oh look- we’re just going to protect the Jews with this little wall here- it will be difficult for people to get into their special area to hurt them!” And yet, it will also be difficult to get out.

The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn’t enough, apparently- Iraqis have generally proven to be more tenacious and tolerant than their mullahs, ayatollahs, and Vichy leaders. It’s time for America to physically divide and conquer- like Berlin before the wall came down or Palestine today. This way, they can continue chasing Sunnis out of “Shia areas” and Shia out of “Sunni areas”.

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq’s history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven’t been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.
(emphasis mine)

The United States needs to deal with other countries in ways in which the military is the last option, not the first. Oil has been behind a number of the wars that have sent refugees fleeing into other countries and to the US. Oil is behind the Iraq war. And oil is behind recent US interest in Africa, including Ghana. That is the background for creating the US Africa Command. The people involved in Africom talk about leading with diplomacy, and talk about peaceful intentions. I recently heard a soldier interviewed on TV who said, the job of soldiers is to kill people and break their stuff (he said as opposed to police, whose job is to protect people and protect their stuff.) As long as your military is your lead contact with a country, the people you contact are in danger. The US should not be making it unsafe for people to stay in their own countries.

From the CDC: Insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs) are now a major intervention for malaria control.

Seven years ago, on April 25th, 2000, African leaders from 44 malaria-endemic countries participated in the first-ever African Summit on Malaria, and declared April 25th as Africa Malaria Day. This year, for the first time, the United States will officially commemorate Malaria Awareness Day, celebrating progress and highlighting opportunities in the fight against malaria. To underscore the U.S. commitment to ending malaria related deaths, President Bush embraced the urgency of the cause by designating April 25th, 2007 as Malaria Awareness Day.

Tom Egwang, the director-general of Medical Biotechnology Laboratories in Kampala, Uganda writes in SciDev.Net that Africa should be the driver, not the co-pilot of malaria vaccine development. He writes:

African researchers in resource-poor countries are as competent and knowledgeable as their Northern partners. They publish research articles in leading peer-review journals, present findings at international conferences, read the same literature and attend the same symposia.

So why aren’t they designing malaria vaccines themselves? The stock response to this — as it seems to be to all Africa’s development challenges — is a lack of funds. But putting pen to paper to design a vaccine does not cost money. It takes creativity and innovation — attributes that we on the continent surely possess.

Getting the policy emphasis right

Effective research and development (R&D) does, of course, need funding. But to say that the lack of malaria vaccine R&D in Africa is due to poverty is a lie.

African governments can afford to buy presidential jets and bail out floundering companies. They maintain huge defence budgets and engage in recurrent military adventurism. These actions cost the continent hundreds of millions of dollars — money that could instead be used to develop malaria vaccines.

Similarly, petrodollar profits from oil-rich states like Gabon, Libya or Nigeria could be used to support malaria R&D efforts within and beyond their own borders.

The European Union — a region that has no malaria — currently supports a multi-million dollar network of excellence in malaria research. These funds could, again, have been better spent supporting R&D efforts in Africa.

Misguided funding policies have been accompanied by lopsided training policies that have created a polarised malaria research world.
. . .
African scientists running R&D projects must make herculean efforts to mentor a new generation of Africans to tackle malaria vaccine R&D head-on. This also means lobbying their governments to invest in research — before the North-South divide becomes an abyss.

University curricula should emphasise product development and entrepreneurship. Strategic partnerships with African organisations like the Uganda Industrial Research Institute would facilitate the development of pilot biotechnology projects.

In this way, products developed by academia could be scaled up on a semi-industrial scale for proof-of-concept studies.

African policymakers have hitherto only paid lip service to African science. They must now embrace it as the engine for socio-economic development in Africa, giving it unequivocal and solid financial support.

A steroidal fantasy mercenary, and an offshore oil rig,
from the video game Mercenaries 2

The Spy Who Billed Me is a particularly interesting blog about outsourcing the “war on terror.” I very much appreciate Dr. Hillhouse’s well informed and balanced viewpoint, as well as her dry sense of humor. One thing that has grown up under Bush, Cheney, and their pal Rumsfeld, are private mercenary companies, and private CIAs. She calls it: the “post 9/11 period of the Golden Trench Coat when the private intelligence industry really came into being. ” The information and discussion you will find on this blog you will find nowhere else. As one friend said when I sent the link: “ this is the sort of thing that used to be available through very obscure and expensive newsletters, where the children couldn’t see it; making this public changes everything.”

The Bush Cheney administration has driven many of the top people out of the CIA. And many have wound up in private security companies. Right now these private corporations are mostly based in the US. But there are some signs of them moving offshore:

There are a lot of reasons to go offshore, taxes, liability and oversight . . . there’s the dimension of avoiding their services falling under ITAR (the US laws governing the export of military services) which would complicate and delay sales and very likely preclude some business all together. . . offshore entities would be free to conduct the kind of activities that Special Forces and spies do: destabilize governments, sabotage facilities, identify and train insurgents, etc. (emphasis mine)

Total Intel represents some of the best and brightest the CIA has produced and Blackwater commands a formidable group of tier-one Special Forces operators. Simply put, together these companies rival and possibly surpass the capabilities of intelligence services of most nations–and I’m not talking Third World. Such capacity for covert operations has never before been in private hands–and for rent.

These companies are run by people who identify themselves as intensely patriotic Americans. That is relatively easy when you are employed by the Pentagon or the CIA. In theory, both organizations are established to support US interests, as government institutions. But when your services are for sale, you are working for your employer. And a corporate employer may have very different interests from the interests of the United States, or the interests of the government or citizens of whatever country where such a company may be working. And what happens when the corporate leadership evolves over time? Will the loyalties evolve?

The potential services are demonstrated in a theoretical scenario she provides for Exxon in Venezuela that has implications for the citizens and governments of African countries, particularly with the current focus on the oil in the Gulf of Guinea.

Well within the reach are services such as:

• de-stabilization of governments hostile to a firm’s business;
• identification, training and support of an armed insurgency, including separatist movements claiming sovereignty over a mineral-rich region; and
• planning and execution of sabotage of a competitor’s foreign facilities.

In no way am I saying that Total Intel, Greystone and Blackwater are offering these services, but rather I am exploring the potential synergy of the CIA’s former top case officers and Special Activities Division operators combined with the best in Special Forces. They’ve done this type of work for their former US government employers, so why not for their corporate ones?

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario and examine the potential a little closer. When I think about good uses for such brains and brawn, oil and Venezuela come to mind. In late 2005 the Venezuelan government gave Exxon an ultimatum that it had to form a joint venture with the national oil company (it eventually did.) The state petroleum company has been very uncooperative, to put it mildly, and has caused the shut down of Exxon fields. Let’s just say it’s not a comfortable place for Exxon to do business.

If I were sitting in the Houston boardroom of a company that has seen governments come and go, I know what I’d be thinking: get rid of Chavez or at least make his life hell. And with over $100 million profits daily, I’d have the cash to buy the expertise that I needed. And that expertise that is now on the open market.

I’d hire spies to identify potential insurgency groups to support and to create the needed cutouts to conceal my involvement.
. . .

Once my spies have identified insurgent group(s) and potential leaders, I’d work with a private military organization that could:

assist in training indigenous resources in developing a capability to conduct defensive and offensive small group operations, including firearm training requirements. Off-the-shelf standard field operations packages consist of 30 days of training to support raid, reconnaissance, and small unit tactics.

I wouldn’t stop at an insurgency. I’d also use the spies for various psyops against the leadership and hire an espionage firm to identify potential targets within the military leadership and Chavez inner circles that could be compromised and used to seed suspicions and distrust among the inner circle. If my spies got lucky, they might even make Chavez believe a coup was imminent and his paranoia could spark a leadership purge. Then there’s always economic sabotage, inciting union unrest..the possibilities go on and on.

Would a Fortune 500 company do something like this?

We saw a few weeks ago that Chiquita was willing to give millions to terrorist organizations to further their business interests.

Oil companies have not been good or benign corporate citizens in African countries to date. With these kinds of services on the market are they likely to become more responsible and public spirited? These kinds of services allow a corporation to have its own active and intrusive foreign policy, one that is responsible to the citizens of no country.

2/2008 – You can read my article on mercenaries in Africa over at the African Loft: The Rising Mercenary Industry and AFRICOM.

(One of the) . . . continuously burning gas flares which had been lit and steadily burning for years, some for over 30 to 40 years, polluting the air with dangerous CO2 and methane gases, contributing fiercely to the global warming trend, while resulting in destructive acid rains and serious contamination of air, water and land. These flares were noisy, and one could feel there awful heat and smell their associated gases from hundreds of meters away. These bright fires at night lit up skies over the nearby villages. The flares danced wild like some distorted form of eternal flames casting somber shadows and eery orange light over the unfortunate Delta communities. Even the comfort of night’s natural darkness was robbed from these communities who existed on that terrible periphery of the oil industry’s wastefulness.

Harpers magazine interviewed journalist Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, asking him questions about African oil and American foreign policy. I am purchasing the book, will be reading it soon, and hope to report more. The whole article is fairly short and well worth reading:
Six Questions for Nicholas Shaxson on African Oil and American Foreign Policy

On the positive side he says:

Attitudes are changing. There’s growing awareness of environmental problems as well as rising interest in “corporate social responsibility,” so it’s a bit harder for oil companies these days to behave like colonial overlords. We are also beginning to understand the reasons for the “oil curse”—countries that strike oil tend to get poorer and more violent over time. . . Despite this new interest in the “oil curse”, old habits and temptations will always remain, because of the lure of oil.

And about the oil curse:

This is a pattern in oil zones. Villagers fight each other for compensation or jobs, and politicians fight each other for access to the oil money.

Shaxon discusses Gabon’s President Omar Bongo, the oil based sway he held over French politics, and whether similar scenarios exist or may evolve. With the private mercenary contractors and mini-CIAs that have grown up under Bush Cheney in Iraq, this may become a more pressing and complicated question. He points out that corruption is hardly a monopoly of African governments; western governments and financial institutions contribute more than their share to corrupt practices.

Shaxon also discusses the effect of oil on both Nigeria and Angola:

Q: A CIA official once told me that the consensus among Nigerians was that the country would have been better off if the oil was still in the ground. Has oil really been so detrimental to African countries that they’d be better off without it?

A: Angola’s oil-laden budget this year is about the same size as all foreign aid to all of sub-Saharan Africa—but according to the United Nations, Angola’s infant mortality is the second worst in the world, worse even than Afghanistan’s. At the start of the last oil boom in 1970, one-third of Nigerians lived in poverty; now, four hundred billion dollars in oil and gas earnings later, two-thirds are poor. People often put the problem like this: oil money would be a blessing but politicians steal it, so people don’t see the benefits. But it’s much worse: the oil wealth not only doesn’t reach ordinary people, but it actively makes them poorer. (emphasis mine) It took me years to really accept this counter-intuitive idea. But after all I’ve seen, I have no doubts.

More missions accomplished by the Bush administration and friends here.

The Iraqi hydrocarbon law, which was planned in Washington and is still pending, has many implications for West Africa. It shows the intentions of the western oil companies, and the Bush administration, toward any oil reserves they can exploit anywhere. African governments take heed. Some regard this law as the victory Bush and Cheney intended when they invaded Iraq.

You can read a discussion of the present status of the bill, and the various viewpoints here.

But I think The Spy Who Billed Me, which is a particularly noteworthy blog, states the situation most succinctly:

The proposed law will allow international oil companies to retain 70% of production over the next 30 years. An additional 20% of production will be tax-free. These are particularly lucrative terms. Countries that allow foreign ownership of a portion of production generally limit this to 20%. US allies Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have completely nationalized production and do not allow any portion to go directly to the firms.

The Niger delta from Google maps

This is another in a series of posts based on the work by b real at Moon of Alabama. Understanding AFRICOM: A Contextual Reading of Empire’s New Combatant Command part I. The article is in three parts, part II and part III and a PDF version of the complete series is available here. This post is based primarily on part II .

(The US) strategic objective focuses on securing Nigerian and Gulf energy supplies To achieve this strategic goal, American military planners have launched a two-pronged pincher movement whose main objective is “Ring-Fencing Nigeria” from the north and south.
. . .
(The US) is developing a coastal security system in the Gulf of Guinea called the Gulf of Guinea Guard.
. . .
Few Americans realize the scale and significance of Nigerian oil and gas production centered in the Delta and how this complex impacts American energy security.

With the offshore oil that is being discovered in Nigerian territorial waters, Nigeria is one of the few places in the world that oil reserves may yet increase for awhile. This means almost unimaginable wealth.

Shell started commercial production of Nigerian oil in 1956. Nigeria became independent in 1960. Since that time conditions have not improved for the vast majority of the people of the Niger delta. In fact, the delta is still occupied by foreigners and conditions have probably gotten worse. Air, land, and water are seriously polluted by the flaring of gases, and oil leaks and spills.

Looking at the Niger Delta on a satellite map, probably the first thing to catch the eye is the spidery plethora of rivers and creeks weaving across the terrain. It’s an area of great ecological significance, the kidneys, quite literally, of West Africa. The mangrove forests here are the third largest of its kind on the planet, and the extent of the ecological value is known only to the locals, as the majority of scientific surveys of the Niger Delta have been done strictly for economic reasons. If you zoom in on the Delta area you will soon start seeing gas flares, the most visible sign of the results of that research. The landscape is dotted with oil and natural gas wells and the production facilities required to contain and transport these fossil fuels to foreign lands, and gas flaring here has long been a problem.

In their efforts to get to the oil underneath, the extraction industries have typically burned off the gas reserves that have collected on the top of these deposits, allowing large gas flares to burn for years, adding toxins into the atmosphere which then return to poison the lands and those living there. It is said that “some children have never known a dark night even though they have no electricity.”

Shell has dealt with a succession of Nigerian governments, made payments as needed, and totally ignored the living conditions and needs of the people whose wealth they were extracting. Had Shell had any sense of corporate responsibility, or concern for human rights and safety, it could easily have pressured successive Nigerian governments into treating their citizens with more dignity and respect, returning some of the wealth, and facilitating genuine development, education, healthcare, and jobs for the people of the delta. Shell, and the other oil companies always had the economic clout. Development would be cheaper than war. They never had the good sense or good will.

Buhari, (a current candidate for President) in his earlier authoritarian rule, had centralized much of the power in Nigeria, especially sticking it to the states in the Delta, dropping their share of Nigeria’s oil rent revenues over a period of two years from 20 to 1.5 percent. (emphasis mine) But then Obasanjo himself, (the current President) during his rule in the 1970s, had laid the ground for Buhari by seizing lands and granting the oil majors rights to exploit the Niger Delta and, hence, its people, further undermining their abilities for representation and retaining control over their own lives.

In fact Shell, and the other oil companies operating in the delta, are trying to persuade the US that the local resistance movements, in search of self determination and a share of resources, are terrorists, and that the oil companies need backup from the US military in dealing with them.

And the US military is responding.

Much has been made of the attempts to link these resistance groups into the GWOT, especially on the part of the oil companies, in order to use the power of the U.S. military to stabilize these areas and secure the energy flows.

However times are changing.

The volatility surrounding oil installations in Nigeria, and elsewhere in the continent, is used by the U.S. security establishment to justify foreign (and domestic) military presence in African oil producing states while contributing to the oil industry’s windfall profits. Yet the depth of resentments, and the military capabilities of insurgent groups armed in large measure through oil theft suggests that the oil companies’ operations – what they call their social license to operate – may be in question.

The US risks further damaging itself by fighting against democracy in the form of local people who want self determination, and a share of the wealth generated in their own home. And Nigerians, and other citizens of Africa and the world, can look at the disaster the oil wars have created in Iraq as a warning of what could happen in the Niger delta. But the US does not appear to be learning the right lessons yet. In fact, as long as Bush and Cheney run things, there is no chance of the US learning, and turning in the right direction. The US military now appears to be planning to develop techniques of riverine warfare to fight the peoples of the delta. And the US is missing the bottom line. It would be cheaper to work with the peoples of the Niger delta than it is to fight against them. The problem is that it would be complicated, and require people who know something about the place and the people, not a characteristic of Bush and his cronies.

There have been recent reports in the Ghanaian press, such as here, and here, mentioning the Cheney report and creation of (a) military base(s) in Ghana. I believe this is the report that is being cited (corrected from an earlier version):
Overview: PDF: Energy for America’s Future (8 pages)
Complete PDF version: PDF Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group (170 pages)

For a more complete bibliography of relevant documents, and much more relevant information and insight as to how this applies to Ghana and West Africa, see the bibliography at the end of this article:
Understanding AFRICOM: A Contextual Reading of Empire’s New Combatant Command part I.
The article is in three parts, part II and part III and a PDF version of the complete series is available. Each part has a bibliography at the end of the article text.

Moon of Alabama has a series of articles by b real providing some history and some of the thinking behind the formation of Africom. Part I, part II and part III. A PDF version of the complete series is available here. In this post I’ll look at some of what it says in part II of this series.

When the US announced the creation of Africom, it cited terrorism and oil as its two main areas of focus, as documented in these articles. As long as the US has this narrow focus, things will work badly for African countries. There is a lot of US talk about supporting development and democracy. I have cited the following, but it bears repeating, the one thing that all people around the globe, including in the US, should remember about Bush:

. . . the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation – indeed, the world – as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them – not even in their own country.

There are rumors of US military activity in a number of places in Ghana. In some places it is fairly clear something is going on, but nobody is saying what. Today there are several articles at GhanaWeb about possible military bases in Ghana: US military base for Ghana, and No US Military Base for Ghana – Addo Kufuor, one worried speculation, one a denial. Ghanaians should make no mistake. There is already a US military presence in Ghana. It is probably what the US military calls “lily pads“. And this presence will grow. As it grows, neither the Ghana government, nor the US government are likely to be open or forthcoming as to exactly what is going on.

Bush continually praises Kufuor. It isn’t because of democracy in Ghana, it is because Kufuor has been compliant with Bush’s wishes. This is the ONLY test the Bush Cheney administration use in evaluating individuals or countries, are they compliant and loyal to Bush? Praise from Bush should set off alarms everywhere.

The US will continue hiding any military developments and activities. There have been demonstrations against US bases in a number of countries, and people from many countries are organizing to resist global and US militarism:

In a new surge of energy for the global struggle against militarism, some 400 activists from 40 countries came together in Ecuador from March 5-9 to form a network to fight against foreign military bases.

The following, from part II of the articles cited above, describes what has been going on pre-Africom, and provides us some clue about what is going on now, in Ghana and elsewhere:

In West Africa, the U.S. military’s European Command has now established forward-operating locations in Senegal, Mali, Ghana (my emphasis), and Gabon — as well as Namibia, bordering Angola on the south — involving the upgrading of airfields, the pre-positioning of critical supplies and fuel, and access agreements for swift deployment of U.S. troops. … [It] is developing a coastal security system in the Gulf of Guinea called the Gulf of Guinea Guard. It has also been planning the construction of a U.S. naval base in Sao Tome and Principe, which the European Command has intimated could rival the U.S. naval base as Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon is thus moving aggressively to establish a military presence in the Gulf of Guinea that will allow it to control the western part of the broad trans-Africa oil strip and the vital oil reserves now being discovered there.
. . .
U.S. naval protection of the sea-lanes that transport oil is of paramount importance.” The report also called for stepped up U.S. naval engagement in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Nigeria.

China has altered the strategic context in Africa. All across Africa today, China is acquiring control of natural resource assets, outbidding Western contractors on major infrastructure projects, and providing soft loans and other incentives to bolster its competitive advantage.
. . .
For the Council on Foreign Relations, all of this adds up to nothing less than a threat to Western imperialist control of Africa.
. . .
The goal of building large regional battalions may very well foreshadow larger proxy wars
. . .
Already, the U.S. supports unpopular governments in nations such as Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Central African Republican, Somalia, and Algeria.
. . .
Algeria, with its documented record of torture and ‘disappearances,’ is in many ways a model of how not to fight terrorism.
. . .
One Central African country in particular illustrates the need for State Department perspective and guidance to temper Defense Department enthusiasm. The country is unstable, desperately poor, and run by a repressive government that is being challenged by a persistent armed resistance. . . With extensive “under-governed spaces” as potential terrorist havens and bordering countries with equally uncertain futures, the country was termed “a model country for security assistance” by the regional combatant command. Civilian embassy officials, however, are demonstrably less keen. They question the rate at which military programs are rapidly escalating and the sizable and still growing presence of U.S. military personnel in-country. . . It would be a major setback if the United States were to be implicated in support of operations shoring up the repressive regime, regardless of the stated intent of such training.

The US Secretary of State is weak, and does not appear to have diplomatic skills, her background is academic, and she is invested in the oil business. The State Department will not be able to counter the growing militarism as long as she is there, and she may support it. And even if she leaves, as long as Bush is US President, countries should be wary of any US offers and deals, including offers and deals made with their neighbors.

Any citizen of any country who has watched the debacle in Iraq will not welcome Bush Cheney attentions to their territories and resources.

Covering the news here.

Moon of Alabama has a series of articles providing some history and some of the thinking behind the formation of Africom. Part I, part II and part III. A PDF version of the complete series is available here.

The U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) will replace the AOR (Area Of Responsibility) for each of three other geographic combatant commands (there are now a total of six) currently tasked with portions of the second-largest continent, with the small exception of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) retaining AOR for Egypt. Further details on operations have not been made public apart from the usual basic press briefings and the formation of a transition team, though it not a mystery to identify what role AFRICOM will play in both the U.S. and Africa’s future.
. . .
That context is centered on strategic energy supplies and, explicitly, that of oil. In the petroleum age, these energy stores – along with the territories concealing them — have taken on great significance in the foreign policies of the industrialized nations, fueled by an insatiable fever for black gold and the seemingly instant wealth and power it delivers to its possessor.
. . .
Oil is the lifeblood of contemporary, militarized western civilization.
. . .
Paradoxically, as the military reach grew, so too did the need for more oil. The Pentagon is currently “the single largest oil consumer in the world.”

The article is scholarly and well documented, complete with footnotes. I am just looking at Part I in this post, but will return to these articles. The Bush administration is very secretive. And there have been movements around the globe to block or limit the reach of US military bases. So what they are doing in Ghana is not clear. What I suspect is that the US embassy, like many around the globe is becoming more militarized. The US Secretary of State is weak, and seems unable to make deals. The Pentagon has the money and the clout under Bush. There have been publicized visits from important military figures to Ghana. In terms of what is happening, or may happen, with the US military in Ghana, I suspect that they are setting up lily pads.

In its efforts to secure other basing options, the United States has negotiated agreements granting it access to airfields and other facilities in several African nations. These facilities are often referred to as “lily pad” facilities, because American forces can hop in and out of them in times of crisis while avoiding the impression of establishing a permanent – and potentially provocative – presence. They include Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where the United States has built two “K-Span” steel buildings to house troops and equipment; an airfield near Bamako, the capital of Mali; an airfield at Dakar, Senegal; an airfield in Gabon; and airfields and port facilities in Morocco and Tunisia.

The article does not cite Ghana specifically in this regard. But I doubt either the Bush administration or the Kufuor government are eager or likely to provide details to their citizens as to what exactly they may be discussing. Africom is just beginning. It would be well to watch the direction it takes. Ghana, and other African governments will need to be extremely clever and nimble in their dealings with it. As I mentioned, the articles are well worth reading to understand a more complete picture.

This is the message of Easter, and one of my favorite pieces of music, here sung by Jerome Hines.

Blog Against Theocracy

In the words of John Rice, the pastor who built the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa Oklahoma, paraphrased here because I cannot locate the exact text today:

The word of God is constantly being revealed. Anyone who teaches that he knows the word of God, or that the word of God is fixed and immutable, is guilty of sin and error.

Every theocrat teaches that he/she knows the word of God and can tell the rest of us the will of God. Every theocrat claims he/she speaks for God. In the US we have heard this over and over again from the likes of Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson. In this respect, every theocrat is a blasphemer. Every theocrat should be anathema to those who cherish the teachings of Christ, or to the truly faithful of any faith.

Firedoglake features a particularly cogent paragraph on the Bush attempts to turn a democracy into a theocracy. Teachers and followers of theocracy, and all who call ourselves Christians, should remember the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Perhaps a review of The Ten Commandments would have helped — the first commandment reads: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” That includes Presidents who say they talk to God, as well as their political power broker minions, too, and not just golden calves — and working hard to curry favor with any of the above is an act that worships power and what you can get from it. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who thinks securing earthly power, consolidating one’s position and amassing a number of favors owed to you that you can call in when you need them is the point of existence is worshiping at the alter of Gordon Gekko.