[News] The US power grab in Africa

[Anti-Imperialist News]

THE ROVING EYE
The US power grab in Africa
By Pepe Escobar

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MJ21Dj03.html

Beware of strangers bearing gifts. Post-modern Amazon and United 
States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally landed in Tripoli - 
on a military jet - to lavish praise on the dodgy Transitional 
National Council (TNC), those pportunists/defectors/Islamists 
formerly known as "North Atlantic Treaty Organization rebels".

Clinton was greeted on Tuesday "on the soil of free Libya" (her 
words) by what the New York Times quaintly described as an "irregular 
militia" (translation: a heavily armed gang that is already raising 
hell against other heavily armed gangs), before meeting TNC chairman 
Mustafa Abdel-NATO (formerly known as Jalil).

The bulk of the US gifts - US$40 million - on top of the $135 million 
already disbursed since February (most of it military "aid") is for a 
missile scramble conducted by "contractors" (ie mercenaries) trying 
to track the tsunami of mobile anti-aircraft rockets that by now are 
already conveniently ensconced in secret Islamist warehouses.

Clinton told students at the University of Tripoli, "We are on your 
side." She could not possibly connect the dots and note that the 
shabab (young people) who started demonstrating against Muammar 
Gaddafi in February have absolutely nothing to do with the TNC's 
opportunists/defectors/Islamists who hijacked the protests. But she 
did have time to unveil another US foreign policy "secret" - that the 
US wants Gaddafi "dead or alive", George W Bush-style (or as the 
beneficiary of targeted assassination, Barack Obama-style).

The new Fallujah
In her exhausting six-and-a-half hours on "free Libya" soil, Clinton 
couldn't possibly find the time to hitch a helicopter ride to Sirte 
and see for herself how NATO is exercising R2P ("responsibility to 
protect" civilians).

A few hundred soldiers and no less than 80,000 civilians have been 
bombed for weeks by NATO and the former "rebels". Only 20,000 
civilians have managed to escape. There's no food left. Water and 
electricity have been cut off. Hospitals are idle. The city - under 
siege - is in ruins. Sirte imams have issued a fatwa (decree) 
allowing survivors to eat cats and dogs.

What Gaddafi never did to Benghazi - and there's no evidence he might 
have - the TNC is doing to Sirte, Gaddafi's home town. Just like the 
murderous US offensive in Fallujah in the Iraqi Sunni triangle in 
late 2004, Sirte is being destroyed in order to "save it". Sirte, the 
new Fallujah, is brought to you by NATO rebels. R2P, RIP.

It gets much nastier. Libya is just one angle of a multi-vector US 
strategy in Africa. Wacko presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, 
during Tuesday's Republican debate in Las Vegas, may have 
inadvertently nailed it. Displaying her geographical acumen as she 
referred to Obama's new US intervention in Uganda, Bachmann said, "He 
put us in Libya. Now he's putting us in Africa." True, Libya is not 
in Africa anymore; as the counter-revolutionary House of Saud would 
want it, Libya has been relocated to Arabia (ideally as a restored monarchy).

As for Obama "putting us in Africa" (see 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MJ18Dj06.html>Obama, 
King of Africa Asia Times Online, October 18, 2011), those 100 
special forces in Uganda billed as "advisers" should be seen as a 
liquid modernity remix of Vietnam in the early 1960s; that also 
started with a bunch of "advisers" - and the rest is history.

Murderous mystic crackpot Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) 
is now a rag-tag bunch of no more than 400 warriors (they used to be 
over 2,000). They are on the run - and not even based in Uganda, but 
in South Sudan (now a Western protectorate), the Central African 
Republic and the long border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

So why Uganda? Enter London-based Heritage Oil, and its chairman Tony 
Buckingham, a former - you guessed it - "contractor" (ie mercenary). 
Here's Heritage's modus operandi, described by Buckingham himself; 
they deploy "a first mover strategy of entering regions with vast 
hydrocarbon wealth where we have a strategic advantage".

Translation: wherever there's foreign invasion, civil war, total 
breakdown of social order, there are big bucks to be made. Thus 
Heritage's presence in Iraq, Libya and Uganda.

Profiting from post-war fog, Heritage signed juicy deals in Iraqi 
Kurdistan behind the back of the central government in Baghdad. In 
Libya, Heritage bought a 51% stake in a local company called Sahara 
Oil Services; this means it's now directly involved in operating oil 
and gas licenses. Pressed about it, TNC honchos have tried to change 
the conversation, alleging that nothing is approved yet.

What's certain is that Heritage barged into Libya via a former SAS 
commando, John Holmes, founder of Erinys, one of the top mercenary 
outfits in Iraq apart from Xe Services, former Blackwater. Holmes 
cunningly shipped the right bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label to 
Benghazi for the right TNC crooks, seducing them with Heritage's 
mercenary know-how of enforcing "oil field security".

Got contractor, will travel
Obama's Uganda surge is also a classic Pipelineistan gambit. The 
possibly "billions of barrels" of oil reserves discovered recently in 
sub-Saharan Africa are located in the sensitive cross-border of 
Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic 
Republic of Congo.

Believe it or not, Heritage was the top oil company in Uganda up to 
2009, drilling on Lake Albert - between Uganda and the Democratic 
Republic of Congo - and playing one country against another. Then 
they sold their license to Tullow Oil, essentially a spin-off, also 
owned by Buckingham, bagging $1.5 billion in the process and 
crucially not paying 30% of profits to Washington's bastard, the 
government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

Enter Libya's state oil company, Tamoil, which was part of a joint 
venture with the Ugandans to build a crucial oil pipeline to Kenya; 
Uganda is landlocked, and badly needs the pipeline when oil exports 
start next year. The NATO war on Libya paralyzed the Pipelineistan 
gambit. Now everything is open for business again. Tamoil may be out 
of the picture - but so may be other players.

Trying to sort out the mess, the parliament in Uganda - slightly 
before Obama's announcement - decided to freeze all oil contracts, 
hitting France's Total and the China National Offshore Oil 
Corporation, but especially Tullow oil.

But now, with Obama's special forces "advising" not only Uganda but 
also the neighbors, and linking up with Heritage - which is 
essentially a huge oil/mercenary outfit - it's not hard to fathom 
where Uganda's oil contracts will eventually land.

The Amazon rules
Unified Protector, Odyssey Dawn and all other metaphors Homeric or 
otherwise for the Africom/NATO 40,000-plus bombing of Libya have 
yielded the desired result; the destruction of the Libyan state (and 
much of the country's infrastructure, to the delight of disaster 
capitalism vultures). It also delivered the lethal unintended 
consequence of those anti-aircraft missiles appropriated by Islamists 
- a supremely convincing reason for the "war on terror" in northern 
Africa to become eternal.

Washington couldn't care less about R2P; as the Libyan Clinton hop 
shows, the only thing that matters is the excuse to "securitize" 
Libya's arsenal - the perfect cover story for US contractors and 
Anglo-French intel ops to take over Libyan military bases.

The iron rule is that "free" Libya should be under the control of the 
"liberators". Tell that to the "irregular militias", not to mention 
the Abdelhakim Belhaj gang and his al-Qaeda assets now in military 
control of Tripoli.

It's useful to remember that last Friday, the same day the US State 
Department announced it was sending "contractors" to Libya, was the 
day Obama announced his Uganda surge. And only two days later, Kenya 
invaded Somalia - once again under the R2P excuse of protecting 
civilians from Somali jihadis and pirates.

The US adventure in Somalia looks increasingly like a mix of 
Sophocles and the Marx Brothers. First there was the Ethiopian 
invasion (it failed miserably). Then the thousands of Ugandan 
soldiers sent by Museveni to fight al-Shabaab (partially failed; 
after all the Washington-backed "government" barely controls a 
neighborhood in Mogadishu).

Now the Kenyan invasion. A measure of the Central Intelligence 
Agency's brilliance is that operatives have been on the ground for 
months alongside bundles of mercenaries. Soon some counter-insurgency 
hotshot in Washington praying in the altar of new CIA head David 
Petraeus will conclude that the only solution is an army of MQ-9 
Reapers to drone Somalia to death.

The big picture remains the Pentagon's Africom spreading its 
militarized tentacles against the lure of Chinese soft power in 
Africa, which goes something like this: in exchange for oil and 
minerals, we build anything you want, and we don't try to sell you 
"democracy for dummies".

The Bush administration woke up to this "threat" a bit too late - at 
Africom's birth in 2008. Under the Obama administration, the mood is 
total panic. For Petraeus, the only thing that matters is "the long 
war" on steroids - from boots on the ground to armies of drones; and 
who are the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department to disagree?

Italian geographer and political scientist Manlio Dinucci is one of 
the few to point out how neo-colonialism 2.0 works; one just needs to 
look at the map. In Central Africa, the objective is US military 
supremacy - on air and in intel - over Uganda, South Sudan, the 
Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Libya, the objective is to occupy an absolutely strategic 
crossroads between the Mediterranean, northern Africa and the Middle 
East, with the added (nostalgic?) benefit of the West - as in Paris, 
London and Washington - finally getting to hold military bases as 
when King Idris was in power (1951 to 1969). As a whole, control must 
be established over northern Africa, central Africa, eastern Africa 
and - more problematically - the Horn of Africa.

The trillion-dollar question ahead is how China - which plots 
strategic moves years in advance - is going to react. As for Amazon 
Clinton, she must be beaming. In Iraq, Washington meticulously 
destroyed a whole country over two long decades just to end up with 
nothing - not even a substantial oil contract. Clinton at least got a 
private army - the "advisers" who will be stationed in the 
bigger-than-the-Vatican US Embassy in Baghdad.
And considering that Obama's new African "advisers" will be paid by 
the State Department, now Clinton's also got her own African private 
army. After November 2012, Clinton might well consider a move into 
the contractor business. In the sacred name of R2P, naturally.

Pepe Escobar is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim>Globalistan: 
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 
2007) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898>Red 
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, 
just out, is 
<http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1>Obama 
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.




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