[NYTr] Condoleezza Stokes Flames of US Wars in Africa

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Riaz K Tayob - activ-l - Dec 21, 2007

Indymedia UK  (probably via Black Agenda Report, Dec, 2007 - NYTr]
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/12/388271.html


By Glen Ford
Editor, Black Agenda Report
http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com

The U.S. military offensive in the Horn of Africa is poised to
escalate, as Condoleezza Rice assures her African proxies of deepening
collaboration in the war on terror. With at least half a million
Somalis facing death by starvation and disease  and thousands more
killed in resistance to the U.S.-backed Ethiopian occupation
Washington has set its sights on neighboring Eritrea as a rogue
state that is guilty of interference in the affairs of its neighbors
and dangerous adventurism in the Horn. The cookie-cutter U.S.
propaganda/attack formula previously applied in the Persian Gulf
has been imposed on Africa, and will surely reap the same catastrophic
results. Yet African American leadership remains mute and impotent
while Washington sets the continent ablaze.

"The Somali occupation is to be transformed into a wider war."

Vowing to wipe out "terrorists" in Somalia, Condoleezza Rice last
week surrounded herself with key African proxies in an effort to
shore up the American-instigated Ethiopian occupation of Somalia,
and to further U.S. military dominance of the Horn of Africa. The
Ethiopian invasion, backed by U.S. air power, intelligence assets and
close collaboration with ground forces, one year ago, faces increasing
resistance by Somali nationalists from a range of political and
religious persuasions. The resulting military "quagmire" has left at
least 6,000 civilians dead in the capital city, Mogadishu, and displaced
over a million more, half of whom face imminent death in what the
United Nations calls the "worst humanitarian crisis in Africa."

But civilian suffering wasn't high on Secretary of State Rice's
agenda when she met last week in Addis Abba with Ethiopia's foreign
minister and Nur Hassen Hussein, prime minister of the puppet Somali
"government" installed by the Ethiopian occupiers - a gaggle of
warlords and supplicants that virtually all observers are convinced
would "not last a day" on its own.

"Counter terrorism requires good intelligence sharing and good
training of forces that can deal with bad elements," Rice told her
junior partners in the bogus "war on terror" that threatens to set
East Africa - and beyond - aflame. "It would have been extremely
difficult to make any progress in terms of fighting extremism in
Somalia without your support," replied Seyoum Mesfin, ministerial
mouthpiece for Ethiopian dictator Mele Zenawi, whose forces are
also waging scorched earth warfare against the ethnic Somali majority
in Ethiopia's Ogaden region, and priming for renewed conflict with
Eritrea, its northern neighbor.

"Washington has designated The Horn a strategically vital military
and natural resource prize."

The "bad elements," "terrorists" and "extremists" whose existence
serves as the cover for massive American military penetration of
the Horn of Africa, are the Islamic Courts that for a brief time
brought relative peace and rule of law to Somalia - stability that
threatened a more than four decades-long U.S. policy of fomenting
chaos in all regions of the continent in which trusted strongmen
could not be imposed. Since 9/11, Washington has designated The
Horn a strategically vital military and natural resource prize - a
largely Muslim region easily accessible to the U.S. armadas, air
fleets and armies massed in the Indian Ocean-Persian Gulf region
to the east.

Through encircling alliances forged by bribery, coercion, subversion,
exploitation of regional rivalries, and mutual greed, the U.S. has
made proxies of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti. Sudan faces
what it fears is imminent U.S.-led intervention in its western
province, Darfur.

The invasion of Somalia signaled that the U.S. felt confident it
could mobilize surrogates and deploy its own awesome assets to
"secure" an entire corner of Africa, and thereafter expand the
"American sphere" to the south and west. But first, it must complete
the subjugation of Somalia, where "insurgents" and "terrorists" -
the identical terms used to describe resisters in Iraq - are on the
offensive. And any setbacks suffered by the Ethiopian occupiers and
their Somali dependents must be blamed on the sole remaining,
indispensable "rogue state" in the immediate area: Eritrea.

The U.S. Juggernaut is In Place

U.S. forces in The Horn are formidable. At any given time, thousands
of American troops and sailors can be found in Djibouti, a former
French colony, now virtually an American protectorate, bordering
northern Somalia at the juncture of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean,
whose population is majority ethnic Somali. U.S. units routinely
rotate to Djibouti from duty in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Kenya,
on Somalia's southern border, has long been a U.S. client, and
closely collaborated with the Ethiopian invasion, closing the border
to fleeing Somalis seeking to join their numerous kin on the other
side.

Uganda, bordering Kenya and Sudan and led by strongman Yoweri
Museveni, is Washington's staunchest ally and ever-eager mercenary
in Black Africa, and the shot-caller for Rwanda's military regime
- its partner, along with Euro-American corporations, in the looting
of Congo.

Condoleezza Rice, while visiting Addis Ababa, promised Uganda $59
million for sending 1,800 "peacekeepers" to Somalia - the only
African Union (AU) force in Mogadishu. "We hope that you (Uganda)
will not be alone anymore," she added. Burundi - like neighboring
Rwanda, dominated by a minority Tutsis military beholden to Uganda
- is expected to provide a second AU contingent in Somalia, unless
the situation in Mogadishu becomes untenable.

All of East Africa south to the border of Mozambique falls under
the purview of the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa, a
wing of the U.S. Central Command (the war-wagers in Iraq): Djibouti,
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania,
Uganda and Yemen, the Comoros Islands, Mauritius, and Madagascar
(Malagasy Republic).

Stretching across the breadth of Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean
to the Sudan, is the U.S. "war on terror" apparatus dubbed the
Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative. Designed, like its
predecessor, the Pan-Sahel Initiative, as a means of luring African
military commanders into the U.S. orbit through "general-to-general"
and "captain-to-captain" collaboration - and, of course, lots of
U.S. equipment and training (and officer-to-officer bribery) - the
Initiative coordinates U.S. military activity in Algeria, Chad,
Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria, and Tunisia.

"The United States Africa Command is to be responsible for U.S.
military operations in and military relations with 53 African nations
- an area of responsibility covering all of Africa except Egypt.'"

Having successfully insinuated this massive military infrastructure
on the continent, the Pentagon this year announced creation of the
United States Africa Command, "to be responsible for U.S. military
operations in and military relations with 53 African nations - an
area of responsibility covering all of Africa except Egypt - and
to be fully operational by September 2008." Africa Command is still
searching for a home headquarters - Liberia and Kenya are top
prospects on the betting circuit - but in truth the Americans already
have many African homes from which to operate, and are waiting for
some politically "acceptable" regime to make the best offer or accept
the most lucrative deal.

The Europeans at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 could not have
conceived of ambitions so vast as those of 21st Century Americans.
The Europeans met to carve up Africa - the Americans are planning
to swallow it whole.

Same Formula as Iraq

Washington's African military offensive flies the false flag of the
"war on terror," requiring that the "usual suspects" be identified
and crushed as the rationale for the imperial presence. There must
be a "rogue state" fomenting "terror." In the Horn of Africa, the
front line of actual combat by the U.S. and its proxies, Eritrea
has been chosen to fill the obligatory bill.

A largely Muslim country that won independence from Ethiopia in
1993 in a socialist- guided war of liberation, Eritrea fought another
two-year border war with Ethiopia (1998-2000) before international
mediators fixed the lines of demarcation. Tensions remained extremely
high, and have been exacerbated by Washington's opportunistic
decision to take Ethiopia's side in a dispute that the world
considered settled. Eritrea now plays the role of Syria and Iran
in the U.S. State Department's cookie-cutter formula for American
"war on terror" aggression: the designated demon. Eritrea "actively
seeks to destabilize the Horn by fueling insurgencies among his
neighbors and supporting groups linked to international terrorists,"
said James Knight, director of the Office for East Africa, Bureau
of African Affairs. Speaking at the University of San Diego, earlier
this month, the suited hit-man declared that "Eritrea is increasingly
authoritarian, its economy continues to worsen, and it now has
established a record of interference in the affairs of its neighbors."

Sound familiar? The State Department propagandist/conspirator
continued:

"Eritrea pursues expensive and dangerous adventurism in the Horn.

Eritrea materially supports extremists to undermine the
internationally-supported Transitional Federal Government in
Somalia....

Eritrea encourages unending violence, especially in Mogadishu.
Eritrea is also believed to support Ethiopian insurgents, including
the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Ogaden National Liberation
Front (ONLF).... Our relations with Eritrea are increasingly strained
by these policies."

"The cauldron in the Horn of Africa must be stoked and stirred, to
facilitate deeper U.S. penetration."

Eritrea, like Iraq, poses no threat to the United States. But no
matter.

The cauldron in the Horn of Africa must be stoked and stirred, to
facilitate deeper U.S. penetration. The Somali occupation is to be
transformed into a wider war, which Washington is confident will
redound to its geopolitical interests. Millions may die to prove
the Americans wrong.

As we wrote in the November 28 issue of BAR: "The war will also
destabilize Ethiopia, which is more than a third Muslim and home
to many peoples that oppose the dictatorial regime in Addis Ababa.
If the rulers of the United States were searching for a plan that
would kill hundreds of thousands of Africans, they have found it.
This time, however, as in Iraq, Washington has created more chaos
than it can handle."

Black Caucus Impotence

The Congressional Black Caucus and American Black "leadership" in
general seem singularly unfit to confront the current, and larger,
looming conflagrations in The Horn. Despite the transparency of
America's evil motives in the region, and direct U.S. involvement
in Somali-killing - including the use of air-dropped napalm and
AC130 flying gunships - the Caucus can only rouse itself to bemoan
the familiar "humanitarian" tragedies created by "other nations"
and peoples on the African continent. They appear collectively and
constitutionally incapable of calling U.S. aggression by its name
- even on the Mother Continent.

"The Caucus appears collectively and constitutionally incapable of
calling U.S. aggression by its name."

The CBC, in particular, as officials of the legislative branch of
the United States government, are obligated to SCREAM their horror
at the imminent immolation of millions of Africans as a direct
result of U.S. policy. Instead, they satisfy their "Africa concerns"
quota with lamentations about Darfur - and associate their names and
good offices with groups that have every intention of instigating a
U.S.-led military thrust into Sudan, thus completing Washington's
trans-African iron straightjacket.

The U.S. African offensive is not some future threat - it is already
in motion.

[BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com ]