Friday, March 14, 2014

black to the future: american proxy warmaking in africa


tomdispatch | Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you.  It isn’t.  It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions.     

Since 9/11, the U.S. military has been making inroads in Africa, building alliances, facilities, and a sophisticated logistics network.  Despite repeated assurances by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that military activities on the continent were minuscule, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch exposed surprisingly large and expanding U.S. operations -- including recent military involvement with no fewer than 49 of 54 nations on the continent.  Washington’s goal continues to be building these nations into stable partners with robust, capable militaries, as well as creating regional bulwarks favorable to its strategic interests in Africa.  Yet over the last years, the results have often confounded the planning -- with American operations serving as a catalyst for blowback (to use a term of CIA tradecraft). 

A U.S.-backed uprising in Libya, for instance, helped spawn hundreds of militias that have increasingly caused chaos in that country, leading to repeated attacks on Western interests and the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Tunisia has become ever more destabilized, according to a top U.S. commander in the region. Kenya and Algeria were hit by spectacular, large-scale terrorist attacks that left Americans dead or wounded.  South Sudan, a fledgling nation Washington recently midwifed into being that has been slipping into civil war, now has more than 870,000 displaced persons, is facing an imminent hunger crisis, and has recently been the site of mass atrocities, including rapes and killings. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed military of Mali was repeatedly defeated by insurgent forces after managing to overthrow the elected government, and the U.S.-supported forces of the Central African Republic (CAR) failed to stop a ragtag rebel group from ousting the president.  

In an effort to staunch the bleeding in those two countries, the U.S. has been developing a back-to-the-future military policy in Africa -- making common cause with one of the continent’s former European colonial powers in a set of wars that seem to be spreading, not staunching violence and instability in the region.

8 comments:

CNu said...

Interesting material sir, thank you! On a synchronistically related note, I want the last 45 minutes of my life back. In the last 36 hours, I read that a huge part of the motivation for picking fights with Islamically denominated states, has to do with the warrior convictions of devout muslims, and the dependability of muslims to fight back. Of course, in the context of the book review, i had to go googling through multiple browswer histories to find that article and came up craps with nothing to show for it, but I swear I read something echoing in part Reynolds theme just a very short while ago.

umbrarchist said...

It is annoying to me is that I did not encounter those stories until the 70s. Ironically they are so old that Malcolm X and MLK could have read them. There is a third book but it is not in the public domain yet as far as I know and was written in the late 70s after the oil embargo. It is the only one that mentions oil. So the reader must take into account the early 60s perspective. Who was worried about oil back then?



Mack Reynolds was widely travelled for the time and does incorporate a global chess game perspective in his works. The board is somewhat different 50 years later.

Vic78 said...

I really don't care much for the Intelligence Committee's jaw dropping. It's not like nobody knew what was going on back then. I remember them saying some shit about feeling safe. If they want to prove they're serious about the issue, they can try to close that base in Cuba. Damn, they are a bunch of sissies.

CNu said...

M.King Hubbert had put the writing on the wall for oil in 1956 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory

CNu said...

Dood, this is the arch-defender of the NSA - pretending to take umbrage at old-news about CIA torture. This is an assemblage of fraudulent, mendacious, empty suits, wholly-owned and controlled via panoptic surveillance, period.

umbrarchist said...

Yeah, and he was being ignored and ridiculed by people within the industry. How many people outside of the industry even heard of him at the time? Did his name appear anywhere in the media in the 50s?

CNu said...

I believe Hubbert was better known than that, but he was known in the context of Technocracy http://www.truthmove.org/forum/topic/1364

makheru bradley said...

There is no doubt that when America’s oligarchic psychopathocracy chose Barack Obama to be their candidate in 2008, they knew that he was The Perfect Proxy to execute their imperialist agenda in Afrika.

Our Prescient Ancestor, Dr. Wilson warned us during the 1990s that the white power system, which produces Afrikan characters who serve different functions, would allow a person of Afrikan descent to be elected president of the United States if that were necessary to maintain the power relationships between Afrikans and Europeans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hyP-ybi8Vs

Of course, Obama could not do what he is doing (in 49 of 54 Afrikan countries) without willing accomplices, the neo-colonial class of leaders on the Afrikan continent.