Of interest, for those of you that are interested, or, for that matter, interesting, is a piece by Conn Hallinan from the 15th of this month about the some of the finer points of AFRICOM, America’s newest military command. AFRICOM came into being shortly before the United States used the Ethiopian armed forces, supported by US air power and small teams of special forces, to destabilize the Islamic Courts Union which had stabalized of most of Somalia and, for the first time in years, brought a semblance of normalcy to the country. The United States would go on to back the very same War Lords that, a decade ago, it had worked to undermine.
An excerpt…
“The White House’s plans for Africa, which reach far beyond the Horn, are part of a general militarization of U.S. foreign policy. A recent congressional report found that “some embassies have effectively become command posts, with military personnel in those countries all but supplanting the role of ambassadors in conducting American foreign policy.� The United States is already pouring $500 million into its Trans-Sahel Counterterrorism Initiative that embraces Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria in North Africa, and nations boarding the Sahara including Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, and Senegal. A major U.S. base in Djibouti houses some 1,800 troops and played an important role in the Somali invasion.
With Africa expected to provide a quarter of all U.S. oil imports by 2015, a major focus of AFRICOM will be the Gulf of Guinea. The gulf countries of Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, and the Congo Republic all possess enormous oil reserves. Some of them are plagued by exactly the kind of “instability� that AFRICOM was created to address.
Nigeria, for instance, is the world’s eighth largest oil exporter. “Though all the eyes of the public seem focused on the atomic ambitions of Iran, Nigeria is at the greatest risk of oil disruption today,� according to Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial Corporation. A year ago, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) shut down one-fifth of Nigeria’s oil production through a series of attacks on pumping stations and oilrigs.�
