Forget about all that stuff about Ethiopia having
a “tacit” o.k. from Washington to invade Somalia. The
decision was made at the White House and the attack had military
support from the Pentagon. The governments are too much in sync
and the Ethiopians too dependent on the U.S. to think otherwise.
And, it didn’t just suddenly happen. Ethiopian
troops, trained and equipped by the U.S. began infiltrating into
Somali territory last summer as part of a plan that began to evolve
the previous June when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control
of the government. In November, the head of the U.S. Central Command,
General John Abizaid (until last week he ran the U.S. military operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq) was in Addis Ababa. After that, Ghanaian
journalist Cameron Duodu has written, Ethiopia “moved from
proving the Somali government with ‘military advice’
to open armed intervention.”
And not without help. U.S Supplied satellite surveillance
data aided in the bombardment of the Somali capital, Mogadishu and
pinpointing the location of UIC forces resulting, in the words of
New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, in “a string of
back-to-back military loses in which more than 1,000 fighters, mostly
teenage boys, were quickly mowed down by the better-trained and
equipped Ethiopian-backed forces.”
As with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the immediate
question is why was this proxy attack undertaken, in clear violation
of international law and the UN Charter? And again, there is the
official line, the excuse and the underlying impetus. The official
line from Addis Ababa is that it was a defensive act in the face
of a threat of attack from Somalia. There’s nothing to support
the claim and a lot of evidence to the contrary. As far as the Bush
Administration is concerned, it was a chance to strike back at “Islamists”
as part of the on-going “war on terror.” For progressive
observers in the region and much of the media outside the U.S.,
the conflict smells of petroleum.
“As with Iraq in 2003, the United States
has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is
to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing
a client regime there.,” wrote Salim Lone, spokesperson for
the United Nation mission in Iraq in 2003, and now a columnist for
The Daily Nation in Kenya. “The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich,
and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage
of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea.”
In a television interview broadcast on the
day of the full-fledged Ethiopian assault, Marine General James
Jones (who ironically, like Abizaid, recently lost his position),
then-Nato's military commander and head of the US military's European
army, expressed his concern that the size of the U.S. army in Europe
had “perhaps gone too low.” Jones went on to tell the
CSpan interviewer the US needed troops in Europe partly so that
they could be quickly deployed in trouble-spots in Africa and elsewhere.
“I think the emergence of Africa as a strategic
reality is inevitable and we're going to need forward-based troops,
special operations, marines, soldiers, airmen and sailors to be
in the right proportion,” said Jones.
“Pentagon to train sharper eye on Africa,’
read the headline over a January 5 report by Richard Whittle in
the Christian Science Monitor. “Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda
are leading the US to create a new Africa Command.”
“Africa, long beset by war, famine, disease,
and ethnic tensions, has generally taken a backseat in Pentagon
planning - but US officials say that is about to change,”
wrote Whittle, who went on to report that one of former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's last acts before being dismissed from
that position was to convince President Bush to create a new Africa
military Africa command, something the White House is expected to
announce later this year. The creation of the new body, he quoted
one expert as saying, reflects the Administration concern about
“Al Qaeda's known presence in Africa,” China’s
developing relations with the continent with regards to oil supplies
and the fact that “Islamists took over Somalia last June and
ruled until this week, when Ethiopian troops drove them out of power.”
Currently, the US gets about 10 percent of
its oil from Africa, but, the Monitor story said but “some
experts say it may need to rely on the continent for as much as
25 percent by 2010.” Reportedly, nearly two-thirds of Somalia’s
oil fields were allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco,
Chevron and Phillips before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed
Siad Barre was overthrown in January, 1991.
Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, said
the division for African military operations "causes some difficulty
in trying to ... execute a more streamlined and comprehensive strategy
when it comes to Africa." According to the plan, the Central
Command will retain responsibility for the Horn of Africa for about
18 months while the Africa Command gets set up. The Pentagon’s
present Horn of Africa joint task force, headquartered in Djibouti,
includes about 1,500 troops.
African countries won't see much difference in the
US military presence on the ground under the new command, Herman
Cohen, assistant secretary of State for African affairs under the
first President Bush, is quoted as saying. "They're already
getting a lot of attention from the US military.” The Defense
Intelligence Agency "has built up its offices throughout Africa
in US embassies. Right after the cold war, they reduced a lot, but
they've built back up."
"When the Cold War ended, so too did the
interest of the USA in Africa...for a while. Particularly following
September 11, 2001, the interest of the Bush administration in Africa
increased several fold,” says Bill Fletcher, Jr., visiting
professor at Brooklyn College-CUNY, former president of TransAfrica
Forum. “Their interest was, first, in direct relationship
to the amount of oil in the ground. Second, it was in relationship
to a country's attitude toward the so-called "war against terrorism."
Irrespective of the character of a regime, if they were prepared
to provide the USA with oil and/or support the war against terrorism,
the USA would turn a blind eye toward any practices going on.”
"The second piece of this puzzle, however, is that the new
interest in Africa was accompanied by a new military approach toward
Africa,” says Fletcher. “This included both the development
of the so-called Trans Sahel project, which supposedly concerns
training countries to fight terrorism, as well as the deployment
of military bases and personnel to Africa. Specifically, and beginning
around the time of the initiation of the Iraq war, US military planners
began discussing relocating US forces from Europe into Africa, and
specifically into the Gulf of Guinea region, a region rich in oil
reserves.
"It is clear, once again, that in all
of this, the character of any regime is secondary to the regime's
compliance with the interests of the Bush administration and their
economic/strategic priorities. The net effect of this could be the
introduction of US military personnel into extremely complicated
internal struggles not only in the Gulf of Guinea region, but in
other locations, e.g., Somalia, allegedly in the interest of fighting
terrorism and protecting strategic oil reserves."
Describing the Trans Sahel project, which covers a
swath of North Africa, Foreign Policy in Focus commentator Conn
Hallinan wrote recently, “The Bush Administration claims the
target of this program, called the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism
Initiative is the growing presence of al-Qaeda influenced organizations
in the region. Critics, however, charge that the enterprise has
more to do with oil than with Osama bin Laden, and that stepped
up military aid to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia will most likely
end up being used against internal opposition groups in those countries,
not ‘terrorists’ hiding out in the desert.”
An apt example of how the charge of terrorism becomes
cover for suppression of local democratic or leftist dissent is
Nigeria. A major focus of U.S. oil interest is in that country and
the Gulf of Guinea region. There, activists reflecting popular demand
for retaining more oil revenues for local development and an end
to environmental chaos, have been labeled “terrorist”
and are being brutally suppressed by a U.S. trained and equipped
military.
Southern Africa scholar George Wright observes that
the development of military ties to government and “rebel”
groups in Africa, in pursuit of U.S. geo-strategic objectives, is
long standing but has accelerating over recent years. Between 1990
and 2000, military arrangements were concluded between governments
or opposition groups in 39 countries on the continent. These involved
weapons supplies, military training, shared intelligence and surveillance.
The aim, he says, has always been to secure neo-colonial relations
with African countries. However, since 9/11, Wright says, the process
has been accelerated and taken on an increasingly militarist character
“under the guise of fighting terrorism.”
Fighting proxy war is credible as long as there is
a chance of holding sway but history has repeatedly demonstrated
when that doesn’t work out, the end is often direct involvement.
That explains why the 2007 U.S. military sets funding for Special
Forces to increase by 15 percent. According to the 2005 Quadrennial
Defense Review, these Special Forces “will have the capacity
to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously…relying on
a combination of direct (visible) and indirect (clandestine) approaches.”
The Ethiopian government has said it does not have
the resources for an extended stay in Somalia even though the projection
is that it will take many months to “stabilize” the
situation in the invaded country. As of this writing, the Bush Administration
was having difficulty raising troops from nearby cooperative states
to take over the job. Only Uganda seemed a sure bet. Assistant U.S.
Secretary of State for Africa, Ms Jendayi Frazer, told journalists:
"Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised U.S. President
George Bush in a recent phone call that he could supply between
1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia's transitional government
and train its troops. We hope to have the Ugandans deployed before
the end of January.”
Shortly after the invasion, Frazer told reporters
there had been no request for U.S. troops or military assistance
so far, but she did not rule out that it could be requested and
supplied later if necessary. Later came quickly. On Sunday, U.S.
AC-130 gunships began bombarding sites within Somalia and Hawkeye
reconnaissance planes took to the air pinpointing locations for
attacks by jet aircraft. Although the announced purpose of the bombing
was alleged al-Qaeda personnel, media reports indicated the target
were “Islamic fighters”, meaning troops of the UIC government.
"The US has sided with one Somali faction against another,
this could be the beginning of a new civil war … I fear once
again they have gone for a quick fix based on false information,
one “highly respected regional analyst” told the Times
of London. “If they pull it off, however, it could be a turning
point. The stakes are very high indeed, now. I fear they are repeating
the mistakes of the past, not only in Som
alia but in Afghanistan and Iraq and will end up creating a new
insurgency which could destabilize this entire region.”
BC Editorial Board member
Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National
Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy
and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click
here to contact Mr. Bloice. |