“In between panels, I ran into Colin Powell
and asked him if we are ever going to get out of Iraq,” Arianna
Huffington wrote on July 2006 in a report from the Aspen Ideas
Festival. ’We are,’ he told me, ‘but we're
not going to leave behind anything we like because we are in
the middle of a civil war.’" Writing on her website,
Huffington added, “Powell and Jack Murtha both talking
about civil war in Iraq -- shouldn't that be headline news?
Evidently not.
Powell showed up at Aspen again this year
and said quite out loud that he once spent 2-hours vainly trying
to persuade President
George Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today's conflict
cannot be resolved by US Armed force. “I tried to avoid
this war,” Powell alleged at 2007 Festival in Colorado. “I
took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country
and becoming the occupiers.”
We know the former secretary of state said these things to the
heavy thinkers gathered at the ski resort because correspondent
Sarah Baxter reported it on July 8 in The Times in Britain.
We wouldn’t know it otherwise. Aide from a note in a media
review column in the Washington Post, the story was
almost totally ignored by the major news outlets in this country.
General Powell, once a top official in the U.S. government has
apparently become an invisible man.
I was musing on this the other day when
the news came that another African American military leader
had been picked to carry the
weight of still another important controversial aspect of Bush
Administration foreign policy. On July 10, the Defense Department
announced that Gen. William E. "Kip" Ward, the Army's
only active black four-star general, will take over Pentagon's
new Africa Command or “Africom.”
It’s clear that the Bush Administration
has embarked on a bold effort to increase U.S. presence and
influence in Africa
and that part of the effort is putting African Americans upfront
in the drive.
Bush Administration Africa policy flows almost directly from
recommendations from two right-wing Washington think tanks: the
Heritage Foundation that came up with the idea of an African
command and the American Enterprise Institute. (The latter would
appear to be working to increase its clout by recently adding
to its staff former - briefly - World Bank director, neo-conservative,
and Iraq war promoter, Paul Wolfowitz, who says his principle
interest these days is Africa.)
Another African American Pentagon official,
Cindy Courville, was recently appointed U.S. ambassador to
the African Union,
having previously served as director for East African Affairs
in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where she was responsible
for the coordination of U.S. military and security policy with
East Africa and the Horn of Africa. Courville said at her confirmation
hearing, “Africa holds growing geostrategic importance
and is a high priority of this administration.”
According to the Administration, the new
Africa command Ward now heads up will help "promote peace and security and respond
to crises on the continent” and coordinate military support
for other diplomatic and development programs. The new command
has been set up, according to a Pentagon press release, because
of “the increasing importance of Africa strategically,
diplomatically and economically.” This is because of “the
increasing importance of the continent to the U.S…”
One of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
last acts before his dismissal was to convince President Bush
to create
Africa command. President Bush announced the formation of the
Africa Command in February, saying it will "strengthen our
security cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities
to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa."
Not everybody sees it quite this benignly.
Many people both here and in Africa are alarmed by the Administration’s
decision to step up U.S. military operations on the continent.
Moreover, many see it linked to the rapidly accelerating scramble
for Africa’s natural resources, principally, but not exclusively,
oil.
Nii Akuetteh, the executive director of
Washington-based Africa Action, said Africom “has nothing to do with African interests
and programs; its access to oil and the ‘war on terror’.” Akuetteh,
a former Adjunct Professor at Georgetown’s University’s
School of Foreign Service and one time Research and Education
Director of the advocacy group TransAfrica, told me he is of
two minds about the appointment of General Ward. “He must
be someone of considerable competence to have risen to where
he is, given the persistence of racism, and that is a good thing.
What bothers me is the concept of Africom itself; I don’t
like it. Beyond all the talk about bureaucratic reorganization
the real fear must be over the threat of increased militarization
of sub-Saharan Africa. If you read the details you will see that
that’s pretty much what it is.”
Akuetteh says although some African governments
may have welcomed the idea, civil groups in most of Africa
and people in the U.S.
concerned with U.S. policy toward the continent, “ are
all of one mind: we don’t like it.”
Bill Fletcher Jr., BC Editorial
Board Member and former President of TransAfrica, said, “It is ludicrous
to think that setting up Africom has anything to do with fighting
terrorism. It is a dangerous notion.” The real motivation,
he says, is to protect America’s oil interests in Africa.
“Pentagon to train sharper eye on
Africa,' read the headline over a Jan. 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.” Today, the US gets
about 10 percent of its oil from Africa, but, the Monitor said,
some experts say it may need to rely on the continent for as
much as 25 percent by 2010.'
“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,” Marine General James Jones, then-NATO's
military commander and head of the US European army, told an
interviewer last year before the African Command plan was revealed.
Jones was appealing for more U.S. troops in Europe to be available
for deployment for trouble spots in Africa. “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.
However, TransAfrica argues that “While the Bush administration
claims this development will build partnerships with African
governments that will lead to ‘greater peace and security
to the people of Africa’ nothing could be further from
the truth. This newest incursion follows a pattern of extraction
of minerals and aiding factions in some of Africa’s most
bloody conflicts: thus further destabilizing the continent. This
operation will strengthen the US military’s presence in
the Gulf of Guinea, to aid oil extraction processes and will
work to further militarize the Horn of Africa in support of the
administration’s ‘war on terror.’ US troops
are already on the Horn of Africa carrying out operations within
Somalia and on its border with Kenya.”
That an African American general would be
named to oversee U.S. military operations didn’t come as a surprise. In August
of last year, Time magazine previewed the decision to set up
the African command. It noted that it would also “provide
a single military organization for agencies like the State Department
and the CIA to work within the region.” A Pentagon source
said at the time Ward would probably be put in charge of the
project, noting what Time called “his boots-on-the-ground
experience in Africa.”
Ward, 58, currently deputy commander of U.S. European Command,
graduated from Morgan State University's ROTC program and joined
the military in 1971. He received his bachelor's degree from
Morgan, and his master's from Pennsylvania State University.
Among his many assignments, in the early 1990s, he served in
Somalia as commander of the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division
(Light) Fort Drum when America sent the military in to battle
Somali militias. In 2000, he commanded the occupation force in
Bosnia and Herzegovina following the breakup of in the former
Yugoslavia. He was the U.S. Security coordinator for the Palestine
Authority for most of 2005. He was promoted to four-star general
last summer.
The announcement of the new military command was followed by
the joint U.S-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Once again, an African
American became the public face of the Administration in an African
operation. That would be Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for
Africa Jendayi Frazer. In Somalis things are going from bad to
worse with the Ethiopian occupation igniting an Iraq-like civil
conflict that shows no sign of abating and threatens to become
a larger regional conflict. Recent declarations by Frazer are
said to be exacerbating the danger.
Last week, it became quite clear that Frazer’s boss, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice is not a central operative in terms
of U.S. policy in Iraq. That role has apparently fallen to Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and Rice’s “assistant,” John
Negroponte.
Rice was scheduled to visit Africa this
week. After a stop in the Israeli-occupied West Bank she was
slated to visit the Democratic
Republic of the Congo and attend a trade conference in Ghana.
However, all three trips – and another to Southeast Asia
- were canceled or postponed. This came after the President said
he was sending Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the Middle East
early next month to survey the situation with – in the
words of the New York Times - “an assist” from
Rice, and the projection of a fall regional conference on the
Middle East that she is to chair.
The postponement of Rice’s trip to Sub-Saharan African
should not be taken as any diminution of the Administration’s
stepped up attention to the continent. On July 11, she addressed
the Organization of American States/African Union Democracy Bridge
Forum in Washington.
“We have had combatant commands around the world for every
place except Africa,” Rice recently told participants in
the 2007 Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists. “We
have a European Command. We have a Central Command; that's the
Middle East. We have a South Command, a Southern Command that
is Latin America. We have not had a command dedicated to Africa."
"Both on the war on terror and in dealing with conflicts,
we are cooperating very intensely with local governments and
local armed forces in training, equipping and intelligence sharing,’ said
Rice. “For instance, right now we are assisting the African
mission in Sudan, and but we're doing it from our European Command.
When we did the Liberia work with a very fine Nigerian general,
General Okonkwo, we did that from European Command. So it only
makes sense as we cooperate more and work more with African militaries
and African leaders to have an African command.”
“According to Rice, “what you're
really seeing is the president's very active policy in Africa
in partnership with
Africans to resolve Africa's problems. Now you're seeing the
institutions begin to develop to make that possible over the
long run. Africa Command is one. Now in Africa we will have a
sub-combatant commander for Africa and an ambassador to the AU
because we're doing so much cooperative work with the countries
of Africa.”
Any African patriots looking over their
shoulders at what U.S. efforts in the Middle East have wrought
might only shudder at
the thought. That is except for the autocratic rulers who have
already thrown their lot with Washington – Chad, Ethiopia
and Uganda come to mind – which have employed such “security” cooperation
to try to crush local opponents. However, the Africom project
drew a cool, sometime hostile response elsewhere on the continent.
Under Secretary of Defense Henry recently led a team promoting
the Africa Command to Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Ethiopia
and Dijbouti where, according to the Financial Times they were
met with "a wall of hostility from governments in the region" most
of whom are apprehensive about the plan and hardly anxious to
join the Administration’s so-called war on terror.
A State Department official told the Times: “We've
got a big image problem down there. Public opinion is really
against getting into bed with the United States. They just don't
trust the United States.” The Guardian (UK) reported, “The
Libyan and Algerian governments reportedly told Mr. Henry that
they would play no part in hosting Africom,” adding, “Even
Morocco, considered Washington’s closest north African
ally, indicated it did not welcome a permanent military presence
on its soil.”
Most commentary on this situation avoids
what I would consider the most important point: what right
does the U.S. government
have to interfere in the affairs of sovereign African nations?
To intervene in their disputes? To promote the militarization
of the continent? These questions seem to have eluded Rice, Frazer,
Courville and company. But then again, they don’t make
policy; they’re just doing their job.
Michele Ruiters, a senior researcher at
the Institute for Global Dialogue in South Africa, wrote in
the newspaper Business Day
that Africans should “oppose the expansion of US military
power on the continent.” Debates will emerge, she wrote, “about
Africom’s interests, maneuvers and probable outcomes, but
we should also examine the potential social, economic and political
destabilization of an already vulnerable continent.”
“The African Union and the Peace and Security Council
were established to entrench democracy, create economic development
and monitor and secure peace but have not been allowed to develop
and mature enough to deal with the continent’s problems, “continued
Ruiters. “Africa does not need another US base aimed at ‘promoting’ peace
and development. Africom would destabilize an already fragile
continent and region, which would be forced to engage with US
interests on military terms.”
Meanwhile, General Powell also told the
Aspen audience that Al Qaeda is only 10 percent of the problem
in Iraq, who told
columnist Robert Novak about CIA agent Valerie Palme was never
a secret, and: "I believe Guantanamo should be closed.” Shouldn't
that too be headline news? Evidently not.
Commander Ward might well be on guard as
he moves into his new position. Sometimes when things go bad
in an unjustified, ill
thought out foreign adventure – say aiding the invasion
of Somalia - the brother in charge – like Powell - can
apparently later become invisible, his recollections unreported.
BlackCommentator.com 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. |