Obama, The Son of Africa, Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels

By John Pilger

Global Research

On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only "engage" for "self-defence", says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Obama’s decision is described in the press as "highly unusual" and "surprising", even "weird". It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and "protect" Indonesia, which President Nixon called "the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize". Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually "self defence" or "humanitarian", words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.

In Africa, says Obama, the "humanitarian mission" is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which "has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa". This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.

Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the "national security of the United States". The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has fewer than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US "national security" usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s "president-for-life" Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military "aid" – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.

However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American "threat". When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, "Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats". These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.

Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and NATO backed the "rebels" with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning "genocide" in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s "humanitarian intervention" was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the "rebel" National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production "in exchange" (the term used) for "total and permanent" French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in "liberated" Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: "We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!"

The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the "scramble for Africa" at the end of the 19th century.

Like the "victory" in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified "pro-Gaddafi" fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, "celebrate". According to General Petraeus, there is now a war "of perception … conducted continuously through the news media".

For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s "defence strategy" plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.

That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the "Son of Africa", is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

For more information on John Pilger, visit his website at www.johnpilger.com

John Pilger is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by John Pilger

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27181

Osama bin Laden is finally "officially" dead

An insider interview about military, secret ops, CIA, incompetent presidents and congress, criminal bankers and a lot more.

General Wesley Clark talking about oil and the Middle East wars

By Democracy Now!

2002 Taliban peace offer damages myth of AL- Qaeda ties

By Gareth Porter

Washington - The central justification of the U.S.-NATO war against the Afghan Taliban - that the Taliban would allow al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan - has been challenged by new historical evidence of offers by the Taliban leadership to reconcile with the Hamid Karzai government after the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001.

The evidence of the Taliban peace initiatives comes from a new paper drawn from the first book-length study of Taliban- al Qaeda relations thus far, as well as an account in another recent study on the Taliban in Kandahar province by journalist Anand Gopal.

In a paper published Monday by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn recount the decision by the Taliban leadership in 2002 to offer political reconciliation with the U.S.-backed Afghan administration.

Citing an unidentified former Taliban official who participated in the decision, they report that the entire senior Taliban political leadership met in Pakistan in November 2002 to consider an offer of reconciliation with the new Afghan government in which they would "join the political process" in Afghanistan.

"We discussed whether to join the political process in Afghanistan or not and we took a decision that, yes, we should go and join the process," the former Taliban leader told the co-authors.

They cite an interlocutor who was then in contact with the Taliban leadership as recalling that they would have returned to Afghanistan to participate in the political system if they had been given an assurance they would not be arrested.

But the Karzai government and the United States refused to offer such an assurance, the interlocutor recalled. They considered the Taliban a "spent force", he told Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn.

Gopal, who has covered Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal, provided a similar account of the Taliban attempt to reconcile with the Karzai government in a lengthy study published by the New America Foundation last November, based on his interviews with present and former Taliban as well as with officials in the office of President Karzai.

The entire senior Taliban leadership, meeting in Karachi, "agreed in principle to find a way for them to return to Afghanistan and abandon the fight", Gopal wrote, but the initiative was frustrated by the unwillingness of the United States and the Afghan government to provide any assurance that they would not arrested and detained.

The Taliban continued to pursue the possibility of reconciliation in subsequent years, with apparent interest on the part of the Karzai government, according to Gopal. Delegations "representing large sections of the Taliban leadership" traveled to Kabul in both 2003 and 2004 to meet with senior government officials, according to his account.

But the George W. Bush administration remained uninterested in offering assurances of security to the Taliban.

Robert Grenier, then the CIA station chief in Islamabad, revealed in an article in al Jazeera Jan. 31, 2010 that former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil had been serving as an intermediary with the Taliban on their possible return to Afghanistan in 2002 when he was "arrested and imprisoned for his pains".

The CIA sought to persuade the U.S. Defence Department to release Muttawakil, according to Grenier. But Muttawakil remained in detention at Bagram Airbase, where he was physically abused, until October 2003.

The new evidence undermines the Barack Obama administration's claim that Taliban-ruled areas of Afghanistan would become a "sanctuary" for al Qaeda.

Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn suggest that the proposed reintegration of the Taliban into a political system that had been set up by the United States and its allies was "totally alien to al-Qaeda ideology but logical for the Taliban".

They acknowledge that the Taliban have welcomed the support and assistance of al Qaeda cadres in the war. But they argue in the new paper that the relationship is a "marriage of convenience" imposed by the foreign military presence, not an expression of an ideological alliance.

They also cite evidence that the Taliban leadership recognise that they will have to provide guarantees that a Taliban-influenced regime in Afghanistan would not allow al Qaeda to have a sanctuary.

They note in particular a Taliban public statement released before the London Conference of January 2010 that pledged, "We will not allow our soil to be used against any other country."

An earlier Taliban statement, distributed to news media Dec. 4, 2009, said the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" - the term used by the insurgent leadership to refer to the organisation - had "no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan".

Independent specialists on the history of the relationship have long questioned that assumption, and have emphasised that the Taliban leadership was never very close to al Qaeda.

Leah Farrell, senior counter-terrorism intelligence analyst with the Australian Federal Police from 2002 to 2008, wrote in her blog that the relationship "is not a marriage, it's friends with benefits". Farrell has also said that jihadi accounts of the late 1990s have shown bin Laden was not that close to Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar before the 9/11 attacks.

The new paper, based on both Taliban and jihadist documents and from interviews with Taliban and former Taliban officials, points to basic differences of ideology and interest between the Taliban and al Qaeda throughout the history of their relations.

Relations between Taliban and al Qaeda leaders during the second half of the 1990s were "complicated and often tense", according to Strick von Linschoten and Kuehn, even though they were both Sunni Muslims and shared a common enemy.

They recall that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's plotting against the United States was done in direct violation of Mullah Omar's directives to him.

An e-mail from two leading Arab jihadists in Afghanistan to bin Laden in July 1999, which Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison later found in a laptop that had once belonged to al Qaeda, referred to a "crisis" in relations between bin Laden and Mullah Omar that threatened the future of al Qaeda-sponsored training camps in Afghanistan. The message expressed fear that the Taliban regime might "kick them out" of Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar nevertheless regarded bin Laden as an "important connector" to the Muslim world, according to Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn. And the Taliban leadership faction that was pushing hard to force bin Laden out of the country was weakened by the death of its leading figure, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, in April 2001.

Contrary to the suggestion that the Taliban were complicit with the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, however, Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn assert that Mullah Omar and other leaders refused to hand over bin Laden to the United States mainly because of the fear of losing the few allies they had in the Muslim world.

They suggest that a primary reason for the Taliban decision not to give into U.S. pressure on bin Laden both before and after 9/11 was to maintain the support of Pakistan, which was encouraging them to hold out against those pressures.

Other published sources have confirmed that, even in October 2001, Pakistani intelligence officials were advising the Taliban to avoid handing over bin Laden, in the hope that the Taliban-al Qaeda resistance to the U.S.-led military offensive would continue.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

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Kissinger about the China - US relations

Listen carefully what he is saying....

John Perkins

Interview with a real insider from the top about economic hit men, oil, the building of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, the roots of terrorism, the Panama Canal, geopolitics, assassins, jackals, Colombia, the building of an empire and some hope for the future. A must see even though it is a bit long, approximately 100 minutes. 

Major books by John Perkins on this specific issue: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), The Secret History of the American Empire (2008), Hoodwinked (2010)

Paul Craig Roberts on the US military spending

China, Japan and OPEC indirectly financing the pointless wars of the US which are bankrupting America and serve only the military industrial complex.