Globalism with Combat Boots

Editor's note: I moving to post at the secondary blog.
See last Friday's stories at the overflow blog.

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Views > April 19, 2007

By Salim Muwakkil

America's new Africa initiatives might be characterized as globalism with combat boots, though it's the same old story with the well-worn plot of Western hegemony.

The United States launched a deadly air attack against Somalia last February, using the war on terror as a pretext. The bombings, which killed scores of civilians, were in support of an Ethiopian invasion to oust a Somalieregime composed of “Islamic militants” considered hostile to Ethiopia and reportedly sought by the United States.

A convergence of Ethiopian and American interests provoked the air attack that helped rout this leadership, the so-called Islamic Courts movement, and endangered thousands of Somali lives. But it failed to turn-up the targeted Islamic militants. Continuing attempts to flush them out has produced what some critics have called an “African Guantánamo.”

According to an April 5 Associated Press story, “human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally to the prisons in Ethiopia” and interrogated by CIA and FBI agents. The bombings were part of “an on-going operation of air strikes in southern Somalia” to support Ethiopia’s struggle against fighters tied to al-Qaeda, a Pentagon spokesman said in explaining the deadly attacks. For five years, the U.S. military has operated a regional task force based in Djibouti designed ostensibly to prevent al-Qaeda sympathizers from gaining a foothold on the Horn of Africa. Last year, the Bush administration announced an enormous expansion of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. military base in Djibouti.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Bush Administration’s bombing of Africa is the lack of any real public discussion in this country. The silence of African-American leadership is especially troubling. Aside from Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.), very few black politicians have even raised the issue. “I think the policy is wrong,” Payne told me when I asked him about the bombing of Somalia. It just “shows a misguided policy in Africa in particular, and the world in general,” he said.

John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen, two members of the International Crisis Group, argue in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs that the Bush administration’s singular focus on stemming terrorism, “is overshadowing U.S. initiatives to resolve conflicts and promote good governance—with disastrous implications for regional stability and U.S. counterterrorism objectives themselves.”

And while the Greater Horn of Africa (which includes the Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Uganda) has attracted the most public attention, the U.S. also has operations in Algeria, Angola, Chad, Gabon, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and other locations.

The U.S. military presence in Africa has been increasing for many years but wasn’t officially acknowledged until Feb. 7, when President George W. Bush announced a new Pentagon command for the entire continent called AFRICOM. The new command, scheduled to start operation by October 2008, “will strengthen our security cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa,” Bush said.

AFRICOM eventually will encompass the entire continent—except Egypt—and include the islands of Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé and Príncipe (in the Gulf of Guinea, where the United States is building another large base). This region will become increasingly important to the United States for reasons made clear in press reports on the AFRICOM proposal: “The U.S., the world’s biggest energy consumer, also hopes the Gulf of Guinea region in West Africa will provide up to a quarter of its oil imports within a decade.”

West Africa has about 60 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and its oil is the low sulfur, sweet crude that petroleum refiners prize. Experts predict that one in every five new barrels of oil entering the global economy in the latter half of this decade will come from the Gulf of Guinea. Nigeria already supplies the U.S. with 10 percent of its imported oil and Angola 4 percent. The continent is also rich in bauxite, diamonds, gold, uranium and a stunning variety of other useful minerals.

The buildup of U.S. forces is often justified as necessary, both to fight the threat of terrorism and to counter growing instability in the continent’s resource-rich regions—to guard against so-called “failed states.”

China’s growing influence in Africa is another reason the United States is anxious to assert a military presence. The burgeoning economic growth of the world’s largest nation has produced a desperate need for Africa’s natural resources and a vigorous rivalry with the West for influence.

America’s new Africa initiatives are driven by the same concerns as the imperialism of the past: unrestricted access to the continent’s resources and geopolitical advantage over perceived enemies. Today it might be characterized as globalism with combat boots, though it’s the same old story with the well-worn plot of Western hegemony.

Once, the enemy was Communism; now it’s Terrorism. But the real enemy is an independent Africa.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983, and an op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.

Iraq, Bush's God-Emboldened Narcissism and Parasitic Militarism

Posted 18 March 2007

Part One: Four Years In Iraq

Had Ismael Hossein-Zadeh written nothing more than his seven-page snapshot of the God-emboldened narcissism of President George W. Bush, his recent book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, would still be worth its steep purchase price. But, in fact, his larger argument is much more compelling. In essence, the professor of economics at Drake University claims that the United States is currently led by a dangerous narcissistic twit, who's been duped into accelerating the degeneration of post-World War II U.S. militarism into a "parasitic militarism," which might lead to the demise of the republic.

Readers of pages 170-76 will understand immediately how the God-emboldened narcissism of George W. Bush was manipulated to initiate mass murder in Iraq. Many Americans are complicit in his mass murder. After all, it required the votes of some woefully ignorant Americans, affluent Republicans (who know on which side their bread is buttered) and partisan Supreme Court justices to put Bush in office.

Behaving as if their country was a banana republic, they put into the office an unread, ill-traveled, inarticulate, crude, callous, mean-spirited, trouble-making, revenge-seeking, Vietnam-evading, incompetent, loud-mouthed, cheap-shot, but consistently-bailed-out narcissist -- largely because Bush and his propagandists proclaimed he had found God.

Quoting from Hugh Urban, a professor of comparative religion, Mr. Hossein-Zadeh agrees: "The narrative that Bush and his biographers tell is clearly modeled on the prodigal son - the young man who fritters away his early life on alcohol [if not cocaine] and sin, only to find God and return to his rightful place in his father's former occupation." [p. 170]

And although this narrative duped a minority among the electorate, especially evangelical Christians, there is little evidence -- except for giving up the alcohol -- to indicate that finding God actually improved Bush's character. Simply recall how he and the equally flawed and evil Dick Cheney engaged in crude psychological projection in September 2000, while slandering Adam Clymer: Bush said, "There's Adam Clymer - major league asshole - from the New York Times." Cheney responded, "Yeah, big time." [Jake Tapper, Salon.com, Sept. 04, 2000]

Or simply recall that, in a supposedly private moment just before his national address announcing that war with Iraq had begun, "a camera caught Bush pumping his fist as though instead of initiating a war he had kicked a winning field goal or hit a home run. 'Feels good,' he said." [Paul Waldman, Fraud p. 8] Could he have been more callous?

Arguably, finding God further warped his character. Instead of remaining an unread, ill-traveled, inarticulate, crude, callous, mean-spirited, trouble-making, revenge-seeking, Vietnam-evading, incompetent, loud-mouthed, cheap-shot, but consistenly-bailed-out narcissist, Bush became a narcissist emboldened by the belief that God had called upon him - him! -- to lead the United States.

Moreover, if Bush was narcissistic enough to claim: "I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me," [p. 171] simply imagine the extent to which his fatally flawed narcissism metastasized after he "won" the White House (and, subsequently, reelection). As Aesop once observed: "The smaller the mind the greater the conceit." [p. 172]

According to Hossein-Zadeh, America's neoconservatives manipulated Bush's Manichaean certitudes about good and evil by presenting the September 11 atrocities as a "lightning bolt" and, thus, a sign indicating Bush's God-given destiny to destroy the evil of terrorism. [p. 172, borrowing from Stephen Sniegoski, "The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel]

Moreover, "having helped define the president's mission, the military-industrial-Likud-Christian Right interests, working largely through the neoconservative militarists, have taken the most advantage of the thus energized president. By deliberately couching their nefarious objectives in missionary terms, and repeatedly defining their enemies, real or imaginary, in biblical language ('axis of evil, evildoers, good versus evil, day of reckoning,' and the like), they have had no difficulty getting the president to carry out their agenda, including the plan to recast the geopolitical map of the Middle East, starting with the invasion of Iraq." [p. 172]

Did it work? Simply recall candidate Bush's suspicion that God wanted him to be president. Then recall that, on June 4, 2003, President George W. Bush confided to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas: "God told me to strike at Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." [Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies, p. 1]

Which raises two questions: (1) Given all the mistakes and failures attending Bush's heinous invasion and, now, unwinnable war, why didn't the same God, who told Bush to "strike at Saddam," also tell him how to achieve certain victory in Iraq? (2) And why shouldn't Americans suspect that Bush's latest plan, the "surge," is nothing more than another neocon manipulation of his God-emboldened narcissism? Republican party operatives and right-wing media pimps might sign on, if only to delay defeat in Iraq until after their President leaves office

After all, as esteemed analyst Anthony Cordesman has observed: "The minimal requirement for a successful U.S. strategy is a relatively stable and secure Iraq, not temporary U.S. military control of Baghdad." Why? Because "the U.S. needs a strategy for all of Iraq, not a single city - particularly when a focus on control of Baghdad could mean leaving most of the country to divide on sectarian and ethnic lines." ["The New Strategy in Iraq: Uncertain Progress Towards an Unknown Goal," Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 14, 2007, p. 4]

Yet, as Professor Hossein-Zadeh warns, the greatest immediate danger to the U.S. and the world does not come from yet another flawed strategy in Iraq, but from the fact that the U.S. still is led by a God-emboldened narcissist, who is divorced from reality and subject to manipulation, especially by Vice President Cheney and the neocons. Thus, he quotes Paul Craig Roberts, who has written: "People with power in their hands who are detached from reality are the most dangerous people of all. The delusional quality of their rantings disarms people from taking them seriously: 'Oh, they couldn't mean that.' But they do." [Pp. 175-76]

Detached from reality? Consider these lies and delusions: Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. We will be greeted as liberators. A "Coalition of the Willing." Shock and awe. A liberation, not an occupation. "Dead enders," not an insurgency. Bringing democracy to the Middle East. Mission accomplished. Sectarian violence, not civil war. The "surge" is working.

When the American electorate finally came to its senses in November 2006 and registered its opposition to the war in Iraq by evicting the complicit Republican-controlled Congress that practiced stay-the-course bootlicking rather than critical oversight of Bush's war, delusional Bush responded with his neocon-inspired "surge," an escalation of his war in Iraq. Similarly, when the Iraq Study Group recommended a diplomatic offensive, to include Iran and Syria, as well as "a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will allow the United States to move forces out responsibly" ["Iraq Study Group: Change Iraq strategy now," CNN, Dec. 6, 2006], delusional Bush responded with his "surge."

Thus, there's abundant external evidence to substantiate Professor Hossein-Zadeh's exposure of the unique and immediate dangers posed to the United States, Iraq, Iran and much of the rest of the world, due to the delusions of America's God-emboldened narcissistic President, George W. Bush. Quoting Lew Rockwell, Hossein-Zadeh agrees: "Bush is alarming, the kind of president who seems capable of blowing up the world and calling it good." [p. 174]

Lest that sound over the top, consider Zbigniew Brzezinski's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as recently as February 1, 2007: "Practically no country in the world - no country in the world - shares the Manichaean delusions that the administration so passionately articulates."

Watch out, Iran! For as Brzezinski also warned: "Indeed, a mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and expanding war is already being articulated."

Yet, Professor Hossein-Zadeh has still bigger fish to fry. In his view, "The moral priority is…to dismantle…the warfare state, or the socioeconomic structure that cultivates and elevates the likes of George W. Bush [and Dick Cheney] to positions of power." [p. 178] His examination of the dangers posed by that warfare state will be the subject of Part Two of this article.


Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).

waltuhler@aol.com