US Troops to Niger: A New Stage in the Scramble for Africa
By <
http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/bill-van-auken> Bill Van Auken
Global Research, February 27, 2013
President Barack Obama's terse notification to Congress last week that
American troops are being deployed to the northwest African nation of Niger
confirms that a whole new stage in the imperialist recolonization of Africa
is now in progress.
The dispatch of the first 100 troops-with hundreds more reportedly to
follow-is bound up with a deal signed last month between Washington and the
Niger government allowing the US military to set up a drone base on the
country's territory, creating the conditions for spreading the Obama
administration's remote-control killing spree throughout the region.
The buildup of US forces in Niger comes in the immediate wake of last
month's French intervention in neighboring Mali, carried out with critical
US logistical and intelligence support, and aimed, in the words of French
Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, at the "total reconquest" of the former
colony.
Both Paris and Washington have justified their military incursions into the
African continent in the name of defeating Al Qaeda and associated
organizations in Africa. British Prime Minister David Cameron chimed in last
month, warning that the prosecution of this war in Africa could span
"decades."
The glaring contradiction between this pretext for war in Africa's Sahel
region and the line-up of these imperialist powers behind Al Qaeda-linked
militias in the sectarian-based war to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria
is passed over in silence by the media and the political establishments in
all three countries.
No one in the US press, for example, bothered noting that Obama's
Qaeda in Africa came on the same day that Washington blocked a United
Nations Security Council resolution condemning an Al Qaeda terror bombing
that massacred scores of civilians in Damascus.
Behind the incoherence of the pretexts for imperialist intervention, the
real forces driving it are clear. Washington finds itself being economically
eclipsed in Africa by China, which has emerged as the continent's leading
trade partner. Increasingly in competition over strategic resources-West
Africa is soon expected to account for 25 percent of US petroleum imports-US
imperialism is relying on its residual military superiority to combat this
economic challenge.
In the prosecution of this predatory strategy, Al Qaeda serves a dual
purpose-providing shock troops for the toppling of regimes seen as obstacles
to US hegemony, and serving as a pretext for other interventions carried out
in the name of combating "terrorism" and "extremism."
Setting up the new base in Niger places US drones just across the border
from Nigeria, which until recently has supplied 10 percent of US foreign oil
imports and where the Pentagon has grown increasingly involved in an
internal conflict involving Boko Haram, an indigenous Islamic sect that
appears to have no ties to Al Qaeda nor any ambitions outside of Nigeria.
In light of these developments, the significance of the US-NATO intervention
to bring down the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 emerges
with ever greater clarity. Claiming the lives of some 80,000 Libyans and
leaving an entire society in rubble, this was the first war to be commanded
by AFRICOM, the regional command set up under the Bush administration in
2007. It was waged to pave the way for new and more far-reaching military
interventions.
The Gaddafi regime served as the linchpin of security and economic relations
that maintained a semblance of stability in the Sahel region, providing
economic aid, for example, that served to cushion the longstanding conflicts
between the Tuareg people and the regimes in Mali and Niger.
The toppling and murder of Gaddafi had the altogether foreseeable
consequence of destabilizing the region, sending Tuaregs fleeing Libya into
Mali, followed by the very Islamist elements that Washington had backed in
the war for regime-change in Libya, and thus providing the pretext for both
US and French imperialism to intervene again, putting troops on the ground
in the region.
Plans for these interventions were well advanced before the first bomb was
dropped on Tripoli. The region has been a focus of US strategic calculations
for the past decade, beginning with Washington's Pan Sahel Initiative in
2003, followed by its Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership in 2005.
In this context, the role played by a whole layer of pseudo-lefts
internationally in justifying and promoting the war against Libya, touting
it as a humanitarian intervention, a crusade for democracy, and even a
"revolution," also becomes clearer than ever.
The academic Juan Cole of the University of Michigan used his inflated
reputation as a critic of the Iraq war to sell the war in Libya. Gilbert
Achcar, a member of the international Pabloite United Secretariat and a
professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, condemned
NATO for not dropping more bombs on the country. And organizations ranging
from the Left Party in Germany, to the New Anti-capitalist Party in France,
the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and the International Socialist
Organization in the US all engaged in the dirty work of politically
legitimizing a predatory imperialist war.
The pro-war positions taken by these individuals and groups-in both Libya
and Syria-reflect the evolution of a whole socio-political layer rooted in
affluent sections of the middle class, which, with varying combinations of
political calculation and ignorance, have come to identify their material
interests with those of their "own" imperialist powers.
In the context of the escalating imperialist drive to redraw the map of
Africa, these elements stand completely exposed as intellectual and
political "assets" of the CIA and the Pentagon.
It follows that a genuine movement against war and colonialism can be
developed only through the independent political mobilization and
international unification of the working class in struggle against the root
cause of war, the capitalist system. With the events unfolding in Africa,
this perspective has been thoroughly vindicated.
Received on Wed Feb 27 2013 - 21:37:25 EST
