Africa: Oil, al-Qaeda and the US military

[dArKeR]

Africa's Maghreb and Sahel regions recently exploded into world view with allegations that the Madrid bombers were tied to those areas' "al Qaeda" groups. And while United States concerns about terrorism in the region have been increasingly voiced, critics of the administration of President George W Bush say that the ongoing US pursuit of energy resources lies behind them. As early as the fall of 2002, Britain's Economist magazine charged that oil "is the only American interest in Africa".

In a fall 2003 interview with Asia Times Online, noted US security analyst Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars, had warned of America's potential African involvement. When queried as to where the next oil flash point might be after Iraq, Klare replied: "I've been looking at Africa. It's heating up over there."

Illustrating the basis for such statements, in 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney's report on a US National Energy Policy declared Africa to be one of America's "fastest-growing sources of oil and gas". By February 1, 2002, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Walter Kansteiner, declared: "This has become of national strategic interest to us." And a December 2001 report by the US National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015, forecast that by 2015 a full quarter of US oil imports would come from Africa.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FC30Aa02.html

[teryang]

1. Brilliant analysis

Globalresearch.ca has a similar series of recent articles on American involvement in central African intrigue and genocide vis a vis Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire. Here the goal includes strategic minerals and precious metals.

This is the sort of 19th Century colonialism that ultimately led to the two world wars.

[bemildred]

2. I do like this quote:

"we are not here for any other purpose than to demonstrate our
friendship, to demonstrate our commitment, and to see if we can
help people in need."

Terrorism is the new Communism, and we can expect that it will
tend to crop up where it is thought that US military intervention
will be useful for one reason or another. Oil is certainly one
such reason, and we have certainly had a string of bad "luck"
in that regard (oil). But I expect that an image of military victory
and political power would be a high priority at this point as well.

The Haiti fiasco is unravelling much too quickly, and those images
today from Iraq are not the sort of thing we want to see, nor are
the images coming from quite a few places in the last few days and
weeks.

It may be that Africa is also being considered as an opportune place
to make one more attempt at demonstration of imperial might, a place
where the flow of information might still be controlled and the
native not too well organized and armed.