Reply #1: West Africa: Where the Empire Will Come to Ruin

[seemslikeadream]

What West Africa does have is oil – a lot of it. Nigeria is the world's seventh-largest oil producer, and accounts for 70 percent of the continent's oil. Equatorial Guinea, as well as Angola, Senegal and São Tomé and Príncipe are all being eyed hungrily by Western oil majors, who've made sizable investments throughout the region.

Yet West Africa also has in abundance the same complexities that have stymied American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq: inscrutable singularities of ethnicity, cultures and customs; a bevy of banana republics and informal statelets run by torture-prone, anti-democratic regimes marked by extreme corruption and violence, and an infinitely more difficult natural environment. In short, West Africa is Afghanistan and Iraq to the power of ten, and American troops stationed there are no doubt going to be feeling the heat.

Adventures in Anti-Terrorism

Now, the U.S. avers, West Africa also has terrorists of the Islamic, al-Qaeda variety. As usual, American leaders are not interested in severing terrorism at its roots – that is, addressing the lack of education, economic opportunity and basic social welfare that inevitably give rise to inter-ethnic conflict and ideological (in today's world, religious) fanaticism. As usual, the remedy for the perceived growth of terrorism is to arm and train the various clans and factions that pass for governments in the area – disregarding their own connections with rogue arms dealers and organized crime, as well as their often precarious grip on power.

And so has the Pentagon undertaken another multi-million dollar project for training the armies of weak states in the war on terror – now, the central-west African states of Niger, Chad, Mali and Mauritania. The American acronym for the operation is TSCTI (Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorist Initiative), and it is, according to Reuters, "aimed at stopping militant groups gaining a foothold in a region which already provides 15 percent of U.S. oil supplies." In short, as mission commander Major Paul Baker recently told the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) in Chad, "e're looking at Africa as a place of growth for the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense."

Indeed. The CSM article points to the ongoing joint U.S. naval exercises with Nigeria, reported anti-terror patrols along the Kenya-Somalia border, and the "expansion of the Chad program from a four-nation, $7 million project to a nine-country plan with an expected budget of up to $125 million." More great news for the U.S. taxpayer, just as Iraq continues to empty imperial coffers.

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http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=3658