Countries are "pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a
great game for the domination of the world," wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy
of India, in 1898. Nothing has changed. The shopping mall massacre in
Nairobi was a bloody façade behind which a full-scale invasion of Africa
and a war in Asia are the great game.
The al-Shabaab shopping
mall killers came from Somalia. If any country is an imperial metaphor,
it is Somalia. Sharing a common language and religion, Somalis have
been divided between the British, French, Italians and Ethiopians. Tens
of thousands of people have been handed from one power to another. "When
they are made to hate each other," wrote a British colonial official,
"good governance is assured."
Today, Somalia is a theme park
of brutal, artificial divisions, long impoverished by World Bank and IMF
"structural adjustment" programmes, and saturated with modern weapons,
notably President Obama's personal favourite, the drone. The one stable
Somali government, the Islamic Courts, was "well received by the people
in the areas it controlled," reported the US Congressional Research
Service, "[but] received negative press coverage, especially in the
West." Obama crushed it; and in January, Hillary Clinton, then secretary
of state, presented her man to the world. "Somalia will remain grateful
to the unwavering support from the United States government," effused
President Hassan Mohamud, "thank you, America."
The shopping
mall atrocity was a response to this - just as the attack on the Twin
Towers and the London bombings were explicit reactions to invasion and
injustice. Once of little consequence, jihadism now marches in lockstep
with the return of unfettered imperialism.
Since Nato reduced
modern Libya to a Hobbesian state in 2011, the last obstacles to Africa
have fallen. "Scrambles for energy, minerals and fertile land are
likely to occur with increasingly intensity," report Ministry of Defence
planners. They predict "high numbers of civilian casualties"; therefore
"perceptions of moral legitimacy will be important for success".
Sensitive to the PR problem of invading a continent, the arms mammoth,
BAE Systems, together with Barclays Capital and BP, warn that "the
government should define its international mission as managing risks on
behalf of British citizens". The cynicism is lethal. British governments
are repeatedly warned, not least by the parliamentary intelligence and
security committee, that foreign adventures beckon retaliation at home.
With
minimal media interest, the US African Command (Africom) has deployed
troops to 35 African countries, establishing a familiar network of
authoritarian supplicants eager for bribes and armaments. In war games, a
"soldier to soldier" doctrine embeds US officers at every level of
command from general to warrant officer. The British did the same in
India. It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice
Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's
black colonial elite whose "historic mission", warned Frantz Fanon half a
century ago, is the subjugation of their own people in the cause of "a
capitalism rampant though camouflaged". The reference also fits the Son
of Africa in the White House.
For Obama, there is a more
pressing cause - China. Africa is China's success story. Where the
Americans bring drones, the Chinese build roads, bridges and dams. What
the Chinese want is resources, especially fossil fuels. Nato's bombing
of Libya drove out 30,000 Chinese oil industry workers. More than
jihadism or Iran, China is now Washington's obsession in Africa and
beyond. This is a "policy" known as the "pivot to Asia", whose threat of
world war may be as great as any in the modern era.
This
week's meeting in Tokyo of US secretary of state John Kerry and defence
secretary Chuck Hagel with their Japanese counterparts accelerated the
prospect of war with the new imperial rival. Sixty per cent of US and
naval forces are to be based in Asia by 2020, aimed at China. Japan is
re-arming rapidly under the right-wing government of Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe, who came to power in December with a pledge to build a "new,
strong military" and circumvent the "peace constitution". A US-Japanese
anti-ballistic missile system near Kyoto is directed at China. Using
long-range Global Hawk drones, the US has sharply increased its
provocations in the East China and South China seas, where Japan and
China dispute the ownership of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Advanced
vertical take-off aircraft are now deployed in Japan; their purpose is
blitzkrieg.
On the Pacific island of Guam, from which B-52s
attacked Vietnam, the biggest military buildup since the Indochina wars
includes 9,000 US Marines. In Australia this week, an arms fair and
military jamboree that diverted much of Sydney, is in keeping with a
government propaganda campaign to justify an unprecedented US military
build-up from Perth to Darwin, aimed at China. The vast US base at Pine
Gap near Alice Springs is, as Edward Snowden disclosed, a hub of US
spying in the region and beyond; it also critical to Obama's worldwide
assassinations by drone.
"We have to inform the British to
keep them on side," an assistant US secretary of state McGeorge Bundy
once said, "You in Australia are with us, come what may." Australian
forces have long played a mercenary role for Washington. However, there
is a hitch. China is Australia's biggest trading partner and largely
responsible for its evasion of the 2008 recession. Without China, there
would be no minerals boom: no weekly mining return of up to a billion
dollars.
The dangers this presents are rarely debated publicly
in Australia, where prime minister Tony Abbott's patron, Rupert
Murdoch, controls 70 per cent of the press. Occasionally, anxiety is
expressed over the "choice" that the US wants Australia to make. A
report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute warns that any US
plan to strike at China would involve "blinding" Chinese surveillance,
intelligence and command systems. This would "consequently increase the
chances of Chinese nuclear pre-emption... and a series of
miscalculations on both sides if Beijing perceives conventional attacks
on its homeland as an attempt to disarm its nuclear capability".
In
his address to the nation last month, Obama said, "What makes America
different, what makes us exceptional is that we are dedicated to act."
Source: johnpilger.com
READ HIS BIO AND MORE
ANALYSES/REPORTS BY JOHN PILGER |