Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Coming Soon: Obama’s Big Move in Central Africa
11 Jan 2012
🖨️ Print Article

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

President Obama would have you believe that 100 elite U.S. Special Forces soldiers are running around in the African Bush looking for what’s left of the Lord’s Resistance Army. “The real target is South Sudan, where the United States is setting the stage for an African proxy oil war with China.” The Green Berets are in central Africa to coordinate military operations by Washington’s African clients. “The United States and Europe can no longer compete economically with China in Africa, and must now resort to raw force, through African puppet armies.”

 

Coming Soon: Obama’s Big Move in Central Africa

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“The U.S. needs its own Special Forces units in place to coordinate its puppet African armies.”

It’s now becoming apparent why President Obama sent 100 U.S. Special Forces troops to central Africa, back in October of last year. The president’s official explanation was that the Green Berets would be helping Uganda, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the new nation of South Sudan to hunt for remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The L.R.A., which has a reputation for killing civilians, was driven from its home in Uganda and now numbers only a few hundred scattered fighters. It poses no threat to any government in the region, and is not a plausible cause to dispatch significant numbers of U.S. Special Forces. Obama is using the L.R.A. to give his military mission a humanitarian cloak – that he’s going after rogue bad guys in the bush who threaten African civilians. The actual mission has to be something much larger.

It looks like the real target is South Sudan, where the United States is setting the stage for an African proxy oil war with China. Last July, South Sudan won independence from northern Sudan, a country that has been targeted for regime change by presidents Bush and Obama. Sudan’s oil lies right at the border between North and South, and the fields are under production by Chinese companies. The South Sudanese fought a decades long war against the north, during which they were heavily armed and financed by the U.S., Europeans and Israel. The newly independent nation is among poorest and least developed in the world – and broke. South Sudan is also already engaged ethnic civil wars of its own that have killed or displaced many tens of thousands. But chaos is precisely the environment that Washington prefers, in Africa – so that it can establish a new order that is to U.S. advantage.

“Obama is using the L.R.A. to give his military mission a humanitarian cloak.”

Reporter Thomas C. Mountain, who calls himself the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, points out in a recent article that the United States pays the salaries of South Sudan’s army, and also pays the costs of the thousands of United Nations so-called “peacekeepers” who have been sent to South Sudan to help contain the ethnic violence. Those UN peacekeepers are mostly soldiers from Ethiopia, a U.S. client state that, along with Kenya and Uganda, is waging a proxy war under U.S. sponsorship in Somalia. The Ethiopians worked very closely with U.S. Special Forces, right down to the company level, in the 2006 invasion of Somalia.

Now, in the heart of central Africa where South Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Congo, and the Central African Republic meet – all of them U.S. client states – the U.S. needs its own Special Forces units in place to coordinate its puppet African armies, and to keep all of them focused on the larger mission. Reporter Thomas C. Mountain says that mission is to destabilize northern Sudan and China's oil operations, there.

That makes perfect imperial sense. The United States and Europe can no longer compete economically with China in Africa, and must now resort to raw force, through African puppet armies. The U.S. has mobilized all its proxies in East and Central Africa for a big push that will need close coordination on the ground. Obama's Green Berets aren't hunting for the rag-tag Lord’s Resistance Army; they're out to control the resources of half the continent.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120111_gf_SouthSudan.mp3

More Stories


  •  BAR Book Forum: Colin Kaepernick’s “I Color Myself Different”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Colin Kaepernick’s “I Color Myself Different”
    20 Apr 2022
    In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick is a professional NFL Super Bowl quarterback who fights…
  • The Ukraine Crisis Can't Save Biden
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    The Ukraine Crisis Can't Save Biden
    20 Apr 2022
    The U.S. propaganda victory over Russia will do Joe Biden and the democrats little good. Their willingness to act on their promises and meet the people's needs will be the deciding factors in…
  • Ukraine: A New Consensus on Whiteness?
    ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    Ukraine: A New Consensus on Whiteness?
    20 Apr 2022
    The Biden administration and corporate media cover up the existence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. They are disappeared from the official narrative in order to get public buy-in for…
  • MANIFESTO: Africa in the Post-War World, San Francisco, April 1945
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    MANIFESTO: Africa in the Post-War World, San Francisco, April 1945
    20 Apr 2022
    When a new international order came into being with the organization of the United Nations in 1945, African people proposed their own visions for the post war world.
  • The Battle Against COVID-19 in Shanghai: A Human Rights Disaster?
    Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
    The Battle Against COVID-19 in Shanghai: A Human Rights Disaster?
    20 Apr 2022
    China's "zero covid" strategy prevented the large number of deaths seen in the United States. But the challenges of stopping the Omicron variant in Shanghai, a city of 25 million people,…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us