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


  • A Public Letter to Mayor Lightfoot: A Call for Leadership
    by Signatories from the Use of Force Community Working Group
    A Public Letter to Mayor Lightfoot: A Call for Leadership
    21 Oct 2020
    The Chicago Police Department’s new use-of-force policy input process is a sham, designed only to create the illusion of community engagement.
  • The NYPD Unleashes Its Most Brutal Cops On Protesters
    Ali Winston
    The NYPD Unleashes Its Most Brutal Cops On Protesters
    21 Oct 2020
    The police unit most likely to bust protesters’ heads is full of cops with long misconduct histories.
  •  Black Agenda Radio for Week of October 19, 2020
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for Week of October 19, 2020
    19 Oct 2020
    Protests in Minneapolis Disrupted by Orange-Shirted “Collaborators” with Cops
  •  LGBTQ Newsletter Surveys Prison Conditions
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    LGBTQ Newsletter Surveys Prison Conditions
    19 Oct 2020
    The newsletter for the prison abolition organization Black and Pink sent out a 133-page questionnaire to incarcerated LGBTQ persons, earlier this year, so that “we can laser beam solutions to the n
  • Anti-Blackness Spread by Global Capital
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Anti-Blackness Spread by Global Capital
    19 Oct 2020
    The ideology of anti-Blackness is both a prerequisite to the rise of capitalism and a product of its spread around the world, said Adam Bledsoe, a professor of Geography, Environme
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us