‘Take up the white man’s burden’ – Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of British imperialism
The British Empire, which at the end of the 19th century
ruled one quarter of the earth’s land surface, is long gone. But its
robust successor and heir, the United States, has set about enlarging
it.
As I sought to explain in my last book ‘American Raj – How the US Rules the Muslim World,’
the US imperium exerts its power by controlling tame, compliant regimes
around the world and their economies. They are called ‘allies’ but, in
fact, should be more accurately termed satrapies or vassal states. Many
states are happy to be prosperous US vassals, others less so.
The US power
system has successfully dominated much of the world, except of course
for great powers China, Russia and India. Germany and much of Western
Europe remains in thrall to post WWII US power. The same applies to
Canada, Latin America, Australia, and parts of SE Asia.
There is one part
of the globe that has remained free from heavy US influence since 1945,
sub-Saharan Africa. But this fact is clearly changing as the US military expands its operations the width and breadth of the Dark Continent.
We are seeing a
rerun of the fine old 1930’s film, ‘Beau Geste’ which was taken from a
cracking good 1924 Victorian novel by C. Percival Wren. Set in French
North Africa, Wren’s dashing French Legionnaires end up defending a
remote fort against masses of hostile Arab and Berber tribesman.
The novel and
film negatively shaped western attitudes to the Arab world and its
peoples but glorified the French Foreign Legion. Wren claimed to have
been a member of the Legion which was the primary enforcement arm of
France’s African colonial empire.
The famed Legion,
which fought from Mexico to Indochina, has now shrunken to a pitiful
8,000 men. France’s thread-bare finances proved a deadlier enemy than
Saharan horsemen.
Even so, the
Legion is still used by Paris for sudden shock interventions across West
Africa to support client French regimes and punish those who challenge
the status quo. I’ve lifted a glass with many Legionnaires. They are an
amazingly tough bunch: you never know whether they are going to kill
you or buy you drinks.
US troops have
now stepped into the boots of ‘La Legion.’ Almost unnoticed, US Special
Forces – our version of the Legion – have been slipping into Africa, the
newest and most exciting market for the Pentagon.
Creation
of the new US Africa Command in 2007, with headquarters in Germany, was
discreet but it signaled active US military and geopolitical interest
in resource-rich Africa, a key target of Chinese interest. No
one in Washington seems to know how many US troops operate in Africa,
but it’s at least 12,000 not counting mercenary contractors and CIA
units. There was consternation in Congress when these facts emerged last
week.
The key US base
in Africa is at Djibouti, a poxy, fly-blown French colony on the Red Sea
that is also shared by the Legion and, curiously, a Chinese naval
station. US forces in Djibouti operate into Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia
and Central Africa. US forces in West Africa operate in Mali, Chad,
Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Liberia, Uganda, and anywhere that pro-US regimes
are under pressure. Mali and Chad, where nomadic tribes battle the
central government, are key operating regions. Both are under nasty
dictatorial regimes backed by Washington.
As in the
British Empire, the ‘natives’ are kept under control by small numbers of
skilled Western troops. There’s no need for big battalions of regulars.
The key is western air power and intelligence. Particularly so in often
barren sub-Saharan West Africa where French and US warplanes patrol the
skies. `We have the Maxim gun (machine gun) and they have not’ wrote a Victorian poet. Nothing much has changed.
France’s previous president, Francois Hollande,
charged into a local tribal squabble in Mali, a key uranium supplier,
between black town dwellers and nomadic Tuareg and assorted Islamists.
Unable to afford the spreading war, France asked for US help and got it.
The bitterly anti-Muslim Trump administration could not miss a chance
to attack Muslims in West Africa under the banner of ‘anti-terrorism.’
A ‘terrorist’ in
this case is anyone who challenges the western-dominated political
order, from Malian nomads to Central African Republic rebels. In the
brutal dictatorial regimes of former French West Africa the only
effective opposition comes from groups calling themselves Islamic. This
pulls the chain of the Trump administration and its Christian
fundamentalist allies at home who seek to uproot fast-spreading Islam
from Africa.
So off the US military charges into Africa, with
little understanding of the region and even less strategic planning.
It’s Vietnam-style ‘mission creep’ all over again.
Washington is still
trying to figure out what happened to Herzegovina in the Balkans while
it plunges into darkest West Africa. That’s why Trump and French
president Emmanuel Macron are so chummy these days.
Eric Margolis
is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist, writing and
commenting for the top media outlets of the United States, Canada UK,
France, Gulf states, Turkey, Malaysia and Pakistan.
All images in this article are from Oriental Review.
The original source of this article is Oriental Review
Copyright © Eric Margolis, Oriental Review, 2017
