US to Lock Africa in a Military Embrace 

JULIAN BORGER /  The Guardian Weekly (UK) 10jul03

Control over future sources of oil is preoccupying Washington as well as the rival giants of East Asia

President Bush's African tour this week is being sold as the gentler, softer, altogether more huggable side of global superpower politics. If you thought we just do wars, it is time to take another look at America, the advance publicity suggests. We do Aids and poverty and fair trade too. If this rings a bell, you may be thinking of "compassionate conservatism". Remember that? Bush was the presidential candidate who spoke Spanish and really cared about public education. As promised, the No Child Left Behind act was passed with great fanfare, but then a strange thing happened. The school rescue programme was quietly drained of funds, which were spent on tax cuts and Pentagon budgets instead, until the whole scheme was hollowed out.

Africa and its supporters should keep a close eye on what now happens to Bush's five-year, $15bn plan to combat Aids, and the three-year, $10bn Millennium Challenge to transform the world's poorest countries. Both schemes are up for the chop in Congress. Republicans may well be paring both programmes even as the US president extols them on his African tour. In America they call this tactic "bait and switch".

More US Bases

Although the mood music on the African trip will be sentimental and uplifting, there are hard-headed calculations behind it. The presidential visit signals a strategic decision by the administration to upgrade the US military presence in Africa to bolster what Washington now sees as important national interests on the continent - the supply of oil and the struggle against terrorism.

The global war on al-Qaida and the administration's goal of weaning the US off Middle East oil have put Africa on the map. It is principally for this reason that Bush is contemplating sending troops to Liberia, the sort of humanitarian intervention he criticised in his election campaign. An essential element of the new Africa policy is to enhance military cooperation with the region, particularly the Ecowas West African bloc.

On the eve of the president's departure, General James Jones, the commander of the US European command with responsibility for African operations, said the US was trying to negotiate the long-term use of a "family" of military bases across the continent. These would include major installations for up to 5,000-strong brigades, "that could be robustly used for a significant military presence", he told the New York Times. It would also involve smaller, lightly equipped bases available in crises to special forces or marines.

The bases would not only be established in North African states such as Algeria, where Islamic extremism is already a potent force, but also in sub-Saharan African nations such as Mali. Gen Jones has also predicted a much bigger role for the navy and marines in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea.

"The carrier battle groups of the future may not spend six months in the Mediterranean sea, but I'll bet they'll spend half the time going down the west coast of Africa," he told journalists. The new bases are described as temporary, but once built they are likely to become part of the African landscape. Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, home to about 1,500 marines and special forces troops, is one of the country's biggest employers - and it is still growing.

The Djibouti base is in striking distance of Sudan, Somalia and Yemen - all seen as possible havens for al-Qaida. But bases in West Africa and an enhanced naval presence in the Gulf of Guinea would be primarily designed to safeguard an increasingly important source of oil. The US is importing 1.5m barrels a day from West Africa, about the same as it imports from Saudi Arabia. Conversely, the US has so far invested a cumulative total of $10bn in West African oil fields. According to the US energy department, those figures are set to grow, with annual African oil imports soon reaching 770m barrels, and US investment in the oil fields set to exceed $10bn per year.

At a meeting organised last month by the Corporate Council on Africa, a senior CIA official, David Gordon, predicted that over the next decade African oil would be potentially more important to the US than oil from Russia or the Caucasus.

But, according to other participants at the meeting, he warned that over the following decade the oil industry there ran the risk of imploding as a result of the region's inherent instability, unless the US did more to prop it up.

In a report to Congress last year, an advisory panel that included oil executives and Pentagon officials recommended greater military cooperation with oil states. The panel, known as the African Oil Policy Initiative Group, said it considered "the Gulf of Guinea oil basin of West Africa, with greater western and southern Africa and its attendant market of 250 million people located astride key sea lanes of communication, as a 'vital interest' in US national security calculations".

The report advised setting up a "unified command" for Africa that would play a similar oversight role to Central Command in the Middle East. To safeguard oil shipments, the report said, "the US should give serious consideration to increased force presence and the establishment of a regional homeport, possibly on the islands of the Republic of Sao Tome and Principe centered in the Gulf."

In fact, the second-ranking general from European Command, General Carlton Fulford, visited the islands last year, after which the Sao Tome government declared it had an agreement to build a port. The claim was denied by the state department, but it said the US would be offering naval and coast guard assistance.

Wherever the new bases are built, there is no doubt they are coming. The news will be welcomed for now by many long-suffering Liberians, but if the people of the Gulf of Guinea are wondering whether the troops are coming principally to protect oil or lives, they should look beyond this week's speeches and ponder the history of the other Gulf.