`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. American Raj: America ...
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 many a glass with 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. War at the Top of the ...
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 [send him mail]
is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2017 Eric Margolis
Previous
article by Eric Margolis: Xi Jinping – `L’état C’est Moi’
