"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
-Dwight Eisenhower, speaking on the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address to the nation, January 1961.
The BBC News headline reads, "US Africom 'Has No Hidden Agenda.'", admitting their guilt with the first elementary denial. There has been decades of struggle and civil strife on the continent of Africa; millions of lives lost needlessly due, in part, to the aggressive non-attention of the Western world powers, with nary a government agency but USAID to hand out cooking oil and sacks of rice, emblazoned with the huge American flag. Rwanda, nothing. Congo, nothing. Sudan, next to nothing. Somalia, a half hearted effort, then nothing. Mozambique, nothing. In the cases that we have done more than nothing in the last decades since the Independence of Africa, it has meant fueling arms to "ideological partners" engaged in brutal civil wars, or assassinating democratically elected heads of state who do not fit our mold of the proper Central African Dictator.
So when the US finally acts to set up an African Central Military command, and says that they have "No Hidden Agenda," something smells fishy.
And something smelled fishy to the African heads of state who, despite the enormous leverage of US diplomatic pressure in the developing world, denied access to their soil for our military's newest foray into international affairs. All except Liberia, recently emerged from a decade of brutal civil war, and no doubt, scared senseless of slipping backwards into anarchy.
Which brings us to the unambiguously hidden agenda; OIL and NATURAL RESOURCES.
This is no secret. (See Fast Company's fantastic article on Africa's resource grab from May 2008...http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/special-report-china-in-africa.html)
The wars of the 21st century will be fought over all matters of resources; Africa will be one of the primary battlegrounds, with its rich deposits of Oil and Minerals, and weak,l corrupt governments little interested in unnecessary oversight. The wars of the 21st century are already being strategized on the ground in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, where governments remain blind to the dire needs if their people in the face of Chinese and American resource imperialism.
The scary fact emerges out of the haze of the last sixty years; we simply cannot compete with the Chinese economically at this point in time. We cannot underbid the Chinese, we cannot play dirty like the Chinese, we do not have the desire to work like the Chinese to procure what we still consider to be our natural right in the world; so we call on the old American bulwark, the men and women in our "All Volunteer Army" to do our dirty work, to project American power across the globe, to squeeze what remains of our share of the pie in the throes of the decline of the American Empire. When we can no longer compete economically, when we have outsourced the last of our jobs, when we can no longer package and repackage the same debt instruments to make money for the few at the expense of the masses, when the full faith in the American government does no longer cover our outstanding debts and obligations, we still have our boys in camo to project the semblance of power across the globe.
Hence, the Military Industrial Complex, Take Two.
When Eisenhower first warned of the policy relationships between the government, military, and corporations, our country was sitting on top of the world order, an undisputed superpower; we continue, vainly, in the same mind state, in an increasingly diminished state; soon, we will be a shell of a country, a shell made of Kevlar body plating, carrying an M-16 rifle and driving a big gas guzzling Humvee through the anarchic 21st century battlegrounds of Central Africa.
