Monday, October 17, 2011

Obama, the new king of Africa, after dethroning Qaddafi....


Obama, the new king of Africa, after dethroning Qaddafi....LOL
By Pepe Escobar


If United States President Barack Obama really wanted to get rid of the new bogeyman du jour, Uganda's Joseph Kony - a former altar boy turned mystical Christian prophet/politico, sporting at least 60 wives - he would order US Attorney General Eric “The Fast and the Furious" Holder to concoct a plot subcontracting the hit to a lunatic Iranian linked to a Mexican drug cartel.

Plan B would be to order the United Nations to tell the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to impose a no-fly zone over Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) "rebels", and then bomb them to oblivion.

Plan C would be to drone the LRA to death with a fleet of MQ-9 Reapers; yet the nearest US drone base is very far away, in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa.

As no unsuspecting Mexicans were available, and the "rebels" in

this case are the bad guys, Obama settled for the classic imperial option; he pulled an AfPak and ordered a surge cum boots on the ground, sending 100 US Special Forces to help a corrupt dictator - Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni - crush his local bunch of "rebels".

Anyone may be excused to see Uganda as Libya upside down - because that's exactly what it is; the dictator in this case gets a good guy billing - one of "our bastards" - while the "rebels" have a pact with the devil. But is that all there is?

I got an urge to surge
The reality in Uganda is an absolute, murderous mess. As much as the LRA "rebels", Museveni's government (helped by Washington) has also perpetrated horrendous massacres against civilians. Kony may even be an amateur compared to Museveni - a sort of dictator for life who has just supervised the displacement and mass murder of at least 20,000 Ugandans on behalf of British corporations. Additionally, Museveni basically stole the Ugandan elections early this year.

Obama's Uganda surge should be seen as a crucial exchange of favors with Museveni - who has sent thousands of Ugandan troops to the African Union (AU) force that is fighting the hardcore Islamist al-Shabaab in Somalia. So while Uganda fights a proxy war for the US in Somalia, Washington helps the dictator to get rid of the LRA "rebels". No wonder the Pentagon is quite fond of Uganda; Museveni recently got $45 million in equipment, including four small drones.

The LRA - a ragged bunch of hardcore Christian fundamentalists - is based in northern Uganda but spread out between four countries, including the new South Sudan and Congo, in Central Africa. They carry no heavy weapons. They don't stand a chance of destabilizing the Ugandan government - much less being a "national security" threat to the US. Bogeyman Kony may be in hiding somewhere along the immense Sudan-Congo border, with no more than 400 warriors left.

Uganda's proximity to the new country of South Sudan is key in the whole equation. So far, for Northern Sudan the LRA has been a convenient, weaponized firewall against Western puppet Museveni. But most of all, this whole area is prime real estate where the fierce battle between China and the Americans/Europeans plays out, centered on oil and minerals, all part of the Great 21st Century African Resource War.

Behold the mineral kingdom
That brings us to Uganda as a new land of opportunity. Ah, the sheer scale of humanitarian warmongering possibilities. For a semblance of success, the initial steps of Obama's African surge would have to include a military base with a long runway attached, and a mini-Guantanamo to imprison the "terrorists". If that sounds too good to be true, that's because it is; think of the Pentagon's Africom headquarters soon entertaining the possibility of time-traveling from Stuttgart, Germany, to somewhere in Uganda.

Any student of realpolitik knows the US doesn't do "humanitarian" interventions per se. Africom's surge parallels the real name of the game; precious minerals - and mining. Uganda - and nearby eastern Congo - happens to hold fabulous quantities of, among others, diamonds, gold, platinum, copper, cobalt, tin, phosphates, tantalite, magnetite, uranium, iron ore, gypsum, beryllium, bismuth, chromium, lead, lithium, niobium and nickel. Many among these are ultra-precious rare earth - of which China exercises a virtual monopoly.

The mineral rush in Africa is already one of the great resource wars of the 21st century. China is ahead, followed by companies from India, Australia, South Africa and Russia (which, for instance, has set up a fresh gold refinery in Kampala). The West is lagging behind. The name of the game for the US and the Europeans is to pull no punches to undermine China's myriad commercial deals all across Africa.

Then there's the inescapable Pipelineistan angle. Uganda may hold "several billion barrels of oil", according to Heritage Oil's Paul Atherton, part of a recent, largest-ever on-shore oil discovery in sub-Saharan Africa. That implies the construction of a $1.5 billion, 1,200 kilometer long pipeline to Kampala and the coast of Kenya. Then there's another pipeline from "liberated" South Sudan. Washington wants to make sure that all this oil will be exclusively available for the US and Europe.

Obama, the King of Africa
The Obama administration insists the 100 special forces will be "advisers" - not combat troops. Think of Vietnam in the early 1960s; it started with "advisers" - and the rest is history. Now, the "advisers" are even expected to fan out from Uganda to South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And it's not even the first time this happens. George W Bush tried the same thing in 2008. It ended in unmitigated disaster because of - what else is new - corruption inside the Ugandan army. Kony was tipped off and escaped hours before an attack on his camp.

So on the surface, we have an uplifting narrative of the first black US president deeply disturbed by the "humanitarian crisis" in yet another African nation, Uganda; i n the perfect cover story for Anglo satrapy Uganda will be propped up as an advanced base for Washington to plunge a dagger inside Islamic Africa.

The official Washington spin hammers the fact that the LRA has "murdered, raped, and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children". Now compare it to devastation perpetrated by Washington, over two decades, on Iraq; at least 1.4 million people killed directly and indirectly, millions of refugees, a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war still in effect and the eastern flank of the Arab nation virtually destroyed.

And compare it to the thunderous silence of the Obama White House as racist eastern Libya "rebels" round up, harass, torture and even snuff out sub-Saharan Africans.

Africa has been fighting like forever against multiple strands of the great white genocidal slave master, aided and abetted by multiple strands of the subservient black dictator/kleptocrat - just to be presented in the early 21st century with an American president of direct African descent who has nothing better to offer than special forces, drones, a militarization surge and hypocrisy-laced "humanitarian" intervention.....


October , 2011 -- UPDATE. Uganda opposition to Museveni responds to Obama's troop deployment....



The Ugandan opposition to that nation's long-serving U.S.-supported dictator Yoweri Museveni have pointed out that President Barack Obama, Jr.'s intervention in Uganda's long-running civil war against Museveni has exposed Obama's willingness to use his African tribal connections to Kenya's Luo tribe to commit U.S. forces to an inter-African conflict. With large Ugandan oil reserves now being discovered, it was easy for Obama's oil industry financiers to convince the half-Kenyan Luo tribesman in the White House to back Museveni's forces against the Lord's Resistance Army of Joseph Kony. Our Ugandan sources point out that Kony ceased being a factor in the anti-Museveni movement in northern Uganda some years ago. Kony first went into opposition against Museveni in 1987, a year after Museveni came to power.

Museveni has been in power so long, the first American president he dealt with was Ronald Reagan.

Obama, in supporting Museveni, has also lined up with Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose father, Oginga Odinga, was a cousin of Obama's Kenyan Luo father, Barack H. Obama, Sr. Ugandan opposition sources point out that African tribal politics have now entered the Oval Office of the White House with Obama's commitment of armed U.S. troops to a country that lies just across the shore of Lake Victoria from his Luo tribal homeland in northwestern Kenya. The Luo have an ethnic affinity with many of the Ugandan tribes.

Obama is attempting to secure Uganda's vast oil, natural gas, and gold reserves for the United States, according to our sources in Uganda and Kenya. The introduction of Kenyan military troops in Somalia, the stationing of a U.S. Air Force bomber squadron in Ethiopia for Somalia operations, and the agreement with the NATO-installed Libyan government to permit the U.S. to establish an airbase in Libya, near the border with Sudan, is all part of a major military move by the United States into oil-rich areas of Africa.

In addition, these plans have been on the drawing board for years. In the early 1990s, Maurice Tempelsman and his corporate colleagues at the Corporate Council on Africa expressed a desire for former Ugandan President Godfrey Binaisa to succeed Museveni as president of Uganda. However, Binaisa was required to approve a long list of concessions to U.S. and western oil and mining companies. Binaisa refused, so the western corporations remained allied with Museveni and support him to this day, now with U.S. combat troops and a build-up of additional U.S. military forces in Ethiopia, Djibouti, South Sudan, and Kenya.

Raila Odinga, Obama's distant cousin, who believes homosexuals should be jailed, has managed to obtain International Criminal Court indictments against his political opposition, including the son of Kenya's founder Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who discriminated against the Luos, including Odinga, Sr., Obama, Sr., and Obama Sr.'s mentor, Tom Mboya. Raila Odinga's anti-homosexual stance is supported by Museveni in Uganda and one bill introduced in Uganda's rubber stamp parliament would put gays to death.

Obama's commitment of U.S. troops to settle scores in a wider inter-tribal conflict in his ancestral land has called into question his abuse of his authority as commander-in-chief.

Odinga, whose George Soros-funded Orange Democratic Movement was installed after a rift with President Mwai Kibaki, has managed to see to it that two prospective presidential opponents, Uhuru Kenyatta, the founder of Kenya's son, and William Ruto, stand indicted before the ICC in The Hague. ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, a stooge of Soros and the United States, has carried the West's water when it comes to selective prosecutions of those who oppose U.S. hegemonic designs in Africa. Museveni's guerrilla opponent, Joseph Kony, now targeted by U.S. troops, also stands indicted by the ICC, along with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and ousted Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. The fact that U.S. clients like Museveni, Odinga, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Samir Geagea and Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi have gone unindicted by the ICC, provides an example at the bias of the court and its political nature.

The actual goal of the U.S. troops now streaming into Uganda and the U.S. Air Force bombers now stationed in Ethiopia is to bring about the division of the remainder of Sudan into four states, ripe for plunder by the United States and the West. U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who has had a pathological hatred for the regime in Khartoum ever since her days in the Clinton administration, has championed the break-up of Sudan, which began in July with independence for South Sudan as a virtual vassal state of the United States, Israel, and Uganda. There are currently plans to build an oil pipeline from South Sudan through Kenya to the port of Mombasa. The introduction of Kenyan troops into Somalia is intended to protect the Somali-Kenyan border, and the pipeline route, from Islamist guerrilla activity. Rice is expected by many to follow the path of her god-mother Madeleine Albright and ascend from the UN ambassadorship to the Secretary of State position in a second Obama administration. According to Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian sources, it is the plan of Rice and others to further divide Sudan into four independent states: Abyei, the Nuba Mountain State, Darfur, and the remainder of Sudan with its capital in Khartoum. The division of Sudan into five parts from its original status would enable the West to easily control the nation's vast oil and mineral resources and deny the resources to China....