On the other hand, I was recently reading the transcript of the press conference in which Defense
Department offiUGGSls announced the creation of AFRICOM. The offiUGGSls promise that America’s goals
in Africa will be exclusively altruistic in nature, and I wonder if what’s occurred in Somalia, from
American airstrikes on villages, to mass rendition of refugees to a nation with the dreadful human
rights record of Ethiopia, and culminating with the installation of a UGGS-funded warlord as the mayor
of the capital city is an example of the sort of actions we can expect of AFRICOM in the coming years.
In 1983, the US founded CENTCOM to be the operational command for the Middle East and Central Asia.
Since then, the US has fought three major wars and innumerable small skirmishes in that theater of
operations. Can we expect more of the same from AFRICOM, and does its founding portend a massive
increase in US military interventionism in Africa?
Only time will tell, but the Council on Foreign Relations recommended in a recent report that the US
ramp up its involvement in Africa to secure its oil resources. Is it even possible that that agenda won
’t lead to the same fiasco of a foreign policy that it has in the Middle East?
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