AFRICOM Cape Town, South Africa

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Although much has been made of China's growing presence in Africa, spurred by its intense interest in oil and other natural resources, it is really the United States — with its history of democracy, respect for human rights and open markets — that is best positioned to be a reliable partner in supporting the African Renaissance.

U.S. Ambassador Eric M. Bost | Building a Better US-SA Relationship

Ho ho ho...

Esquire's a good magazine. I don't subscribe to its general thrust but, over three or four years, it has published two articles that have piqued my interest. Both are written by Thomas P.M. Barnett, one of the U.S. military's leading public-consumption policy advocates and apparatchiks.

Esquire, like the New York Times, floats U.S. foreign policy into the public psyche. Three years ago, in March of 2004, Barnett's key role in determining USian foreign-policy objectives came to light. Operating out of the Office of Force Transformation, he published The Pentagon's New Map, a scantily clad, dumb-blond apology for the PNAC policies to which he'd enthusiastically lent substance. He was talking Empire. And he was writing vile and evil stuff with the likes of Henry H. Gaffney and former OFT Director Arthur K. Cebrowski, e.g. The American Way of War and Global Transaction Strategy.

I reviewed it. Of it I remarked, "Coming from a man without a conscience, soul, or shred of intelligence, it tells me the never-ending war is here."

"The one U.S. public-sector export that has only increased its global market share with time is security. We account for nearly half the global public spending on security, and unlike any other state, we actually can export it to other regions on a substantial and continuous basis. And that is our fundamental transaction with the global economy: We import consumption and export security.

Sharing our surplus of security with the world is what makes us unique. Any advanced industrial state can sell arms, but only the United States can export stability. Yes, it does engender plenty of anger from some quarters, but from far more it elicits real gratitude - and allowance for our "living large."

[...]

Africa, for example, will need far more aid than the Core has offered in the past, and the integration of the Gap will ultimately depend more on private investment than anything the Core's public sector can offer. But it all has to begin with security, because free markets and democracy cannot flourish amid chronic conflict."

Indeed. Donald Rumsfeld's more recent linguistic torture tool springs to mind, i.e. The Long War. Riding on the banal evil of the term, i.e. "export security", Barnett and others like him paved the way for the old torturer.

Gifted the hindsight of three or four years, look what their "export" of "security" is doing for the people of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Somalia, and myriad others. Delivered with batteries included, theirs is a product we Africans definitely don't want.

Interestingly, the U.S. military first publishes these pieces on short-lived military web sites. Barnett's was the NewRuleSets.Project. Quoting from his now-pulled site, we're told:

The NewRuleSets.Project began in the spring of 2000 as a multi-year, five workshop effort designed to explore how the spread of globalization alters the basic "rules of the road" in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes redefine the U.S. Military's historic role as "security enabler" of America's commercial network ties with the world.

[...]

The project was hosted by the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which participated in the design of the three workshops held atop World Trade Center 1 at the Windows on the World conference facility [May 2000, October 2000, June 2001]. That particular workshop series ended with the tragedy of 9/11, as did Cantor's participation in the research.

Hmm... I'll bet. Once you've served your purpose and all that...

When I saw South Africa excluded from Barnett's map of the so-called Gap — and alive to smoke-and-mirror disinformation, I knew the Americans were coming. Much of "their" oil is under Africa. West Africa, from Angola upwards is drowning in the stuff and East Africa, which has viable supplies, forms a buffer against... well, the East. Hence a heavy-handed and murderous U.S. military presence in Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and other countries.

China and India's inevitable relegation of the U.S. pretend economy to Disneyland poses enormous threats to Washington. Good relations between African countries and their Asian and East European counterparts, particularly Russia, severely dent U.S. prospects of long-lasting global hegemony. Military defeats in every country invaded since World War II do not auger well. The United States, blind to its impotence, is fighting the unavoidable — a slide to obscurity.

Trapped like a rat, the U.S. now exhibits — in hapless countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, the rabid and callous viciousness epitomized by its sitting-on-his-sorry-ass president, George W. Bush. To keep its fiat currency afloat and its largest currency earner booming, it follows Thomas Barnett's lead, "exporting security" to the world with increasing desperation.

With every African country bound to flog U.S. forces like mangy dogs, South Africa was the DoD's only option. It was inevitable that it would all end up in my backyard.

And that's how I figured the U.S. Consul General's new bunker at 2 Reddam Avenue, Tokai, lies at he heart of Africa's future Green Zone. Under the leadership of Mozambican refugee and National War College graduate Helen La Lime, it is situated in a secluded, tree-shaded road in a corner of the Constantiaberg mountains, and is a fine example of prefabricated Botha-era fortress architecture. Disguising its vast, three-floor sprawl of concrete, the entrance comprises blacked-out-bullet-proof windows and bars set off by a low-slung, unpretentious minimalism.

Despite the lettering on the walls fronting it, Consulate General — United States of America, and the flag flying above it, this is a structure that has slouched into town. It faces the wrong way. The rear, fronting the M42 — which allows a traffic-light free drive to Cape Town International Airport, is faceless, peppered by small barred windows and a seemingly windowless top floor.

Its unimposing facade aside, and in keeping with its fortress architecture, extraordinarily low profile, room for growth (the golfing estate next door would make for an ideal mini-Middle American officer's mess), and mountain backdrop, the U.S. consular building is superbly located. Given the legacy of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, and the U.S.'s ongoing practice of special rendition, arbitrary torture, and mindless violence, it is a virtual annexe of one of the world's most ghastly and overcrowded prisons, Pollsmoor.

Pollsmoor, still — as far as I know — home to Consul General Helen La Lime's compatriot Edwin Hunsaker, is not for the faint of heart. Within its walls, gangs including the 26s and 28s reign. Prisoners have had their heads sawed off with penknives and others have died after having their guts ruptured by overly enthusiastic dope fiends jumping on their stomachs to extricate smuggled marijuana from their anuses.

It bounds the consulate on the northern side and is ideally suited to question and answer sessions conducted by experienced South African Iraq vets, flunkies, and "facilitators".

But it's not only Pollsmoor's proximity to the consulate that intrigues me. The consulate is itself housed just north of the South African National Defence Force's nuclear-blast resistant bunker and sometime NSA Echelon ground station at Silvermine. Press-ganged into serving the homeland by B.J. Vorster, I worked there for six months, having just returned from the U.S.'s 1976 bicentennial celebrations in New York. The bunker's entrance is a tunnel immediately in front of the old Maritime Naval Command building fronted by massive hydraulic doors leading into the mountain.

Of this installation — at a time when the Vorster regime was extremely close to the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, the U.N. Special Committee Against Apartheid noted:

For several decades South Africa had been considered an integral part of the over-all Western defence system and as a result there is long-standing collaboration with certain Western Powers in the exchange of surveillance and other information. The operation of the voluntary embargo has not put an end to this relationship which has in fact expanded in a number of ways. In 1973, South Africa inaugurated its Advokaat naval communication system in Silvermine, built with West German assistance and disclosed that there existed "fixed radio communication" with Whitehall, Buenos Aires, and San Juan. This system monitors the entire South Atlantic and most of the Indian Ocean. There is no evidence that South Africa's collaboration with other Powers in this field has ended.

Today, facing China and India, eyes and ears spanning the Indian and South Atlantic oceans constitute a global MasterCard, i.e. they're priceless.

Durban and Johannesburg cannot offer such command-and-control facilities. They will remain outposts of Empire. A cursory glance at the Google map, with the three facilities marked, show sub-economic housing in a prestigious area to be the only obstacles to the development, by around 2012, of a full-fledged U.S. military base.

Fuck the poor, as they — in this instance, Thomas P.M. Barnett, says.

... CJTF-HOA, whose area of responsibility stretched from Sudan down to Kenya, soon evolved into something so much more: an experiment in combining defense, diplomacy, and development — the so-called three-D approach so clearly lacking in America's recent postwar reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Because the task force didn't own the sovereign space it was operating in, as U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did, the Marines were forced to work under and through the American ambassadors, their State Department country teams, and the attached U.S. Agency for International Development missions. If little of that cooperation was occurring in Kabul and Baghdad, then maybe Africa would be better suited.

That's how Africa Command (AFRICOM) works today, through its ambassador, State Department country team, and USAID mission.

When subjugating a continent of 800 million, you tread warily.

At first, anyway.

Yeah, I know. You could write me off as a fuckwit floating a really ludicrous hypothesis. I would too, but Tom Barnett keeps me sane. The ever-alert Bruce pointed me to Barnett's latest public offering of great and significant import, The Americans Have Landed. These pieces are extracted from his loathsome shill of a policy engineered in Hell.

For the Pentagon, the corporation that runs the only military on earth with a global reach, the world is carved into regional commands. Until now, Africa has been nothing but a strategic backwater — the one place where America clearly had no interests and no bureaucratic structure to manage those nonexistent interests. Africa was divided haphazardly between European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command. In a globalized world where bad actors live to exploit unguarded seams, we seemed to be providing Al Qaeda with several to exploit.

The U.S. military's strategic take on Africa has long been "We have no compelling interests there, and we sure as hell don't want anybody else to have any, either!" It was that attitude that got Washington nervous about the Soviet Union's seeming ideological penetration of the continent in the late 1970s, and it's what gets the Pentagon nervous today about China's obvious economic penetration.

But denying other great powers strategic interests in the region does not constitute a strategy of our own, nor does the great hunt for "high-value targets." Which is why America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon. The same can be said for China in the economic realm. To work, a lot of preconceptions about what an American military presence is really good for in underdeveloped countries will have to change. What we've not learned in Iraq — or taken far too long to learn — will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa.

Say what? "America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon." I'm not going to suggest, of course, that China's interests in Africa are altogether altruistic — as the Good Ambassador and Barnett would have us believe are theirs, but at least it does deliver on infrastructure.

Nor am I going to review Barnett's execrable piece here. An African, I find it too disgusting, repulsive, arrogant, nauseating, and downright evil to dwell on. Barnett tries to recast himself in the role of a good ol' boy out for a fun sortie with the military.

He fails miserably. He comes across as himself, i.e. an unmitigated racist and imperialist riding on the shirt-tails of many far braver and more insightful than he. He is insulting, dumb, and a disgrace to every decent American. In short, he is a pig without a uniform.

Besides, Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque goes to town on Barnett and lights the firmament with a brilliant dissection of this incredibly sick and depraved soul.

The Esquire piece, by Thomas Barnett, is a mostly glowing portrait of the Africa Command, which, we are told, is designed to wed military, diplomatic, and development prowess in a seamless package, a whole new way of projecting American power: "pre-emptive nation-building instead of pre-emptive regime change," or as Barnett describes it at another point, "Iraq done right." Although Barnett's glib, jargony, insider piece — told entirely from the point of view of U.S. military officials — does contain bits of critical analysis, it is in no way an expose. The new details he presents on the post-invasion slaughter are thus even more chilling, as they are offered simply as an acceptable, ordinary aspect of this laudable new enterprise.

My small contribution to Floyd's fine work is the Google map of Africa Command's (AFRICOM's) latest network-centric acquisition above — hosted for nothing by Ongopongo.

And don't forget — AFRICOM's now an equal distance from Cape Town and Simonstown harbors. The Empire has turned vampire. And, given the timing and content of Barnett's latest DoD press release, it looks set to suck us dry in its latest global killbox, Africa.

"In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperilled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously ... Government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example ... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."

Justice Brandeis | Olmstead et al v United States

Addendum: Nice endorsement from Winter Patriot, another follower of the breaking wave and a treasure trove of sources. And yes, don't forget to click the map links. It's cool what Google Maps can do.