http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar07/Dixon01.htm

Africa: Where the Next US Oil Wars Will Be

.........On February 7, George Bush announced the formation of AFRICOM, a new Pentagon command which will, under the pretext of the so-called "Global War On Terror", plan and execute its oil and resource wars on the African continent. What does this mean to African Americans? And to Africans?

The Pentagon does not admit that a ring of permanent US military bases is operating or under construction throughout Africa. But nobody doubts the American military buildup on the African continent is well underway. From oil rich northern Angola up to Nigeria, from the Gulf of Guinea to Morocco and Algeria, from the Horn of Africa down to Kenya and Uganda, and over the pipeline routes from Chad to Cameroon in the west, and from Sudan to the Red Sea in the east, US admirals and generals have been landing and taking off, meeting with local officials. They've conducted feasibility studies, concluded secret agreements, and spent billions from their secret budgets.

Their new bases are not bases at all, according to US military officials. They are instead "forward staging depots", and "seaborne truck stops" for the equipment which American land forces need to operate on the African continent. They are "protected anchorages" and offshore "lily pads" from which they intend to fight the next round of oil and resource wars, and lock down Africa's oil and mineral wealth for decades to come.

Chicago's Prexy Nesbitt, one of the architects of the US anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and ‘80s spoke about the importance to Africans and African Americans of George Bush's Feb. 7 announcement of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent.

"It means a tremendous amount to Africans, because African people, from working people to university elites all follow very closely everything that the US government does wherever it does it in the world. ...More and more African Americans in the US are following carefully what's the US is doing in Africa, but not enough... What we're seeing (is) ... a US military penetration of the African continent and that this penetration is... motivated by the US quest... for new sources of oil and other minerals"............

.........George Bush, Big Oil, Andy Young and the Pentagon are already implementing their plan for Africa. It looks like Nigeria, the classic case of a rich country full of poor people. It looks a lot like the impoverished, poisoned, festering wasteland of the Niger delta, where they've had a free hand for decades. And when Africans resist, as they surely will, the backup plan is to declare Africans who want to control their own resources "terrorists", and through AFRICOM, deploy US military might to lock down Africans and African resources...........