Countries are \u201cpieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world,\u201d wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1898. Nothing has changed. The shopping mall massacre in Nairobi was a bloody fa\u00e7ade behind which a full-scale invasion of Africa and a war in Asia are the great game.<\/p>\n
The al-Shabaab shopping mall killers came from Somalia. If any country is an imperial metaphor, it is Somalia. Sharing a common language and religion, Somalis have been divided between the British, French, Italians and Ethiopians.\u00a0 Tens of thousands of people have been handed from one power to another. \u201cWhen they are made to hate each other,\u201d wrote a British colonial official, \u201cgood governance is assured.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Somalia is a theme park of brutal, artificial divisions, long impoverished by World Bank and IMF \u201cstructural adjustment\u201d programmes, and saturated with modern weapons, notably President Obama\u2019s personal favourite, the drone. The one stable Somali government, the Islamic Courts, was \u201cwell received by the people in the areas it controlled,\u201d reported the US Congressional Research Service, \u201c[but] received negative press coverage, especially in the West.\u201d \u00a0Obama crushed it; and in January, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, presented her man to the world. \u201cSomalia will remain grateful to the unwavering support from the United States government,\u201d effused President Hassan Mohamud, \u201cthank you, America.\u201d<\/p>\n
The shopping mall atrocity was a response to this \u2014 just as the attack on the Twin Towers and the London bombings were explicit reactions to invasion and injustice. \u00a0Once of little consequence, jihadism now marches in lockstep with the return of unfettered imperialism.<\/p>\n
Since Nato reduced modern Libya to a Hobbesian state in 2011, the last obstacles to Africa have fallen. \u201cScrambles for energy, minerals and fertile land are likely to occur with increasingly intensity,\u201d report Ministry of Defence planners. They predict \u201chigh numbers of civilian casualties\u201d; therefore \u201cperceptions of moral legitimacy will be important for success\u201d.\u00a0 Sensitive to the PR problem of invading a continent, the arms mammoth, BAE Systems, together with Barclay Capital and BP, warn that \u201cthe government should define its international mission as managing risks on behalf of British citizens\u201d. The cynicism is lethal. British governments are repeatedly warned, not least by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, that foreign adventures beckon retaliation at home.<\/p>\n
With minimal media interest, the US African Command (Africom) has deployed troops to 35 African countries, establishing a familiar network of authoritarian supplicants eager for bribes and armaments. In war games, a \u201csoldier to soldier\u201d doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. The British did the same in India. It is as if Africa\u2019s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master\u2019s black colonial elite whose \u201chistoric mission\u201d, warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the subjugation of their own people in the cause of \u201ca capitalism rampant though camouflaged\u201d. The reference also fits the Son of Africa in the White House.<\/p>\n
For Obama, there is a more pressing cause \u2014 China. Africa is China\u2019s success story. Where the Americans bring drones, the Chinese build roads, bridges and dams. What the Chinese want is resources, especially fossel fuels. Nato\u2019s bombing of Libya drove out 30,000 Chinese oil industry workers. More than jihadism or Iran, China is now Washington\u2019s obsession in Africa and beyond. This is a \u201cpolicy\u201d known as the \u201cpivot to Asia\u201d, whose threat of world war may be as great as any in the modern era.<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s meeting in Tokyo of US secretary of state John Kerry and defence secretary Chuck Hagel with their Japanese counterparts accelerated the prospect of war with the new imperial rival. Sixty per cent of US and naval forces are to be based in Asia by 2020, aimed at China. Japan is re-arming rapidly under the right-wing government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who came to power in December with a pledge to build a \u201cnew, strong military\u201d and circumvent the \u201cpeace constitution\u201d. A US-Japanese anti-ballistic missile system near Kyoto is directed at China. Using long-range Global Hawk drones, the US has sharply increased its provocations in the East China and South China seas, where Japan and China dispute the ownership of the Senkaku\/Diaoyu islands. Advanced vertical take-off aircraft are now deployed in Japan; their purpose is blitzkrieg.<\/p>\n
On the Pacific island of Guam, from which B-52s attacked Vietnam, the biggest military buildup since the Indochina wars includes 9,000 US Marines.\u00a0 In Australia this week, an arms fair and military jamboree that diverted much of Sydney, is in keeping with a government propaganda campaign to justify an unprecedented US military build-up from Perth to Darwin, aimed at China. The vast US base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs is, as Edward Snowden disclosed, a hub of US spying in the region and beyond; it also critical to Obama\u2019s worldwide assassinations by drone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to inform the British to keep them on side,\u201d an assistant US secretary of state McGeorge Bundy once said, \u201cYou in Australia are with us, come what may.\u201d Australian forces have long played a mercenary role for Washington. However, there is a hitch. China is Australia\u2019s biggest trading partner and largely responsible its evasion of the 2008 recession. Without China, there would be no minerals boom: no weekly mining return of up to a billion dollars.<\/p>\n
The dangers this presents are rarely debated publicly in Australia, where prime minister Tony Abbott\u2019s patron, Rupert Murdoch, controls 70 per cent of the press. Occasionally, anxiety is expressed over the \u201cchoice\u201d that the US wants Australia to make. A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute warns that any US plan to strike at China would involve \u201cblinding\u201d Chinese surveillance, intelligence and command systems. This would \u201cconsequently increase the chances of Chinese nuclear pre-emption \u2026 and a series of miscalculations on both sides if Beijing perceives conventional attacks on its homeland as an attempt to disarm its nuclear capability\u201d.<\/p>\n
In his address to the nation last month, Obama said, \u201cWhat makes America different, what makes us exceptional is that we are dedicated to act.\u201d<\/p>\n
________________________<\/p>\n
John Pilger\u2019s<\/i> new film, Utopia, is released in cinemas in the UK on 15 Nov [2013] and is launched in Australia in January. He can be reached through his website:\u00a0www.johnpilger.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n