PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

War on terror: Common cause with America ?

kudugana@yahoo.com

Penultimate Tuesday the Daily Trust carried a story on its front page titled “ Gulf of Guinea : Air force backs US troop deployment”. In the story the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Jonah Wuyep, was said to have declared that the Nigerian Air Force was in support of the efforts of the United States to defend its interests in the Gulf of Guinea . Wuyep declared his force’s support while receiving General Robert H. Foglesong, commander of the United States Air Force. Both the United States and Nigeria , said Wuyep, shared the same interest in the Gulf of Guinea given its oil and gas potential.

Wuyep, according to Trust also said the Gulf of Guinea was assuming increasing strategic importance to the US because of the growing instability of the Middle-East as America ’s principal source of oil. “So far”, said the Nigerian air force chief, “the problem of international terrorism has not manifested itself that much to threaten the strategic interests of the U.S. in the region. However, the possibility of such a scenario should not be completely ignored. Therefore, now is the time to develop the capabilities and cooperation needed to cope with any potential”.

Wuyep then acknowledged the American donation of patrol boats to the Nigerian Navy, and, presumably as the first step towards the strategic cooperation between the two countries’ air forces, he pleaded with his American counterpart to make similar donations to the Nigerian air force.

In stating that America and Nigeria shared the same interest in the Gulf of Guinea because of its oil and gas potential, Wuyep was apparently reflecting the position of his commander-in-chief, President Olusegun Obasanjo, whose first acts in office included a quiet pact with the American army to superintend the training and command of the Nigerian army, something which the then army chief, Lt-General Victor Malu, found disagreeable and over which he was eventually kicked out.

However, even though Wuyep was reflecting the position of his Commander-in-Chief, anyone familiar with his (Wuyep’s) antecedents as a senior air force officer in Kaduna during the religious riots of February and May 2000, and the disposition of the air force since he took over its over-all command, will agree that Wuyep’s position sprang not only from mere loyalty, but also from what seems to be his visceral antipathy for Muslims. Anyone who thinks I am being unfair to the air force chief should recall the incident in December 2001 when the Air Force Headquarters issued a most slanderous signal against Muslims restricting officers and men of the armed forces to the barracks and asking them to be vigilant because of “a plan by some Muslim clerics (Ulamas) to launch attacks on Nigeria”. The clerics, according to the signal, were set to attack not only military formations but also the police and non-Muslims in some states.

In more civilized countries such as a slander would not have gone uninvestigated and unpunished if found to be untrue. However, because ours is a country where those in power behave with impunity, the slander was never investigated, and, of course, never earned anyone even a slap on the wrist.

Now, if the air force under Wuyep would make wild allegations about Muslims attacking the military, the police and non-Muslims, it should not surprise anyone that the air force chief believes deep inside him that the Americans and Nigerians have a common cause in fighting so-called international terrorism and in safeguarding the oil and gas resources of the Gulf of Guinea. As air force chief, Wuyep, I am sure, must be of more than average intelligence. If, therefore, he can manage to push aside his hatred for Muslims, he should see that America ’s interest in the Gulf of Guinea is not necessarily the same as Nigeria ’s. This is simply logic. America , as The Economist once said, is addicted to cheap oil. As a producer, it is certainly not in Nigeria ’s interest to under-price its oil and gas.

Of course it is also not in Nigeria ’s interest to over-price its oil, but even a blind man can see that the Americans are not interested in leaving the pricing of oil to the fabled market forces. If they were, they would never, among other things, have consistently arm-twisted the Saudis, as swing producers, to always pump up oil anytime the Americans decide prices were getting out of hand.

No, Nigeria , as a producer of oil, does not have a common cause with America , as   oil’s single biggest consumer. We do have a common cause with other producers and consumers alike to see that oil’s price is stable and to also see that the rate of its consumption does not create local and global environmental disasters. Unfortunately, the Americans seem to be more interested in cheap oil than stable oil price just as their reneging on the Kyoto agreement on global warming shows quite clearly that they don’t give a damn about the environmental consequences of a reckless consumption of, not just oil, but all other resources of the earth.

And just like we don’t have a common cause with the Americans over oil and gas in the Gulf of Guinea , so also do we not have a common cause in the war against so-called Islamic terrorism. Again if Wuyep would push his hatred for Muslims aside he would easily see why. And it is not just because ordinary Muslims and Christian -- or for that matter Nigerians who believe in many gods, or in no god at all -- have no reason to kill each other as they often do, since they have a common cause in fighting their exploitation by the ruling class whose membership cuts across all beliefs. The main reason why we have no reason to make America’s war against so-called Islamic terrorism our own war is simply because of the antecedent of America’s ruling class in creating bogeymen to frighten ordinary Americans and the rest of the world into line in its war for global hegemony.

One little insight into this strategy of creating bogeymen is contained in The Last Empire by Gore Vidal, a popular American essayist and a distant relation of Al Gore, former American Vice-President. I once quoted this little insight on these pages, but it bears repeating, especially in the light of America ’s unrepentant defence of its consistent lies about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and its inhuman treatement of its prisoners of war in Cuba and Iraq .

Until President Harry Truman, said Vidal, the American government was truly representative of the American people. Then things changed from February 27, 1947. There was, of course, a build up towards that fateful date, but after it, the change was decisive. On that date, says Vidal, President Truman “replaced the old republic with a National Security State whose purpose was to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold and tepid.” Those who helped Truman make the decision, says Vidal, included Dean Acheson, an Under-Secretary of State and a handful of Congressmen, including Republican Senator Arthur Vandenburg. The Senator was the one who assured Truman that Congress would give him the war economy he desired if the president would first “(scare) the hell out of American people that the Russians were coming.”

Truman gladly obliged and thus, says Vidal, began the perpetual war. “Representative government of by and for the people is now faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media.”

With the Russians out of the way after half a century of cold war, obviously a new bogeymen had to be created to sustain the war economy. The American ruling class has gone about creating this bogeymen  in ways both crude and subtle. The primary weapon, as before, is propaganda.

Some of us, it seems, have become victims of this propaganda. Others it seems have their own pet hates or private agenda and have merely adopted the same propaganda to pursue those pet hates and agenda. Whether victims or victimizers, it seems to me that the administration of President Obasanjo seems to have adopted a policy  which regards most, if not all, Muslims in the armed forces as suspect terrorists. I may be wrong, but this seems to me to be a reasonable explanation  for why, since Obasanjo became president more than five years ago, all three services of the armed forces and most command posts, from battalion to division, have been kept away from Muslim officers in a country where more than half the population are Muslims.

Both the president as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces and Wuyep as his Air Force Chief should know that joining America’s war on so-called Islamic terrorism can only alienate the large Muslim population of this country. Terrorism of whatever description is crime not war. And the proper way to fight crime is by dealing with its root causes not by military force. If force can solve the problems of crime, the Americans would have seen won the drug war in their Latin American backyard. They have been losing that war because they have turned their eyes and minds away from the demand side and concentrated on the supply side. Yet as ardent believers of market forces, have they not always taught the world that where there is demand there will always be supply? Surely, it can be argued that global terrorism, to the extent that it is real rather than manufactured or exaggerated, is the supply side of global injustice. Therefore if the Americans want to stop the supply of so-called terrorists they must stop their unjust policies which include being hooked on cheap oil and gas, whether these come from the Middle East or from the Gulf of Guinea or from the moon.

Of recent the media has been full with news of impending changes in the armed forces. As the administration of President Obasanjo does quiet, if not illegal and unconstitutional, deals with the Americans to police the flow of oil between producers and consumers, we shall see whether more than four years on, the president and his senior military officers like Wuyep are more interested in fighting Nigeria’s own war of unity and stability than in fighting other peoples’ war because of their inexplicable(?)  distrust or hatred of their fellow countrymen.