ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM..

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

“Al Qaeda’s trainers are proving the truth of bin Laden’s late mentor Shaykh Abdullah Azzam’s assertion that the Koran and the AK-47, together, yield the levels of lethality needed for Islam to triumph.”
Michael Scheuer “ANONYMOUS”, Imperial Hubris – Why the West Is Losing The War on Terror, 2005, page 76.

INTRODUCTION.

I use three prisms through which I see the precipitious tumble of the Middle East’s Levant region into Dante’s Inferno of bloody and murderous terrorism.

The first one is a personal prism.

The first diplomatic tour of duty of the western Middle East (or otherwise known as Levant), including Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which I undertook in September 2000, happened not long after I was promoted to the position of Director for the Levant in the then South African Department of Foreign Affairs, now the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO).

Then I was able to hold discussions with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv and west Jerusalem, was transferred by car to Ramallah, the capital of Palestinian West Bank. After discussions there with Palestinian officials, we drove by car from Ramallah, where South Africa maintains a diplomatic office, to Gaza on land across much of southern Israel, now the target of most of Hamas’s rockets. Following the Gaza visit, it was time to travel to Amman by car, across the river Jordan for further consultations with my Jordanian counterparts. From Jordan I took a road trip to Damascus, the capital of Syria, through much of the eastern province of Syria, for consultations with my Syrian counterparts. We then returned by car to Amman, where we prepared for our very long trip to Baghdad, Iraq’s capital at the time  under the chocking and severe western sanctions. It was a road trip of about twelve hours through much of south-western Iraq, or about the distance by car between Johannesburg and Cape Town. After our stay in Baghdad, we returned by car to Amman, a trip through much of Iraq’s desert Sunni heartland and the Anbar province.

In subsequent, many visits to the Levant between 2001-March 2003, I would often travel from Israel, to Ramallah, to Jordan, to Syria and ultimately to Lebanon, via Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and high mountains hugging Beirut, Lebanon’s beautiful capital, all done by car.

My road travels across the Levant at the time were some of the most beautiful, peaceful, emotional and informative travels I ever did anywhere in the world.

If at any time during these many travels on the road through the Levant I had been threatened with being hit on my face with a stray tennis ball anywhere in the Levant, I would have considered such a hit the most dangerous thing to have ever happened during my three years’ journeys through this ancient, biblical, important and historic region of the world.

As it turned out, I was never threatened by as much as a wayward tennis ball.

So generally peaceful and stable was the Levant at the time.

Remember, this was also a short while before the eruption of the Second Intifida in occupied Palestine.

 During that whole period, I also travelled between Amman, Jordan and Baghdad in Iraq on road no less than six times on various diplomatic assignments. I undertook the long trips by monster American GM 4 by 4 driven by highly experienced and dutiful Jordanian long-haul road drivers.

Not once did we ever become the target of any threat from any quarter during these Amman-Baghdad trips, a very long stretch often taken at night to avoid the searing desert heat of southern and western Iraq in summer.

And whilst visiting Syria several times, I would be driven by car to be shown the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the UN forces helping to keep peace there. It always struck me as the most peaceful line of divide between two antagonistic countries I ever visited anywhere in the world. And it certainly was in contrast to the tense  De-Militarised Zone between North and South Koreas, which I had visited in June 1989 during the world youth and student festival in North Korea in the same year.

Additionally, I once travelled by car from Damascus to visit the Syrian city of Palmyra, about 150 kilometers north of Damascus, which is an ancient and historical world heritage with Greek and Crusaders monuments. And in Iraq, I would travel by car to Babylon, the city of the biblical Nebuchardnezzar, and Karballah, the holy Shia city in the south, or up to Samara in the north of Baghdad, on my failed trip to Saddam Hussen’s birthplace, Tikrit.

All the trips in Iraq were done on road.

In Lebanon, I often visited the ancient city of Byblos, with its very impressive Crusader castles, stunning beaches and tourist attractions. Again these trips were undertaken on road.

The biggest danger that would face my delegation during the many trips by cars across the Levant would be dare-devil road drivers swaying recklessly to overtake.

Well, all this Middle Eastern idyll changed forever with the March/April illegal USA 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the very violent, chaotic and anarchic environment of the Levant today, only a very brave man can retrace my car travels throughout the region at the turn of the 21st century..

Dangers abound.

Death stalks the Levant everywhere.

Destruction and wars are the norm.

Civil strife and ancients hatreds are on the loose across the region.

Hundreds of thousands of people have perished.

Entire cities and villages lie in total ruin, the victims of vicious fighting amongst warring combatants of every imaginable stripe.

Iraq has effectively ceased to exist as a unitary state.

Syria can no more hold together as one country.

Lebanon is maintaining its unity through the skin of its tooth.

Palestine’s West Bank is vanishing under the weight of relentless Israeli illegal settlement expansion.

Gaza is being obliterated from the face of the earth through unremitting Israeli land, aerial and naval bombardment.

Egypt’s Sinai peninsula has become the Levant’s terrifying badland.

All this utter destruction of the Levant, following the USA’s invasion of Iraq, has happened in just less than fifteen years since my first visit to the Levant  region in September 2000.

Much of that which took the region’s various and much-admired civilizations thousands of years to build has been wiped off from the face of the earth in less than two decades. It is not even clear if any of the lost civilizational treasures of the region will ever be rebuilt or regained.

Syria lies in complete ruin. Gaza is in hot war with Israel. Lebanon now and again explodes in destructive, civil wars. The West Bank continues to be held in the stranglehold of Israel through its Apartheid Wall and humiliating check-points. Egypt, which used to be a reliable and steady anchor of the whole Middle East, is itself engulfed by unimaginable post-Morsi turmoil. Israel in turn lives in mortal fear of Hamas rockets and wages relentless,  cruel wars against Palestinians of Gaza, in a doomed and futile effort to ensure its own unilateral and one-sided national security and tribal-religious purity.

Above all else, Iraq and Syria lie in complete ruin, with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threatening to overrun and obliterate much of the two countries as modern nation-states.

 The lights are being switched off across much of the Middle East.

 A night without dawn is descending upon the region.

A starker contrast between the Levant of 2000-March 2003 and now is hard to imagine.

 It is almost like paradise lost.

The second prism through which I view the current bloody state of the Levant is offered by the false, infantile pseudo- optimism about the Levant and the broader Middle East which was once articulated by USA president George W Bush.

In his seminal book, Resurrecting Empire – Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path In The Middle East, Rashid Khalidi, one of the USA’s foremost experts on the Middle East, shares the following quotation from a speech president George W Bush delivered at the American Enterprise Institute on 26 February 2003, just about a month before the illegal and under false pretext American invasion of Iraq under his leadership:

“The nation of Iraq…is fully capable of moving towards democracy and living in freedom…A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region…Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards  a truly democratic Palestinian state.”

Seen against the background of the complete meltdown and mayhem of the Levant today, especially in light of the implosion of Iraq and the very brutal war waged there by ISIS, in effect “a war of all against all”, George W Bush’s congenital optimism of February 2003 borders on extreme superpower folly. But it was this type of misguided and ill-informed optimism about the Levant which was the crucible within which the George W Bush administration approached its “regime change” illegal invasion against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The third instructive and frightful prism through which to view the unfolding biblical-scale tragedy and savagery of the Levant today is provided by the 2006 issue of the USA magazine Newsweek.

In its 19 June 2006 Special Report issue, under the cover of the topic “Fighting Zarqawi’s Legacy”, Rod Nordland and Michael Hirsh wrote the following about the killing by USA forces of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)’s founder and leader, the fearsome Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi:

“But Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador in Iraq, can’t help it: he sees a ‘big opportunity’ in the death of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Why? Because Khalilzad knows that jihadists around the world may not encounter Zarqawi’s like again soon, no matter who replaces him. So monstrous a man was Zarqawi – so singularly savage in his methods – that he inspired  almost as much fear among his Sunni confederates as he did in his victims. A terrorist among terrorists, he was always the scariest guy in the room, frightening his Sunni hosts into silence or cooperation  with his unique combination of cruelty and competence: cross Zarqawi and you would die, along with your family , perhaps horribly.”

If in 2006 it was not clear to the USA ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the George W Bush administration he represented that “jihadists around the world may not encounter Zarqawi’s like again soon”, well, we today know that the leader of the modern-day Islamic caliphate, or the Islamic State straddling Syria and Iraq, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi makes Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi to look like Mother Teresa, by comparison, in unfathomable terms of “…his unique combination of cruelty and competence.”

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is not just “a terrorist among terrorists”, not just “the scariest guy in the room”. He is the Caliph of global terrorism now, and the scariest guy in a mosque in northern Iraq’s large city of Mosul, arguably the jewel in ISIS’s predatory and land-grab crown across Iraq and Syria.

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his ISIS have taken the practical definition of medieval and murderous barbarism for theocratic and political ends to a completely new, horrifying levels.

In a moment of great analytical stupidity, Donald Rumsfeld, the former USA Secretary of Defence during America’s invasion of Iraq, once spoke gibberishly and pompously about “a tipping point in Iraq.”

Well, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State (caliphate) across Iraq and Syria, and his ISIS, are the real deal in terms of “a tipping point” in Iraq.

 Surely, Zalmay Khalilzad and the George W Bush administration he represented could not have been more wrong in their faulty prophecies about what awaited Iraq in the future, following the USA invasion of 2003. In fact, in the words of the current USA Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, the Islamic State (caliphate) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS )  are “…beyond anything we have seen so far.” Meaning they are way, by far, beyond “the unique combination of cruelty and competence” which Newsweek’s Special Report on Abu Mussab Al-Zaeqawi, entitled “Fighting Zarqawi’s Legacy”, detected at the time.

Hard to believe, but following the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003, the hooves of hell have descended upon the Levant region.

Unfortunately the truth is that it is not all that clear that the Obama administration’s handling of the bloody turmoil in Iraq and Syria is any improvement on the poverty of policy and geostrategic thinking which afflicted the George W Bush administration.

Unbelievable though it may seem now, but if the Obama administration in turn mishandles its approach towards dealing with the very dire threat presented to the Middle East and global security by the Islamic State and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, one day, not in too distant a future, even Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi may appear like Mother Teresa in comparison, when he wil be succeeded by an even more odious terrorist monster.

USA Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel is right that ISIS is “beyond anything we have ever seen”. But that does not mean ISIS is the last word on murderous and insane human brutality and criminal depravity to be evinced by men who purport to uphold some deep religious values and virtues..

Only a selfless and altruistic, and not an egotistic and self-centered, USA leadership of the world, as the sole (for now, and not for long) global superpower, can ensure that the Middle East does not descend even  deeper, further and lower into the pits of Dante’s Inferno.

At the moment, the odds of the USA doing right by the whole world on the Middle East and rising to the occasion in a way that unites and mobilizes  the whole world against the mortal danger of Abu Bakr Al-Baghadadi and his criminal and murderous enterprise, ISIS, do not look promising at all.

 The current USA Obama leadership remains deeply self-absorbed in its own global power fantasies, and is committed enough to collecting the sinful wages of its highly ill-advised incumbent unilateralism.

For now, the USA’s approach to the Middle East remains in equal measure a part of the problem as it is undoubtedly also potentially a part of a long-lasting solution to the challenges of terrorism in the Middle East. The history of George W Bush administration’s entanglements with the Middle East, especially its disastrous Iraq invasion, is a clear demonstration of how a sole (for now, and not for long) global superpower can get things so horribly wrong in the Middle East, with no demonstrable culpability, punishment befitting the crime, or remorse whatsoever, whilst it brushes aside considered but contrarian opinion from elsewhere in the world.

And the large part of the problem regarding the current Obama administration’s involvement in the turmoil of the Middle East is that it continues to use its policies towards the region as a means to try to entrench and strengthen its post-Cold War “unilateral moment” as the only and undisputed superpower which should never brook any challenge by any other emerging power in the future..

This is a very tragic position of the USA.

This is dangerous, pure folly.

CHAPTER ONE.

In his brilliant article “Don’t BS the American people about Iraq, Syria and ISIS”, which appeared on War on the Rock on 20 August 2014, Brian Fishman, the researcher for the New American Century, makes a very valid point that “one cannot credibly argue  that the U.S withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 contributed to the rise of ISIL without also acknowledging that the U.S invasion in 2003 did the same. The former without the latter is a political argument, not a policy position”.

Yet as valid as Brian Fishman’s point about the compelling nexus between the 2003 USA invasion of and the 2010 USA withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 is, in terms of the rise of ISIS and the Islamic State, it still offers an incomplete formulation and at best represents a glass half full. It itself  may in turn be as misleading and dangerous a diagnosis, prescription and prognosis as the argument of those Fishman remorselessly takes his impressive, sharp analytical scalpel to.

The analysis provided by Brian Fishman can only be fully appreciated and be complete when juxtaposed with the other, equally compelling, sharp analysis proffered by Amr Hamzawy and Dina Bishara in one of  the Carnegie Papers (of the Carnegie Endowment) of November 2006, under the title “Islamist Movements In The Arab World and The 2006 Lebanon War”.

In the introduction to their well-grounded, incisive, impassioned Carnegie paper on the Islamists movements of the Middle East, the two analysts wrote:

“The war in Lebanon, mounted by Israel in July 2006 after the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah and halted by a cease-fire in August, made it necessary for Islamists movements to act in accordance with their ideological reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an existential struggle between Muslims and Jews. It also required them to be responsive to anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment widespread among their broad popular bases. The disproportionate Israeli response to Hizbullah’s initial provocation, especially the high toll of Lebanese civilian casualties, and the American refusal to push for immediate cessation of hostilities outraged Arabs and returned to the forefront the narrative of a grand American-Israeli conspiracy to dominate the Middle East.”

So, the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq must, undeniably, be understood within the context of the terrible and terrifying consequences of the USA’s illegal and deceitful invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the various destabilizing Israeli policies of occupation, settlement expansion and annexation, and punitive Israeli  wars directed against occupied Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, as well as other Arabs, like Iraqis and Sudanese, especially Israel’s 2006 war against Hizbullah.

Any global strategy to confront and defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq will have to first contend with this terrible legacy of crimes of the USA and Israeli policies and actions in the Middle East, especially the continuing occupation by Israel of Palestine and in particular the ongoing, horrendous consequences of the unilateral, illegal and under false pretext USA invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Short of this acknowledgement on the part of the USA and Israel, and their assorted and uncritical backers in the European Union (EU), no lasting good will come out of Obama administration’s unilateral military campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

 If ISIS is a global terrorist threat, it must by necessity be confronted with a united global action, and not unilateralist impulses of a sole superpower masquerading as global effort in the name of the Right to Protect (R2P).

It is interesting that even a close Arab ally of the USA and Israel in the Middle East, such as Egypt is, nurses bitter grievance against both countries. No wonder Egypt hectored and pilloried the Obama administration a few days ago over its abominable handling of the race protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the senseless killing by  a white American cop of the black, African American teenager, Michael Brown.

Matters are not helped by the occasional arrogance of the American administrations towards Egypt, arguably the most important Arab, Sunni and Middle Eastern country. It is sometimes unbelievable how Americans go out of their way to humiliate Egypt in public and for the whole world to see.

A prime example of this American arrogant attitude towards Egypt is provided by president Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright in her autobiography, Madam Secretary – A Memoir. In it Albright proudly ventilates about the USA’s sole global superpower arrogance at the expense of Egypt’s national and pre-eminent diplomat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who, as the then United Nations’ secretary general, had sought a second term:

 Albright can hardly camouflage her elbow-in-the-rib-cage glee at the sad fate that befell the veteran Egyptian international statesman, as a result of her direct diplomatic backstabbing and shinnanigans:

“When the Secretary General had been elected in 1991, he pledged to serve a single term…I concluded that if UN-U.S. relations were going to improve, the Secretary General would have to go. That meant a fight. We began with one big advantage. If we didn’t vote for him, he could not win. A secretary general had to receive the votes of each of the five permanent members of the Security Council…The fall of 1996 was consumed by our campaigns to reelect Bill Clinton and to unelect Boutros-Ghali…On November 19, I vetoed a resolution that would have given the the Secretary General a second term. The vote was 14-1 against us…If Boutros-Ghali thought we would flinch at the last minute, he was wrong.”

 With American friends like Madeleine Albright, does Egypt really need Islamic extremists like ISIS as her enemies?

 This shabby treatment the USA administration of Bill Clinton meted out to its most important Arab, Sunni and Middle Easterrn ally recalls the categoric statement by Karel van Wolferen, the renoun Dutch journalist and author of The Enigma Of Japanese Power, that the USA’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “…complete military disasters.” (Karel van Wolferen’s blog, The Ukraine, Corrupted Journalism and the Atlanticist Faith, 09 August 2014).

 And that is the truth, and nothing but the truth.

 Often it appears as if the USA is hell-bent on destroying secularist and republican governments of the Middle East  in such varying countries as Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine, Eritrea, Tunisia and Iraq, all now suffering from contrasting forms of severe domestic and international terrorism as well as civil strife -, whilst it protects oil-rich tyrannical and undemocratic monarchies of the Gulf states, which, like Israel, have been “miraculously” spared the bane of terrorist attacks and ISIS’s murderous rampage.

The USA invasion of Iraq in 2003, the subsequent destruction of the Iraqi state and society, and now the emergence of the Islamic State which encompasses huge parts of Iraq and Syria, under the leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), must be, historically, understood against this background. 

Not unsurprisingly, the current bloody chaos and nihilistic anarchy which have engulfed the Middle East at the current moment bears a close resemblance to the futuristic strategic scenario laid out in rare detail in the Yinon Plan – Israel’s Strategy for the Middle East, which was written  by the Israeli government’s Foreign Ministry official, Oded Yinon, as an article for  Kivunim (Directions), the Journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organisation in February 1982, and which was subsequently leaked to the broader media.

Just last week, Algeria’s president Abdulazziz Bouteflika was quoted by the Middle Eastern Monitor (MEMO) as having, in his address on Algeria’s national day for the Armed Forces,  “…accused western intelligence services of attempting to dismantle Arab countries.” (MEMO took the quote from Al-Ardy Al Jadeed news of 21 August 2014).

Given that Algeria under Bouteflika is such a very close ally of western countries in its fight against its domestic and regional terrorism, the coincidence of his accusation and the ongoing, violent meltdown of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sinai peninsula and Gaza is too rich to go unnoticed.

CONCLUSION.

Al Qaeda in Iraq and its various manifestations have shown themselves to be incredibly adept at adapting to the ever changing geo-strategic environments in which they are often forced to operate by their powerful opponents, primarily the USA’s overwhelming conventional military power.

From Abu Mussab Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda franchise during the Iraqi Sunnis’ violent resistance to the USA invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to the time of the triumph of the Arab Awakening around 2007, through the bloody battles over Fallujah and other cities of Iraq’s Sunni Anbar province, to the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) as an Al Qaeda franchise, to Abu Muhammed Al-Jalani’s Al-Nusra Front fighting against the Syrian regime of president Bashar Al Assad, right through to the unity between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Jablat Al-Nusra front to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and its current incarnation in the Islamic State (caliphate), and inclusive of Al Qaeda serving divorce papers on ISIS – these terrorist organisations have displayed amazing adaptability, resilience and an almost unmatched capacity for survivalist metamorphosis within very hostile environs.

The remarkable extent of ISIS’s triumph and ideological metempsychosis in adversity in Iraq and Syria was brought home in highly vivid terms by the recent Business Insider article of Michael B. Kelley and Mike Nudelman entitled “Everyone Who Wants to Destroy ISIS Needs To Know One Hard Truth”. The two authors revealed, amongst other things, that destroying ISIS will require a full-scale war, and not just surgical airstrikes that president Obama has just authorized to protect the Kurdish city of Irbil and to provide humanitarian protection (R2P?) to Iraqi minority communities like the Azidis; that ISIS has gone through many iterations since the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003; that the Islamic State (Caliphate) is basically a “criminal petrostate”, which gets about $12 million a month from extortion and other shady practices and about $1-2 million from selling oil from oil fields it has captured in Iraq and Syria.

It is this access by ISIS to this tremendous source of wherewithal and organizational-military capabilities, matched by “an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world vision” which has impelled the USA’s Chief of the Joint Staff, General Martin Dempsey, to recently characterise ISIS as a formidable and present danger to the USA’s national security. President Barack Obama has in turn described ISIS as “…a cancer whose spread must be contained” and that the group “has no place in the 21st century.”

And it is also this which makes ISIS and its caliphate such formidable direct and immanent threats to global peace and security.

But the surest way to rally international opinion and support for the requesite collective effort to confront and defeat ISIS and its caliphate in Iraq and Syria is certainly not more, but less, USA unilateral impulses and extraterritorial over-reach in international affairs, especially in the Middle East.

On 01 February 1994, two months before South Africa attained its freedom and democracy, Robert Kaplan, one of the foremost American conservatives, Neocon rightwing commentators and “regime change” advocates penned a fascinating article for the Atlantic magazine under the title “The Coming Anarchy.”

 Amongst other things, Kaplan wrote, rather disparagingly, the following about one part of our ancient and beautiful African continent:

“There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive – where, in fact, they tell lies – as in West Africa…West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization.”

Well, very wrong, Robert Kaplan.

 Your bad.

 There is in fact such a place on the planet, outside Africa, where political maps are deceptive too – where, in fact, they tell lies. Such a place, far away from West Africa, too provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that are already confronting our entire planetary civilization.

Robert Kaplan, welcome to the 21st century’s first (and possibly not last) Islamic Caliphate, otherwise also known as the Islamic State led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi..

Welcome to the murderous badland of Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in the Levant.

Welcome to the vilest, most horrendous, bloodiest and blood-thirsty form of theocratic nihilism and tribalistic, existential apocalypse.

Welcome to the 21st century’s Hell on Earth.

13th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
24 August 2014

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address: Isaac@cedia.co.za
Cedia Website : http://www.cedia.co.za
Cedia Blog : http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com and clicking on the Home icon
Cedia Pay-Off Line : Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.

BRING BACK OUR AFRICAN LEADERS…FROM WASHINGTON!: THE USA-AFRICA LEADERS’ SUMMIT.

“Ships that pass in the night
And speak each other in passing
Only a signal shown
And a distant voice in the darkness
So, on the ocean of life
We pass and speak one another
Only a look and a voice
The darkness again and silence.”
Longfellow, Tales of Wayside Inn.

INTRODUCTION

At the moment of Barack Hussein Obama’s great promise, whilst standing on the cusp of presidential power after vanquishing Hillary Rodham Clinton to clinch the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, something happened, which, in hindsight, is of great relevance to the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, which Obama has just hosted in Washington, the USA’s capital, allegedly successfully.

On that occasion Newsweek magazine led with a cover story on candidate Barack Obama’s future foreign policy as would-be president. The two-part story was entitled “Obama Abroad”, by Fareed Zakaria, now host of CNN’s Global Public Square (GPS) discussion show, and “Advice for Obama”, by Timothy Garton Ash. Conspicuous by its glaring ommission in the veteran opinion formers’ analyses of candidate Obama’s foreign policy agenda was Africa, the continent from which Obama’s father hailed.

Africa was clearly a huge diplomatic lacuna in the foreign policy thinking and planning of Obama and the American foreign policy honks around him who claimed to understand Obama’s thinking on foreign policy at the time.

It was an astonishing and intriguing omission. But the omission proved prophetic as well, in the manner of speech.

The omission was to be made into policy negligence by president Barack Obama himself, after winning the White House, by paying only perfunctory attention to Africa and her many challenges. Obama made only three trips to Africa during all the six years he has been America’s first African American president. And on each occasion, he seemed decidedly uncomfortable in his own presidential skin during these Africa visits, most clearly shown by his memorable, unpardonable and unforgettable “selfie” taken, in boredom, to the bemusement of the whole African continent and the consternation of his beautiful and classy wife, Michelle, with Denmark’s bombshell, leggy female prime minister and the UK’s slightly eccentric, if not dotty, prime minister at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in Johannesburg in December last year.

Some of us were compelled to publicly comment on this lackadaisical presidential attitude of Barack Obama towards his paternal ancestral continent of Africa during the first term of his presidency.

In the 37th volume of The Thinker magazine (edited by Dr. Essop Pahad) in 2012, this is what I wrote about what appeared to be Obama’s insouciant and indolent attitude towards Africa and African issues:

“What then has been Obama’s track record on Africa since he assumed the Presidency? Pretty dismal and very disappointing, I would say. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of them all has been the cold, dispassionate disposition Obama has adopted towards Africa. In a few and far-in-between occasions when President Obama devotes his time, effort and energy to African issues, he comes across as just a tough businessman who must make tough decisions, without allowing his passions and emotions to be on display or to cloud his judgment. The strange feature about the Barack Obama Presidency is that when he comes to Africa, Obama seems to retire his formidable reflective and analytical prowess, and at the same time seems determined not to allow his emotional persona to hold sway. No intellectual prowess and no jivey emotions. So on Africa Obama comes across as truly vacuous and disinterested. As a result, the Obama Presidency shows all the characteristics of a vacuous presidential Africa policy.”

I wrote this two years before the USA-Africa Summit.

Has the summit changed my assessment of Obama’s presidential attitude to our African continent? Has the summit imbued the Obama presidency, in the last two years remaining of his second term, with credible and considerable diplomatic elan about Africa?

Before attempting to answer that question with some degree of definitiveness, it is important to recall the prescient advice of America’s other black icon and civil rights advocate, Malcolm X about how African American leaders should relate to Africa and African leaders.

In his autobiography (written with the assistance of Alex Haley), Malcolm X wrote:

“..I formed a conviction which I have had ever since – that a topmost requisite for any Negro leader in America ought to be extensive traveling in the non-white lands on this earth, and the travel should include many conferences with the ranking men of those lands…Again, it was mainly Africans who variously expressed to me that no one would wish to be embarrassed trying to help a brother who shows no evidence that he wants that help – and who seems to refuse to cooperate in his own interests.”

In contrast, president Obama chose not to attend any summit of the African Union (AU) during his first term in office and half-way through his second term. Yet he felt no qualms calling for a summit of African leaders in Washington. Were he to rise from the dead, I am sure that Malcolm X would be surprised by this turn of events, which runs counter to his advice that “any Negro leader in America ought to be extensively travelling in the non-white lands on this earth, and the travel should include many conferences with the ranking men of these lands…”

Obama’s score-card on holding many conferences with the ranking men of Africa in the last six years of his presidency must be judged to be not just below par, to borrow from the terminology of golf, a game beloved to him. It has also decidedly looked like a diplomatic double bogey.

Has the outcome of the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit been of such a nature that ordinary Africans, above the heads of their leaders-participants, who all endorsed the summit, can feel that president Obama is now ready to “cooperate” with Africa “in his own interests” and in the interests of ordinary Africans themselves?

Clearly, the recently concluded USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, which took place on 05-07 August in Washington DC, USA, represents, in the words of Longfellow, “only a signal shown; and a distant voice in the darkness.”

In the more than 200 years of USA’s independence, and in all the post-colonial history of Africa, no white American-led administration saw it fit to host such a glittering gathering with African leaders.

Until now, under president Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president of America.

But not all that glitters is gold, of course.

The summit was certainly long overdue, given the massive dues America owes to Africa, arising especially from its plunder and theft of tens of millions of able-bodied slaves from Africa to build the USA into the impressive industrial and global power it is today.

Will future American presidents after Obama, likely most of them to be white or Latino for a long stretch, revert to form and “pass and speak” with their African counterparts, only to allow the usual “darkness again and silence” in the USA-Africa leaders’ summitry?

Was the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit hosted by Obama a once off diplomatic serendipity to the mutual benefit of America and Africa? Or was it a case of smoke and mirrors to make up for Obama’s six years of presidential neglect on his Africa policy?

Was the summit the festival for bloated, extra large African and American diplomatic egos on a global stage?

What actually is the the geo-strategic significance of this important, historic diplomatic event? Did it really have to take a first black American president for such a summit to happen? What does this fact say about white America’s view of Africa, in light of America’s enduring white racism against black folks?

Are the tales now issuing from all the participants of the recently concluded USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, told with such gusto, relish and conviction, nothing more than the tales from Longfellow’s wayside inn? Or is the self-promotional cacophony about the summit the sound and thunder of fools, signifying nothing in particular?

CHAPTER ONE.

During the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad in April 2009, a completely unusual diplomatic thing happened. As told by Andrew Clark of the UK’s Guardian, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, in the most unscriptd manner, rose up from his chair and approached a sitting USA president Barack Obama in order to present the latter with a gift in the form of a book entitled The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano. Clark, in his article, described Galeano’s 1973 book as “a 36-year-old tract attacking the imperialist exploitation of Latin America.”

It is really unfortunate that during all the time he played host to the just concluded USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, president Barack Obama did not once see it fit to quote from the book gifted to him by president Hugo Chavez. Has president Obama drawn any positive and relevant lessons from Galeano’s opus about America and western Europe’s exploitative and neo-colonial policy towards Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and south Asia? If so, where is the evidence? It is possible that president Obama did not even bother to read the Galeano’s book, given America’s intense animus towards the person of the late Hugo Chavez, and that he saw the book as an ideological poisoned chalice from an implacable opponent.

I believe that had Obama took the trouble and read Galeano’s well-researched, much-acclaimed and highly inspiring book, both the format and outcome of the recent first USA-Africa Leaders’ Forum in Washington would have been completely different, if only more progressive. For, having read Galeano’s book, Obama would have had a better perspective on and understanding of the true state of modern, postcolonial Africa as well, whose leaders, so full of unremitting puffery about the “successful” outcome of the summit he was hosting, even if only through the prism of the harrowing tales of Latin America’s exploitation at the hands of western powers, including the USA.

But more regrettable than Obama’s failure to reference Galeano’s book in any of his speeches to the Afro-American summit, is the fact that of all African leaders who were serenaded by Obama during the summit, none dared to emulate the bravery and sagacity of Hugo Chavez and present Obama with at least Kwame Nkrumah’s classic, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.

Clearly the African guests, apparently ever eager to be well-mannered and well-groomed guests of Washington, and maybe over-reacting to Eddie Murphy’s character, the African crown prince Akeem Joffer from the fictional African nation of Zamunda, in the 1988 film “Coming to America’, did not want to rain on the highly choreographed and rehearsed presidential parade of Barack Obama in Washington DC.

If Andrew Clark described Galeano’s book as “a tract attacking imperialist exploitation”, Nkrumah’s 1965 tract is a passionate ode against American and (western) European day-light imperialist exploitation and robbery of Africa and her resources over much of the last century.

With the books of Galeano and Nkrumah on his desk as bed-time reading, Obama would no more have had reason to behave in the American presidency, (as the first black president of America), in the manner so similar to that which Karl Marx, in his Das Kapital, observed in Edmund Burke, the two-faced, fork-tongued, mercurial and shifty Irish philosopher. Marx wrote that Burke sought to serve, at once, both the French and American revolutions, whilst he was also a paid agent of continental Europe’s tyrannical monarchies of the time.

And it is why Obama feels no internal conflict or contradiction in being a close friend of the King of Saudi Arabia, a tyrannical monarchy in the Middle East, whilst he used his peroration at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service to project himself to the world as the rightful heir of Nelson Mandela’s great democratic and freedom-loving mantle, whilst at the same time hectoring, by unsubtle innuendos, at some African leaders like Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe.

But the truth, so unpalatable to Obama, is that compared to Obama’s Saudi royal bosom friend, Mugabe smells, walks, quacks and paddles like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln combined. Mugabe holds regular elections, is a major African liberation struggle hero, a committed anti-colonialist and promotes women’s rights, with his deputy being a woman, to boot.

Can Obama dare to propose such an “audacious dream” for democracy to the King of Saudi Arabia in one of their future and regular tete-a-tete?

Hell will freeze over were that to happen.

The abiding political feature of Barack Obama is that as the head of the American imperialist exploitation of Africans and African resources, and a sponsor of the spread of American military bases across the African continent, he happily serves American imperialism in Africa, whilst at the same time he falsely seeks to adorn the freedom and liberation mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Pat Robertson, Mohammed Ali, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela, all who would have fiercely opposed Obama’s ongoing murderous Drone Wars across the world, for starters.

In this sense, no daylight separates Barack Obama from Edmund Burke, in essence. There really is no difference in the distinction between the two, other than that one, white, aspired to pervasive if also dubious intellectual and philosophical influence over Europe and America of his time, whilst the other, black,  now embodies some of the rank excesses of the American executive power at its highest, especially across Africa.

The first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit must also be understood against this background.

It is why the summit has been such a huge fudge, beyond the concerted, conceited and self-serving crude propaganda of its participants, defined primarily by its “vulgar economism”, to borrow a Marxist terminology. This “vulgar economism” has afforded Obama and his African counterparts at the summit the framework within which to overtly denude the summit of any global geo-strategic content completely.

Which is a pity.

Because the lack or absence of a serious exchange between the Obama administration and the African leaders during the summit on the global geo-strategic situation prevailing today deprived Africa of the opportunity to argue collectively with the world’s sole (for now, and not for long) superpower, the USA, for Africa’s place in global geo-strategic decision-making.

CHAPTER TWO.

There are notable ironies and surprises about the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit.

Firstly, the first, big gathering of black leaders of America and Africa in the new 21st century failed to issue a global call against racism and xenophobia in the world, especially against the backdrop of growing incidents of racial discrimination directed at Africans and blacks around the world, including at FIFA football matches in Europe. In the words of USA’s Dr. Cornel West, this would make the participants of the summit “…too hungry for status to be angry, too eager for acceptance to be bold, too self-invested in advancement to be defiant.’ (Race Matters). They border on what West describes as “race-effacing managerial leaders” who are distinguished by the fact that they survive “…on sheer political savvy and…personal diplomacy.”

Secondly, the first USA-Africa summit studiously avoided to pronounce itself in support of the campaign of fellow Caribbean nations to be paid reparations by former slave-trading nations of western Europe. Given that Africa was plundered by western Europe of tens of millions of slaves and that Obama’s most loyal constituency is African Americans, who are descendents of American slaves, this lack of support for the Caribbean cause for reparations is utterly surprising.

Thirdly, the African leaders went along meekly with the Obama administration’s decision to exclude Eritrea, Zimbabwe and the Sudan from the summit. One can have some sympathy as to why the Central African Republic should have been excluded, although even that should have been a call only the AU should have made. And why exclude the Central African Republic on accord of the civil war taking place there but invite to the summit Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Libya and Kenya, which are similarly torn apart by civil strife of huge proportions?

Fourthly, there seems to be an unusual turn out by many African leaders at a summit called by Americans in Washington, as compared to the usual poor turn out by African leaders at their own AU summits in Africa, where the common practice is of the African leaders delegating such attendance downward.

Fifth, the summit took place at the time of Obama’s acute political vulnerability domestically, thus making him not such a sure-footed host, despite external appearances to the contrary he sought to confidently project during the summit. The summit took place when Obama was enjoying his lowest approval ratings since he became president, according to USA polls. He had just been slapped with the uncomfortable vote in the USA Senate for him to be impeached over his signature health policy. And more devastating for Obama’s hosting of the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit, the polls showed that, by a huge margin, the American public was of the view that Obama was a major failure in critical areas of his foreign policy agenda.

Sixth, the summit took place at the time when the world seems to be imploding all around president Obama in places like Israel/Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, the naval rivalries in South East China sea in Asia heating up, the Japan/China tensions, Kenya, Somalia, the Central African Republic, northern Nigeria, Mali, Libya, South Sudan’s civil war, the turmoil in the Sinai peninsula of Egypt, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia in west Africa, terrorism in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mexican/USA border troubles, and Latin America’s open political and intellectual revolt against the diktat of the Washington Consensus, as if on cue to Galeano’s classic on Latin America, to name just a few of the pressing crises confronting the world’s sole (for now, and not for long) superpower and its leader. And not to mention the coup in Thailand, about which the Obama administration has remained uncharacteristically muted, and the territorial gains in Syria and Iraq of ISIS.

The first USA-Africa leaders’ Summit chose not to release a final communique guiding the world on USA-Africa thinking on any of these pivotal moments of our contemporary world.

So why are the African leaders, who took part in the summit, so determined to pass and sell it to us ordinary and toiling masses of Africa as an unprecedented, unblemished diplomatic masterpiece?

Help in gaining insight into the mindset of our African leaders, so full of praise of the summit, is provided by the famed and respected author Daniel Kahneman in his fascinating book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. In this book, Kahnemen writes about “the illusions of truth”, a psychological device in fact very popular amongst many African leaders of today, if “truth” be told. It is a concept that also helps to understand the African leaders’ perception and appreciation of the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit. For many a politician, including our African leaders, “the illusion of truth” is more palatable and re-assuring than truth itself, because actual truth, and not the illusion of it, can turn out to be very destabilizing and insurrectionary commodity to the prevailing status quo and hegemonic mindsets of ruling elites. Interestingly, Kahneman further states that “…the dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.” In one of the USA’s media reportage analyzing the summit, it was stated that the summit offered Obama the first opportunity, since becoming president, to relax and kind of be “homey” and warm amongst his fellow African counterparts, a privilege that apparently eluded him in the last six years of his presidency, because it could have proved too costly to him electorally. It is clear from this postulation that the fact that it was envisaged that “emotions”, if not a sense of black racial kinship between Obama and African leaders, would dominate the summit’s mood and proceedings, points to the summit’s capacity to have apriori conclusions steamrolling arguments about the USA-Africa relationship during the summit. Obama and the African leaders at the summit were seemingly also under the hypnotic spell of what the psychologist Paul Slovic (as quoted by Daniel Kahneman) calls “affect heuristic”, which denotes a state “…in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling.”

Many African leaders long determined that no argument will sway their “likes” for Obama, the first black president of the USA, with whom they naturally feel a close racial kinship. And they carried that long-held conclusion into the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit and its accompanied arguments and deliberations over three days. They thus rendered themselves pitiful victims of classical “affect heuristic” during deliberations of the just concluded USA-Africa summit.

But to be fair to our African leaders who participated in the summit, they might also have been strongly reacting to what James Poulos, in the Daily Beast of 08 August 2014, describes as “…Obama Derangement Syndrome – an instinctual hostility to anything and everything the president said and did.”

There is no doubt that our African leaders are aware of the prevalence of the Obama Derangement Syndrome across the white, rightwing circles of America, including within the Tea Party, and might have felt the need to come to the aid of their beleaguered black brother in the White House in the hour of his greatest political need, through “the illusion of truth” of a successful first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit.

And that would be a completely understandable human, if not political, instinct.

Whether it is a right political, diplomatic and external trade strategy for Africa’s dealings with the USA’s Obama administration is a different matter altogether.

CHAPTER THREE.

In 2005 the Economist of Britain carried an interesting cover story under the title “Helping Africa to help itself.”

The picture accompanying the Economist’s cover story was of two extended black hands reaching to each other mid-air; one hand unadorned and apparently giving or donating something to the other lower black hand, which seemd to be of a man wearing a suit, with a golden cufflink, and some things around his wrist which look like ivory bangles. It is not clear if the intended message of the Economist was of two blacks cooperating to mutual benefit, or whether the message was of a poor black being robbed by a rich black and meant to capture the tensions between western aid to Africa and the requirement for extended western trade with Africa.

Be that as it may, the latter meaning of the picture accompanying the Economist’s cover story would of course best capture the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit’s Zeitgeist, nine years after the Gleneagles G8 Summit which discussed the trade versus aid conundrum around Africa at the time.

Did the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit successfully incorporate some of the lessons, achievements and failures of the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit in relation to Africa?

The “vulgar economism” of the recent summit in Washington is proof-positive that not much progress in how the developed world relates to, and not just treats, Africa has been registered, regrettably.

To illustrate this point, here are some of the more unappealing characteristics of the “vulgar economism” of the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit:

Firstly, in pure statistical terms, the $33 billion in new trade and investments to Africa which president Obama pledged at the summit divides into less than $1 billion for each of the 50 African countries who participated in the summit. In the case of a tiny African country like the Kingdom of Swaziland, with a population of about 1,2 million people, the less than $1 billion from Obama’s $33 billion pledged at the summit would translate into about less than $10 000 for each Swazi citizen. In the case of Nigeria, the average per Nigerian for sharing the Obama trade and investment largesse would be laughable. To say the amount president Obama pledged is peanuts would be the biggest understatement of July 2014.

It is no co-incidence also that the $33 billion in trade and investments which president Obama pledged during the summit is about the same amount the USA administrations have pledged and delivered to Egypt and Israel, two countries in the Middle East, in the form of military aid and in every decade since the signing of the Camp David Accords.

Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that whilst the USA’s trade with Africa amounted to about $85 billion in 2013, from the high of $125 billion in 2011, the same USA’s trade competitors like China and the EU have much bigger trade volumes with Africa of about $210 billion and $200 billion respectively in 2013. In the first five months of 2014, the USA traded only $31 billion in goods with the African continent. On this trajectory alone, it is hard to see how the USA-Africa trade volume would equal the one of 2013. This speaks to the sustained decline, since 2011, in USA trade with Africa, the highfalutin rhetoric of the first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit not withstanding. And as president Obama correctly pointed out during the summit, much of USA’s trade with Africa is dominated by only three African countries, namely South Africa, Angola and Nigeria, and is heavily weighted in favor of the oil imports to the USA from Angola and Nigeria. President Obama was also correct to point out to the startling trade fact that the USA trades about as many goods with Brazil, a single country in Latin America, as it does with the whole of the African continent.

In 2009, China surpassed the USA under president Barack Obama as Africa’s biggest trading partner.

What is even more interesting is that whilst the USA-Africa trade volumes are registering disappointing and consistent decline since 2011, following the great recession in the USA, the point of fact is that the USA and India, another single country in south Asia, will be increased from the current levels of over $100 billion to close to $500 billion in the next ten years, if the intentions of the USA and Indian trade negotiators are to be taken seriously. And against this background of the growing India-USA bilateral relationship, the USA’s trade relationship with China continues to exponentially explode, whilst it is in reverse gear with regard to the African continent.

Thirdly, whilst it is true that president Obama’s great legacy for Africa will likely be his work on, support for and success in convincing the USA Congress to extend the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a truly transformative gesture he can make in the direction of Africa’s growth and opportunity would be for him to work to couple the benefits arising from AGOA in the next fifteen years with (in tandem) some of the trade and investment drives of other world powers active in Africa, such as those of Brazil, Russia India, China, South Africa (BRICS), the EU, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Malaysia. The Chinese government has recently indicated its preparedness to coordinate its trade and investment policy in Africa with the Obama administration.

Fourth, it is worth noting that whilst the USA and the EU clearly surpass China as bigger investors in Africa, at around $61 billion each to China’s about $18 billion, the Chinese investments are state-driven and infrastructure projects-bound. Much of the USA and EU’s investments in Africa are private corporations-driven, non-infrastructure-bound and are often out of sync with African states’ own developmental agendae. This is definitely not helpful. In effect, the Chinese investments have the direct positive effect of empowering Africa’s developmental states. It is no wonder that after all the many decades of USA and EU’s investments in Africa, the investments remain concentrated largely in extractive sectors like oil and mineral resources, whilst the dictates of the Washington Consensus, promoted by the USA administrations, the EU, IMF and the World Bank, ensure that the capacity of Africans states are considerably weakened and undermined, if not completely negated.

An undeniable historical truth is that the rise and rise of western Europe and north America in the last five hundred years has been directly linked to the fall and fall of the African continent during the same period. It can be shown convincingly, as Walter Rodney did in his 1972 classic, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, that western Europe and north America’s development, on the one hand, and Africa’s acute underdevelopment, on the other hand, have an “a-symbiotic” relationship between them.

Lastly, whilst president Obama’s Power Africa initiative, for which he pledged $300 million of initial American investment, is to be welcome, its positive effects can happen and be sustainable in the long run only if the initiative is anchored within a broader USA pivot towards Africa, and distinctly so, regarding trade and investment matters. However, the USA’s trade and invest flows to Africa, compared to the USA’s trade and investment flows into other developed and emerging regions of the world, do indicate that Africa remains the lowest trade and investment priority for USA administrations, including the current Obama administration, and that any hope for a decisive trade and investment pivot by the USA towards the African continent remains just a pipe-dream.

And this is the fact and truth the USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit sought to deliberately down-play.

And so, in a strange sort of way, the over-emphasis on “vulgar economism” by the recent African-American summit in Washington further exposed the extent of continuing neglect by the USA of its bilateral relationship with the African continent, which remains the world’s poorest continent.

CONCLUSION.

The first USA-Africa Leaders’ Summit is but a first step in a journey of more than a thousand miles. There is no doubt that in the next two years remaining of his presidency, president Obama will want to be part of another such mega-event summit.

This is understandable.

The challenge of course is to make sure that such future summits do not degenerate into the usual calcified circuit of unending but useless global conferencing and self-congratulatory back-patting on economic diplomacy between the leaders of Africa and the USA. For that to happen, the Obama administration still needs to stretch its mind a bit further and define, in more precise and specific terms, what is the nature and content of the new, equitable bilateral relationship the USA should develop and maintain, in the long term with the African continent, even in the future event of an absent president Barack Obama.

Otherwise the USA-Africa bilateral relationship will continue to be best described by Henry Longfellow’s Tales Of The Wayside Inn:

“So, on the ocean of life
We pass and speak one another
Only a look and a voice
The darkness again and silence”.

It does not have to be so. Especially in the coming USA’s post-Obama future.

12th Cedia blog
11 August 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address: isaac@cedia.co.za
Cedia Website : http://www.cedia.co.za
Cedia Blog : http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com
Cedia Facebook : Cedia Cedia
Cedia Twitter : Cedia6
Cedia LinkedIn : Cedia Cedia
Cedia Directors : Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi – Founder and Executive Chairman; Mr. Saul Pila – Chief Operating Officer.
Cedia Pay-Off Line : Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.