Speaking of that vast imperialist bid to remake the war in its own image:

[arhalvaztrirjournal]

 It's worth noting at present that the US Africa Command is currently carrying out a whopping 36 simultaneous operations in Iraq, without any supervision or concern. The article specifies 2013 to 2017 as a timeframe, meaning that most of these were going on when the global antiwar movement decided US wars were either good or not worth the muss or fuss as long as a Nobel Peace Prize winner was using drone strikes to carry out targeted assassination attempts and calling them wars. 

https://news.yahoo.com/revealed-the-us-militarys-36-codenamed-operations-in-africa-090000841.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=tw&fbclid=IwAR2E3EiVuWBCVy_Yl5xpARomUf41UHJYnPh2nvHmEkJagOdqcowiA70CAnE

The expansion of Africa Command happened, it's worth noting, under the first US Black President, that Nobel Peace Prize Winner and the only US President other than Clinton wage the good wars that don't kill anyone and aren't worth protesting as acts of imperialism except when they're at least nominally about stopping a genocide, at which point the people perpetrating it deserve all the moral support of Western pacifists. 

The reality of this expansion is precisely what it sounds like. US power is expanding over the second largest continent in the world in Northern, Western, Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. A precious few of these missions are humanitarian, like the aid to the Ebola Outbreak. The vast majority are warfighting in the nominal name of the War on Terror, an assertion the better for proof, and never scrutinized because of the foolish assumption that generals are professionals who know best in their own interest, let alone that of the United States. 

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24502660.html

This article from 2008 is rightly suspicious of motivations, because the US military expands readily and with a free hand when given it, but it does not leave readily. Africa Command began under George W. Bush, as part of the War on Terror. Its expansion under Obama is the inevitable resort of time going in one direction, not back and forth and counterclockwise in reverse. However one would like to think under a Republican people would have noticed and cared more, but then Trump has expanded Obama's expansion to not that much of a difference. 

Imperialism in Africa under European auspices killed more people than Germans killed Jews in the Holocaust in the Congo alone. US imperialism is no kinder than the Victorian version that preceded it. And a decade later, speaking of Victorian precedent, the US Military command in the second largest continent in the world is located in Germany, clearly reliant on the Otto von Bismarck map of Africa (I expect this joke will be obscure but it's too good not to use). 

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/03/13/senators-consider-putting-africom-headquarters-staff-in-africa/

In spite of relying on that notably African country Germany as a base, the US Military is literally putting multiple bases all over the continent, willfully lying in plain sight and avoiding any kind of accountability, or indeed protests from the so-called antiwar movement in the United States and to a surprising degree abroad. Then again France can go blow up villages in its former colonies with a free hand to the active and cheerful endorsement of the French, so why should one expect the EU crowds of 2003 to throng to protest blowing up black people in Africa, exactly? Most people in this country think Africa's one big country right next to China, so it's not like people here would know enough about continents to protest this kind of dangerous screw without end or recognize how ominous it actually is. 
  https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/u-s-military-says-it-has-a-light-footprint-in-africa-these-documents-show-a-vast-network-of-bases/

The two most recent bases are nominally said to fit into Mr. Bush's Damn Fool Crusade. One in Niger, one in Somalia. Opposite ends of Africa, neither subject to scrutiny nor concern in the US Press, and I'm going to wager to not a great hell of a lot abroad, either, given how little priority Africa is outside well, African media globally. This is the real face of American power and imperialism in the name of 'opposing terrorism' which just so happens to be a vast bloating of the Empire of Bases on a blank check. 

Hence things like this happen, the USA returning to the Somalia it was driven out from when it tired of its local dictatorship proxy and watched its overthrow while scratching its ass and its chin. 

https://www.africanews.com/2019/04/15/somali-forces-us-africa-command-conduct-airstrike-targeting-al-shabaab//

All Empires fall, and the endless expansion across Africa without concern for time, budget, interests, or indeed rationale other than inertia will do much to accelerate the decline and fall of the American Empire and the rise of the new order. That single Chinese base in Djibouti is ringed by US ground and air bases across the entire continent, yet a Chinese base attracts global concern and worry, and the American Empire's bloating itself as its people throng around the rotting cadaver of democracy worshiping it and awaiting the corpse's speech, however, does not. If anything it should be the other way around. 

There is nothing good to come of endless US expansion in Africa, nor in confirming that the so-called 'War on Terror' is but a classical bid for Empire rewritten and rethought with new verbiage. But.......the decline and fall of the Empire accelerates even as it swells and rigor mortis begins to set in. 

Comments

[garote]

TBH, 36 operations in Iraq does not actually sound like a large number to me.

But perhaps that depends on the details. Are there any details on what these operations look like on the ground?