>... Over the past several years, Bush and his foreign policy team have done something almost no one expected when they took office - they have made Africa a priority. It would be an uplifting story, the fulfillment of countless bleeding-heart dreams, except for one thing. Africa is a Bush priority for one reason: oil.
For critics who consider President Bush's talk of global democracy a sham, and suspect it conceals a hidden agenda to control the world's supply of oil, Africa is a kind of Rosetta stone. The continent's west coast - from Nigeria in the north to Angola in the south - is America's fastest-growing source of oil and gas. Over the next decade, according to the National Intelligence Council, Africa's share of the U.S. petroleum market will rise from 15 to 25 percent. As Kansteiner has put it, "African oil has become of national strategic interest to us."
For an administration worried about the stability of longtime oil cow Saudi Arabia, West Africa is a godsend. Its oil is high-quality, easy to refine, and largely offshore, which means political unrest is less likely to disrupt production. It's half the distance from the Persian Gulf. And, because most West African oil producers don't belong to OPEC, they can pump out as much crude as they want, potentially lowering prices.
That's the good news. The bad news is that many of the regimes that control this new oil make Saudi Arabia look like Sweden. In the Middle East, the president is supposedly renouncing the decades-long bargain in which America blesses Arab dictatorships in return for their hydrocarbons. But, in West Africa, his administration is building another, equally ugly arrangement to replace it.
Last month, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola - Africa's second-largest oil producer - met Bush for the second time. For the leader of a midsized African country, two Oval Office visits is unusual. It's even more unusual, given that President Bush has said he will reward only those African countries that "invest in the health and education of their people. ... Corrupt regimes that give nothing to their people deserve nothing from us." That statement probably elicited a chuckle at Human Rights Watch, which estimates that, between 1997 and 2002, 9 percent of Angola's gross domestic product simply disappeared. Dos Santos's government, in other words, stole roughly as much money as it spent on health and education combined. Luckily for the Angolan leader, he has other credentials that matter in Washington: The night before his first Oval Office meeting, he was feted at a dinner sponsored by ExxonMobil and Chevron-Texaco, both of which are planning major West African expansions.
Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-33939-1.shtml
Angola's Deadly War Dealing with Savimbi's Hell on Earth http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr991012.html
"This war may be a war of the poor.It is definitely a war of the squalid, of the seamy since I've seen only sleazy, squalid people since I've been here. But it is also a war of the rich. It's a war that, in any case, smells of the money in traffickers in tanks and guns. They say that the operation of the oil reserves of Cabinda, in the north of the country, alone brings President dos Santos between 3 and 4 billion dollars a year.They also say that the diamonds of the Lundas bring Savimbi a half-billion. And, above all, they say that this money is reinvested, at 60% for the one, and 80% for the other, in military equipment..." Pg. 16 of, War, Evil and the End of History, " published in France in 2001 by Bernard Henri-Levy.
Michael Pugliese