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Baffour’s Beefs By Baffour Ankomah
Africa and Zimbabwe should learn invaluable lessons from the crisis in Iraq. THE ongoing crisis in Iraq has sent my mind racing, in fact more than racing, to the point where I am asking myself can Africa, and Africans, learn anything from these events?

Two Saturdays ago, my co-columnist on the opposite page, Nathaniel Manheru, did an illuminating piece on the Iraq crisis that lay bare the intricacies of the misfortune that has befallen the land that was once part of Greater Mesopotamia, itself the cradle of a civilisation that lasted for so long at a time when the current “makers of world civilisation” were living in caves and did not know what a window was.

Does anybody remember that textbook, “Makers of World Civilisation”? The Murungu, a very latter-day saint, pretends in that book that he created world civilisation, and then goes on to teach it to us in Africa! And did we believe it? You bet we did.

So after Manheru’s excellent piece two Saturdays ago, I don’t intend to go over the grounds he covered, but only to say that we, Africans, must not let the Iraq crisis go without learning invaluable lessons from it.

Eleven years ago, I was lying in my hotel room in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, when, on that fateful night in March 2003, George W.

Bush and his prime minister colleague, Tony Blair, were raining cruise missiles and bombs on Iraq, and particularly on its capital city, Baghdad.

I watched in utter horror as Western journalists blabbed on TV about the new term they had just coined, “shock and awe”, to describe the intensity of the callousness of the bombing.

Apparently the fires and flares and the booms that the missiles and bombs were making and leaving in their wake against the background of a darkened Baghdad skyline was so “shocking” and “awe-inspiring” to the journalists that they could find no apt and better description than “shock and awe”.

So Bush and Blair “shocked” and “awed” their way through a country much older than theirs, and no matter how many limbs they dismembered or eviscerated or evaporated – and hey they did dismember and evaporate scores of thousands of such limbs that night and many nights thereafter — it was all for a good cause.

Or so they told the world. A dictator called Saddam had to be shown his place, and mightily so.

As a reward for dying so innocently and in so teeming numbers, the Iraqis got a new government installed in Baghdad filled with the stooges of Bush and Blair. A quiescent world was then told how the new Iraq would live in happiness ever after, especially now that liberty and democracy were the gifts the Americans had brought. Or so they said!

Barack’s sovereignty and self-reliance
Fast forward to 2011. President Barack Obama pulls out the last American soldier from Iraq, and hubristically tells the world: “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” No wonder that dictionaries are in short supply in Washington DC.

Three years on, from Obama’s infamous line, Time magazine, one of America’s greatest exports to the world, which had been a champion of the “shock and awe” philosophy of 2003, does a front cover on June 30, 2014, with a headline in capital letters saying: “THE END OF IRAQ”.

Apocrypha could not have said it better. And you bet Obama did not shake his head when he saw that front cover.

But listen to Time magazine: “To Americans weary of the Middle East, the urge is strong to close our eyes and, as Sarah Palin once put it so coarsely, ‘let Allah sort it out’. President Obama has kept a wary distance from Syria’s civil war and the turmoil of postwar Iraq.

“But now that the two have become one rapidly metastasising cancer, that may no longer be possible. As long as the global economy still runs on Middle Eastern oil, Sunni radicals plot terrorist attacks against the West, and Iran’s leaders pursue nuclear technology, the US cannot turn its back.”

Wow. Now Iraq has become a “metastasising cancer”, and the gracious Sarah Palin wants “Allah to sort it out”.

So, tell me, when did the “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” of Obama’s dreams become a “metastasising cancer” of Time’s prose?
And what in heaven has Allah got to do with it?

Surely Allah dropped no bomb or cruise missile on Baghdad or Tikrit. George Bush and Tony Blair did. And we know where they live, these two scoundrels. The world should hold them by the scruff of their bloody necks and squeeze tight those necks until the bodies that sit below those necks sort Iraq out. Allah has better things to do than do the work that Bush and Blair should do.

Enter Tony Blair
Perhaps the prospect of seeing his sorry neck squeezed by the same rope that truncated Saddam’s, was what frightened Tony Blair to speak out on June 17, 2014, distancing himself and Bush from what is currently happening in Iraq.

The man whose father once held sway in Sierra Leone as a colonial officer was adamant that he and Bush were not to blame for the current crisis in Iraq. Yet he went on to admit on BBC that same day that they — meaning he and Bush and their hangers-on — “underestimated” the fact that once “the dictators” were removed in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would open the door to the evils of “sectarianism and tribalism”.

So these men of the White House and Downing Street who, while in office, thought of themselves as, and in fact behaved like, the sons of God, if not God himself, in effect, did not seriously consider what would happen to the societies they claimed to be bringing the gift of “liberty and democracy”. They “underestimated” it! Where are you Tony Blair?

Thus 11 and 15 years respectively after the arrival of “liberty and democracy” in Iraq and Afghanistan, we read, in the eternal words of Time magazine, that the two unfortunate countries have become a “metastasising cancer”.

Are we therefore surprised that the men — and usually they are men — who forced “liberty and democracy” down the resisting throats of the Iraqis and Afghans are now scampering away from their misdeeds, fearful that the rope that once dispatched Saddam to the grave may be the same that cuts short their own mischief-filled lives.

Now even John Simpson of the BBC and his colleagues of the Western media fraternity who glorified the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq have turned tail and are now reporting that Saddam may not have been a bad dictator after all, because he held Iraq together, with all its “sectarianism and tribalism”, and made it a worthy place to live than when liberty and democracy arrived from the USA, a gift of the occupant of a White House built by the sweat and toil of African slaves.

This is a lesson we must learn in Africa, and especially in Zimbabwe where for a decade and a half the same bearers of the gift of liberty and democracy have sought to seduce the people, and hey they very nearly succeeded!

It was a close shave — truth be told. But how “metastasising” a “cancer” Zimbabwe would have become by now, only Allah can tell. And surely we would not have had the temerity to call on him to sort the country out.

That should tell us that change exported by foreign godfathers and enforced at their whim cannot be in the interests of any receiving nation.

This is why Africa must be wary of such change. The stooges of the godfathers may shine for a while, no problem; but they would not work in the long-term interests of the nation.

It has happened many times in Africa and elsewhere. It happened in my native Ghana in 1966 when the foreign godfathers used local malcontents to overthrow Nkrumah’s government.

It had happened earlier in DRCongo in 1960-61 when the godfathers again used local stooges to eliminate Patrice Lumumba. DRCongo has since remained a country of trees, rivers and rebel wars despite being potentially the richest nation in Africa by natural resources.

‘Don’t blame us, it’s their fault’
Today, the Iraqi and Afghan stooges who egged the Americans and their British cousins on when they arrived in 2001-03 are no more, but the people of the two countries are still paying the price of the nightmare imposed on them.

The fabric of their societies has since been shred into bits, and once that stage has been reached, anybody with an AK47 rifle is king.

For the long-suffering people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the pill becomes even more difficult to swallow when the purveyors of liberty and democracy now rub their flaccid noses in the mud by telling them, as Blair told them in mid-June, that he and Bush, the bringers of liberty and democracy, are not responsible for Iraq’s current condition.

Please let’s listen to Blair, speaking on June 17: “We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this.

“We haven’t. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not, and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.”

What temerity! And Blair did not only say it, he wrote it and published it on his website, on June 17. “We have to put aside the differences of the past and act now to save the future,” he continued. “Where the extremists are fighting, they have to be countered hard, with force.”

Well. Well. Well. Tony Blair wants more force to be applied, when force has not worked these past 11 benighted years in Iraq? He even thinks it is “extraordinary” for anybody to think that Iraq would be stable today if Saddam had stayed in power.

Listen to him again: “The civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect. Iraq is now in mortal danger.

“The whole of the Middle East is under threat.”

In my native Ghana, this is the kind of talk that earns one a toothless mouth. Tony Blair is lucky to be saying what he is saying thousands of miles away from my good village in the Ghanaian rainforest. He would have gone home with nary a tooth in his damned mouth.

The same fate would have befallen the journalists at Time magazine who are supporting Blair’s line of thinking. How disingenuous can one be when Time pretends that all of us have short memories, when it included this paragraph in its “The End of Iraq” cover story on June 30:

“Yet on a deeper level, the blame belongs to history itself. At this ancient crossroads of the human drama, the US’s failure echoes earlier failures by the European powers, by the Ottoman pashas, by the Crusaders, by Alexander the Great.

“The civil war of Muslim against Muslim, brother against brother, plays out in the same region that gave us Cain vs Abel.
“George W. Bush spoke of the spirit of liberty, and Obama often invokes the spirit of cooperation.

“Both speak to something powerful in the modern heart. But neither man — nor America itself — fully appreciated until now the continuing reign of much older spirits: hatred, greed and tribalism. Those spirits are loosed again, and the whole world will pay a price.”

Amazing, isn’t it? “The blame belongs to history”. Indeed! But do you notice that apart from Cain and Abel, all the names strung together by Time in that paragraph are European: “European powers, the Ottoman pashas, the Crusaders, Alexander the Great, George W. Bush, and even our own Obama.”

So, tell me, what in Devil’s hell were these Europeans doing “at this ancient crossroads of the human drama” where “the reign of much older spirits: hatred, greed and tribalism” continue? I thought their homes were, and still are, in Europe.

What were they doing in the Middle East where Muslim rise against Muslim, brother against brother, in the same region that gave us Cain vs Abel? At least, for all his sins, Cain dispatched his brother Abel by himself without any godfather whispering in his damned ear.

Or maybe I should say that the whispering in his ear came from God the Father soon after Cain had done the dispatch. And it was not a conspiratorial whispering, as Bush and Blair and their hangers on are wont to do, but one of damnation and eternal disgrace.

And did I like this one from Time?: “But while Washington plunged into the blame game, fair minded observers could see that the US’ road through the region is littered with what ifs and miscalculations. What if we had never invaded Iraq? What if we had stayed longer? What if Obama had acted early in the Syrian civil war to put arms in the hands of non-radical rebels?”

Too late. It should tell the Americans not to be too uppity. This world does not belong to them alone. How many rooms can an American sleep in, in a night? So why do they want to dominate everything and everyone?

The next assignment, South Sudan
Last week, I reported in these columns America’s next adventure in Africa, in South Sudan, where President Salva Kiir Mayardit told me the week before last that the Americans want him out.

I want to repeat the President’s words here so that when they finally come to pass, no American company will take the copyright from me. You read it here first, in The Saturday Herald.

Let’s start from the top. This is President Kiir speaking: “Well, the transitional government idea is not our position. It is a position being imposed by the IGAD countries who are under pressure from the Americans, the European Union, and the international community.

They have put pressure on IGAD that the government in Juba must be dissolved so that a new system comes up in Juba . . . ”

So why are the Americans doing that? “They say that their companies are not allowed to invest in the oil industry here. But it is not our mistake. When we signed the CPA in 2005, we wanted to review the oil agreements that had been signed by Khartoum and China. The Americans refused.

“They said ‘no, don’t touch the already signed agreements, we will be given access later to the files so that we will know what has been done. But we have nothing to say on it just now. If there are new contracts to be awarded, yeah we will sit down and sort them out, but not the existing agreements’.

“So we left the existing agreements alone. And the Americans went on to impose sanctions on President Bashir and pulled out their companies from South Sudan.

“I appealed to them to bring back their companies when I became the First Vice President of Sudan. I said to them: ‘Those companies that were operating in the oil fields in South Sudan, let them come back’. They said: ‘No, if this is done Bashir will still benefit from this money. So we are not coming in’. They wanted Bashir to fall. But Bashir cannot fall because he is with his people.

“Now when South Sudan became independent in 2011, I called the Americans again. ‘Let your companies come,’ I told them, ‘so that if there are oil blocks that have not been awarded to any companies, I will give them to you, including Block 5B which had actually been awarded to an American company that later pulled out. Up to now that block is still not awarded to anybody’.

“So I called them but they said no. Riek Machar (the former vice president turned rebel and opposition leader) had told them that, ‘if you help me to become president, I will chase away the Chinese and the other Asian oil companies in South Sudan, and I will give everything to you’. And they believe him.

“So this is my crime. I haven’t offered them what Riek has offered them.”

President Kiir was even more explicit about what the “transitional government in 60 days” being pushed by the Americans and the EU is intended to do. “It’s just how to get me out of power. It’s a smokescreen,” Kiir said laconically.

Please mark the President’s words and put them in your dairies, because as sure as the sun will rise from the east tomorrow morning, the Americans are going to press for the end of Kiir’s presidency, unless their mischief is exposed and the whole of Africa begins to talk about it right now.

The shame is that South Sudan, a new and poor country, does not have the wherewithal to withstand the American onslaught as Zimbabwe did.

And unless Salva Kiir rolls over, which I understood him he is not going to do, the people of that long-suffering country are in for a torrid time, as we have seen in Zimbabwe in the past 14 years when President Mugabe decided not to roll over.

Salva Kiir himself gave a faint hint of it when he said: “ . . . So it is the situation of Iraq that they want to happen here. These are strong nations, they can come in, throw away the elected government, and then install one of their stooges…

“[But] I told them that if you talk about the removal of the elected president … it is a red line to us. So if you don’t want grudges and conflict to deepen in South Sudan, leave these two institutions untouched — Parliament and the Executive.”

There you have it, dear readers. I have deliberately repeated here what I reported last week so that nobody will forget it when it finally comes to pass. Salva Kiir may not be able to withstand the American assault, but South Sudan’s version of “the continuing reign of much older spirits: hatred, greed and tribalism” that Time writes about in Iraq and Afghanistan, will surely be “loosed again” in South Sudan as the passions of the two largest ethnic groups in the country — Dinka and Nuer — are already at a high point as a result of the current war that erupted after Kiir’s Nuer vice president, Riek Machar, tried to seize power last December, and the resulting fighting turned into a Dinka vs Nuer duel.

Kiir is a Dinka and if he is unlawfully pushed out of office, by the Americans or anybody else, the tall Dinkas of South Sudan will not take it lying down. And the whole country will pay a price.

I am writing this with Stan Mudenge’s words ringing in my two ears. At the hallowed Zimbabwe Grounds on the day Zanu PF supporters organised the Million Man March for their President in 2007, Comrade Mudenge pulled me aside and told me how Robin Cook, the UK’s now late foreign secretary, had told him point blank in 2001 that “if you guys do not get rid of Bob, don’t say we didn’t warn you, but what will hit you (meaning Zimbabwe as a country) will make your people stone you in the streets”.

Did it come to pass? Surely. The first half of the warning came to pass 100%. “What hit” Zimbabwe in the years after 2001 was such that the “stoning bit” very, very, nearly came to pass at the 2008 elections!

So what is the moral of this story? Africa must look at the ant of Proverbs Chapter 6 of the Bible, and learn valuable lessons from these events.

Verses 6-11 of Chapter 6 say: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest — and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man.”

And you can add, “your people will stone you in the streets”.

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