LIBATION.... "SUPREMACY by STEALTH"

[Baba Ahmed]

[b]As an Afrikan person I call upon

the Spirit and Wisdoms of our ancestors

and the forces of truth and justice

to be with us to unite us

to strengthen our senses of responsibility

and help us to re-capture our minds;

to store the knowledge and love of self

to study to learn to plan to work together

and to build for our survival and future

as individuals and community

May the inspiration of our glorious Afrikan past

and the divine melinated lights of cosmic energies

come to arise surround and protect us

as we re-dedicate and commit ourselves

to re-affirming and re-claiming

Our Humanity and Heritage
]
and as before, once again

become one with the Almighty Force

In the resoration of truth and justice

In Ourselves in this place On this planet,

At this time, Forever!!!


Ashay! Ashay!! Ashay-ooooo!!!

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Asomdwee all; this libation presented itself as I read an article, "SUPREMACY by STEALTH"*** written by Robert B. Kaplan. It brought to mind what one of our dedicated healers, Dr. Llaila O. Afrika wrote, that the European thinks with a military mind. Dr. John Henrik Clarke has said that one of our biggest errors is to think that we can appeal to our ancient enemies' sense of conscience, of right and wrong, to admit any wrong doings...ever. In this article is noted repeated invocations of the writer's ancestors, by names and their successful strategies and tactics. You will see one Eu-rope-an illustrate what some have called an almost innate desire to oppose to conquer to control all others, in all things human beings do. You will see that Eu-rope-ans are in a consistent, continual constant state of WAR. A distinctive group, a gang of ethnicities traceable to pre-Greco/Roman cultures whose essential characteristics are garnered around a driving force to be God over everything natural, including the trees and bees. Ants and worms and the very air we breathe, the lands we live upon and the waters needed for bare existences. Kaplan lists 10 rules to gain and maintain Supremacy by Stealth:

• 1. Produce More Joppolos

• 2. Stay on the Move

• 3. Emulate Second-Century Rome

• 4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy

• Be Light and Lethal

• 6. Bring Back the Old Rules

• 7. Remember the Philippines

• 8. The Mission is Everything

• 9. Fight on Every Front

• 10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan

As we read the brief notes to each "Rule," think what they mean in your frame of references on historical, social, political, religious and educational circumstances and usages by Afrikan peoples. One of our highly regarded ancestors, Chancellor Williams discovered that he could learn sometimes more of what Europeans omit to write/say than what is written and or said. There is no Rush Limbaugh type of praise for Republicans nor implications for so called Black leaders to advocate Democrat leadership. In fact neither party is mentioned in that sense. This is a combination of old Europe and New Westerner: an American white boy. A cold hearted and calculating arrogant one at that. Yet an examination of today's political/economic scenarios worldwide reveals why. With that, lets begin, as I end in the words of elder Hannibal Afrik: look not where u fell; look where u stumbled! We can not talk ourselves into overcoming and to being victorious; we cannot pretend that negative aspects of life do not exist so that all is left is illusionary positives; we have negatives within and outside that will exist forever, in the balances of life. OurStories has been said are the best qualified area to reward our studies. Often tho, we hear it said or see it written: let it go; put it behind you; forget the past and move forward. The Krakkkas like any sensible people constantly refer to their ancestors' victories for guidances now. We can take the paths of our Respected and honorable Ancestors to honor their legacies. We can also continue to use hodge-podges of European Cultural Thoughts and Behaviors that will keep us as agents aiding European Hegemonies.

Its on us as a people. Often in the Spirits of Maroons!!!

Supremacy by Stealth

PREFACE

"It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire---different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless. It is time to move beyond a statement of the obvious. Our recent effort in Iraq, with its large-scale mobilization of troopes and immense concentration of risk, is not indicative of how we will want to act in the future. So how should we operate on a tactical level to manage an unruly world? What are the rules and what are the tools?
___________________________

"In the late winter of 2003, as the Unted States was dispatching tens of thousands of soldiers to the Middle East for an invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command was deployed in sixty-five countries. In Nepal the Special Forces were training government troops to hunt down the Maoist rebels who were terrorizing that nation. In the Philippines they were scheduled to increase in number for the fight against the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas. There was also Colombia---the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt, and the third most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil and Mexico. Jungly, disease-ridden, and chillingly violent, Columbia is the possessor of untapped oil reserves and is crucially important to American interests.

"The totalitarian regimes in Iraq and NOrth Korea, and the gargantuan difficulty of displacing them, may have been grabbing headlines of late, but the future of miliatry conflict---and therefore of America's global responsibilities over the coming decades---may be best gauged in Colombia, where guerrilla groups, both left-wing and right-wing, have downplayed ideology in favor of decentralized baronies and franchises built on terrorism, narcotrafficking, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and the siphoning of oil-pipeline revenues from local governments. FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), for example, is Karl Marx at the top and Adam Smith all the way down the command chain. Guerrilla warfare is now all about business, and physical cruelty knows no limits. It extends to torture (fish hooks to tear up the genitals), gang rape, and the murder of children whose parents do not cooperate with the insurgents. The Colombian rebels take in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from cocaine-related profits alone, and have documented links to the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatists (who have apparently advised them on kidnapping and car-bomb tactics). If left unmolested, they will likely establish strategic links with al Qaeda....

"Even as America's leaders deny that the United States has true imperial intentions, Colimbia---still so remote from public consciousness---illustrates the imperial realty of America's global situation. Colombia is only one of the far-flung places in which we have an active military presence. The historian Erich S. Gruen has observed that Rome's expansion throughout the mediterranean littoral may well have been motivated not by an appetite for conquest per se but because it was thought necessary for the security of the core homeland. The same is true for the United States worldwide, in an age of collapsed distances. THIS AMERICAN IMPERIUM IS WITHOUT COLONIES, DESIGNED FOR A JET-AND-INFORMATION AGE IN WHICH MASS MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLE AND CAPITAL DILUTE THE TRADITIONAL MEANING OF SOVEREIGNTY. ALTHOUGH WE DON'T ESTABLISH OURSELVES PERMANENTLY ON THE GROUND IN MANY LOCATION, AS THE BRITISH DID, RELIANCE ON OUR MILITARY EQUIPMENT AND THE TRAINING AND MAINTENANCE THAT GO ALONG WITH IT (FOR WHICH THE INTERNATIONAL ARMS BAZAAR IS NO SUBSTITUTE) HELPS TO BIND REGIMES TO US NONETHELESS. Rather than mass conscription army that fought World War II, we now have professional armed forces, which enjoy the soldiering life for its own sake: a defining attribute of an imperial military, as the historian Byron Farwell noted in Mr. Kipling's Army (1981)

"The Pentagon divides the earth into five theaters. For example, at the intersection of 5 (degrees) latitude and 68 (degrees) longitude, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) gives way to PACOM (the Pacific Command). At the Turkish-Iranian border it gives way to EUCOM (the European Command). By the 1990s the U.S. Air Force had a presence of some sort on six of the world's continents. Long before 9/11 {baba note: Sept. 11, 2001 reference} the Special Forces were conducting thousands of operations a year in a total of nearly 170 countries, with an average of nine 'quite professionals' (as the Army calls them) on each mission. Since 9/11 the UNisted States and its personnel have burrowed deep into foreign intelligence agencies, armies, and police units across the globe.... Precisely because they forment dynamic change, liberal empires---like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United States---the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq. consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against Iraq. 'Don't bluster, don't threaten, but quietly and severly punish bad behavior,' says Eliot Cohen, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. 'It's the way the Romans acted.' Not just the Romans, of course: Speak softly and carry a big stick' was Theodore Roosevelt's way of putting it.'....We can take nothing for granted. A hundred years ago the British Navy looked fairly invincible for all time. A world managed by the Chinese, by a Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned with Russia, or by the United Nations (an organization that worships peace and consensus, and will therefore sacrifice any principle for their sakes) would be infinitely worse than the world we have now. An do for the time being the highest morality must be the preservation---and, wherever prudent, the accretion---of American power.

"The purpose or power is not power itself; it is the fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability; the idea of liberty, prgmaticallly conceived; respect for propery; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for th worldwide expansion of a liberal civil society.... The 'American Empire' has been discussed ad nauseam of late, but practical ways of managing it have not. Even so, the mangement tecniques are emering. While realists and idealists argue 'nation-building' and general principles in Washing and New York seminars, young majors, lieutenant colonels, and other middle-ranking officers are regularly makin decisions in the field about how bes to train colombia's army, which Afghan tribal chiefs to support, what kind of coast guard and special forces the Yemeni government requires, how the Mongolians can preserve their sovereignty against Chinese and Russian infiltration, how to transform the Romanian military into a smaller service along flexible Western lines, and so forth. The fact is that we trust these people on the ground to be keepers of our values and agents of our imperium and to act without specific instructions. A rulebook that does not make sense to them is no rulebook at all.

"The following rules represent a distillation of my own experience and conversations with diplomats and military officers I have met in recent travels on four continents, and on military bases around the United States."
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*** The Atlantic Monthly: July/August 2003

[Baba Ahmed]

*** The Atlantic Monthly: July/August 2003


==================================

Rule No. 1

Produce More Joppolos

"Then I asked Major Paul S. Warren, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Army's Special Operations Command, what serves as the model for a civil-affairs officer within the Special Operations forces, he said, 'Read John Hersey's A Bell for Adano---it's all there.' The hero of Hersey's World War II novel is Army Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian-American civil-affairs officer appointed to govern the recently liberated Sicilian town of Adano. Joppolo is full of resourcefulness. He arranges for the U.S. Navy to show local fishermen which parts of the harbor are free of mines, so that they can use their boats to feed the town. He finds a bell from an old Navy destroyer to replace the one (taken) from the local church and melted down for bullets. He countermands his own general's order outlawing the use of horse-drawn carts, which the town needs to transport food and water. He goes to the back of a line to buy bread, to show Adano's citizens that although he is in charge, he is their servant, not their master. He is the first ruler in the town's history who doesn't represent a brute force of nature. In Hersey's words, [Men like Joppolo are] our future in the world. Neither the eloquence of Churchill nor the humanness of Roosevelt, no Charter, no four freedoms or fourteen points, no dreamer's diagram so symmetrical and so faultless on paper, no plan, no hope, no treaty---nonoe of these things can guarantee anything. Only men can guarantee, only the behavior of men under pressure, only our Joppolos.
"One good man is worth a thousand wonks. As The Times of India wrote on July 7, 1893, the mind of a sharp political agent should not 'be crowded with fusty learning.'[/i] Ian Copland, a historian of the British Raj, wrote that 'extroverts and sporting types, sensitive to the cultural milieu,' were always necessary to win the confidence of local rulers. In Yemen recently I observed a retired Special Forces officer cementing friendships with local sheikhs and military men by handing out foot-long bowie knives as gifts. In a world of tribes and thugs manliness still goes a long way.

"The right men or women, no matter how few, will find the right hinge in a given situation to change hsitory. The Spartans turned the tide of battle in Sicily by dispatching only a small mission, headed by Bylippus. His arrival in 414 B.C. kept the Syracusans from surrendering to the Athenians. It broke the Athenan land blockade of Syracuse, rallied other Sicilian city-states to the cause, and was crucial to the defeat of the Athenian fleet the following year. The United States sent a similarly small mission to El Salvador in the 1980s: never more than fifty-five Special Forces trainers at one time. But that was enough to teach the Salvadoran Military to confront more effectively the communist guerrillas while beginning to transform itself from an ill-disciplined constabulary force into someting much closer to a professional army.

"You produce a product and let him loose," explains Sidney Shachnow, a retired Army major general. 'The Special Forces that dropped in to help [the Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid] Dostum, the guys who grew beards, got on horses, and dressed up like Afghans, were ordered to do so by Tommy Franks. These were decisions they made in the field.'.... Shachnow is a perfect example.... His success resulted from decisions made on instinct and impulse, and from an ability to take advantage of cultural settings in which he dind not naturally fit---exactly the ability that U.S. trainers and commandos in El Salvador, Afghanistan, and so many other places have had to possess.

"'A Special Forces guy,' Shachnow told me, 'has to e a lethal killer one moment and a humanitarian the next. He has to know how to get strangers who speak another language to do things for him. He has to go from knowing enough Russian to knowing enough Arabic in a few seeks, depending on the deployment. We need people who are cultral quick studies.' Shachnow was talking about a knack for dealing with people, almost a form of charisma. The right man will know how to behave in a given situation---will how to find things out and act on them."

Rule No. 2
Stay on the Move

"Xenohon's Greek army cut through the Persian Empire in 401 B.C., with the troops freely debating each step. We should be mobile in the same way---get bogged down militarily nowhere, but make sure we have military access everywhere. Because we to manage a world in which---as always---old regimes periodically crumble, disaster lies in becoming too deeply implanted in more than a handful of countries at once. Here our provincialism helps. As Hayward S. Florer, a retired Special Forces colonel, told me, 'Even our Special Ops people are insular. Sure, we like the adventure with other cultures, learning the history and language. But at heart many of us are farm boys who can't wait to get home. In this way we're not like the British and French. Our insularity protects us from becoming colonials.

"Colonialism is in part an outgrowth of cosmopolitanism, the intellectual craving to experience different cultures and locales; it leads, inexorably, to an intense personal involvement in their fate. 'We want an empire not of colonies or protectorates but of personal relationships,' a Marine lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton, in California, told me. 'We back into deployments. There dosen't need to be a policy directive from the Pentagon---half the time we don't know what the policy is. We get a message from a Kenyan or Nigerian officer who studied here that his unit needs training. We try to do it. We help decide, based on our needs in a region, who we want to help out.' The U.S. military is constantly doing favors for other militaries, favors we call in when we need to. This is how we sometimes get access to places. The formal base rights that we have in forty countries may in the future be less significant than the number of friendhsips maintained between U.S. officers and their foreign counterparts. With that in mind the military needs to establish a formal data system for tracking such relationships. At present the method of keeping abreast of these crucial ties is large anecdotal.

"The best tools of access are the so-called 'iron majors,' a term that really refers to all mid-level officers, from noncommissioned master sergeants and chief warrant officers to colonels. In a sense majors run our military establishment, regardless of who the Secretary of Defense happens to be. Up through the rank of captain an officer hasn't closed the dooor on other career options. But becoming a major means you've 'bought into the corporation,' explains Special Forces Major Roger D. Carstens. 'We're the ones who are up at four A.M. answering the general's e-mails, making sure all the systems are go...'

[Baba Ahmed]

Rule No. 3

Emulate Second-Century Rome

To continue on the 10 Rules Kaplan postulates for continued SUPREMACY by STEALTH, he writes:

"Provincialism is the aspect of our national character that will keep the United States from overextending itself in too many causes. But owing to the wave of immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America that began in the 1970s, the United States is an international society comparable to Rome in the second century A.D., when the empire reached its territorial zenith under Trajan and, more important, was granting citizenship to elites in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. (Trajan and Hadrian, in fact, were both from Spain). Our military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities must now turn to our Iranian-, Arab-, and other hyphenated Americans---our potential Joppolos. At a time when we desperately need more language specialists, it is shameful that we are seeking out so few of the many native speakers at our disposal. The financial incentives we offer them are simply insufficient, and the waiting period for security clearance has become farcically long. This situation has been changing of late for the better; it needs to continue to do so.

"Trained area specialists are likewise indispensable. In 1976 Secretary of State Henry KIssinger entrusted the eminent Arabist and diplomat Talcott Seelye, in Lebanon, to carry out two discreet evacuations of American citizens from that war-torn country with the help of the Palestine Liberation Organization---which we did not recognize at the time. Seelye, who was born in Beirut, may not have wholly agreed with Kissinger's foreign policy---but that didn't matter. He knew how to get the job done. The fact that Arabists and other area specialists maybe emotionally involved, through marriage or friendship, with host countries---often causing them to dislike the policies that Washington orders them to execute---can actually be of benefit, because it gives them credibility with like-minded locals. In any case, such tensions between policymakers and agents in the field are typical of imperial systems. We should be be overly concerned about them... area experts are ignorant of much outside their favored patch of ground. Their knowledge of the current reality in a given country is so prodigious that they often cannot imagine a different reality. That is why are experts can say what is going on in a place, but cannot always say what it means. Still it is impossible to implemement any policy without them, as Kissinger and others learned.... Colonel Robert Warburton, the Anglo-Afghan who established the Khyber Rifles regiment on the Northwest Frontier of British India in 1879, was one kind of person needed to manage our interests in distant corners of ther world. Warburton spoke flent Pashto and Persian, and was at home among both aristocratic Englishmen and Afridi tribesmen.... Warburton was less a cosmopolitan than a nuts-and-bolt journeyman, whose linguistic skills came from birth and circumstance more than from intellectual curiosity. The American equivalents of Warburton can be found among Arab-Americans posted to Central Command and Latino-Americans posted to Southern Command---people who fit into places like Yemen and Colombia, but who want only to return to their suburban American homes afterward.

"Southern Command, in particular, is full of Spanish-speaking noncommissioned offers: ethnic Mexicans, Domincans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. The relative shortage of speakers of Arabic and other languages in the rest of the military indicates that in the Special Forces, at least, languages may soon have to be recognized as an 'occupational skill'---like weaponry, communications, battlefield medicine, engineering and intelligence, on in which every noncommissioned officer must spend a year specializing. If each Special Forces unit had a couple of officers who were fluent in several languages spoken in the theater comman (Arabic, Persian, and Turkish in CENTCOM, for example), our ability to project power would dramatically increase.

"The forward basing of area commands is another strategy that would encourage area expertise and language skills. In the years to come we should consider moving Central Command headquarters from Tampa, Florida to the Middle East, and Southern Command headquarters from Miami back to Panama, where it was until 1997. THERE IS SIMPLY NO SUBSTITUTE FOR BEING IN THE REGION WHEN IT COMES TO ABSORBING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. AS A JOURNALIST, I HAVE FOUND THAT IN MY PROFESSION PEOPLE ON LOCATION ALWAYS HAVE BETTER INSTINCTS FOR THE LOCAL SITUATION THAN PEOPLE BACK IN THE UNITED STATES, even if they don't always draw the proper conclusions. Many have told me that the same holds true in the military."

[Baba Ahmed]

Rule No. 4
Use the Military to Promote Democracy

"In an age of expanding democracy, military and intelligence contacts are more important than ever. Civilian politicians in weak and fledgling parliamentary systems come and go. But leading military and security men remain as behind-the-scenes props, sometimes even getting themselves elected to high office---as has happened in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia. 'Whoever the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys run their special forces and the President's body-guards,' one Army Special operations officer told me. 'Weve triained them. That translates into diplomatic leverage.'

"The military's bilateral relationships with foreign armies and their officer corps play a substantial role in safeguarding democratic transitions. Militaries have been the pillars of so many Third World societies for so long that the advent of elections can scarcely make them politically irrelevant, especially in Africa and Latin America. In some places such as Turkey and Pakistan, the military and security services have at times actually enjoyed a reputation for greater liberalism than civilian authorities. In Colombia in the mid-1990s the civilian government was tainted by drug money, the military police, who were seen to be less corrupt, helped to save our bilaterial relationship.

"U.S. security-assistance programs also professionalize foreign militaries, thus helping to prevent coups and to improve the human-rights climate. In the 1980s in El Salvador, Colonel J. S. Roach, a member of the operational planning team there, observed that 'the Salvadoran military understood they weren't supposed to violate human rights, but they believed they were driven to extreme measures by extreme circumstances' but Roach's team and others pounded home the point that violating human rights almost never makes sense from a pragmatic perspective, because it costs the military the civilian support so necessary to rooting out guerrilla insurgents. 'Human rights wasn't a separate one-hour block at the beginning of the day,' Roach said. 'You had to find a way to couch it in the training so that it wasn't just a moralistic approach.'

"The world is a gritty, messy place, and there are no perfect solutions. But the fact is that Third World military men are more likely to listen to American officers who brief them about human rights as a tool of counterinsurgency than to civilians who talk about universal principles: mid-level officers from around the world are regularly sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for training in the history and necessity of protecting human rights....

"In fact, in places where democracy is especially weak (Peru and Indonesia are obvious examples), a phone call from a U.S. general to a local officer will often advance diplomacy (and also civil society) more effectively than a phone call from the ambassador. Particularly in previously hostile areas, such as the ex-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia, new diplomatic relationships are being eased by the U.S. military's training of border guards and security services...

"The much larger truth is that the very distinction between our civilian and military operations overseas is eroding. In 1994 two Special Forces officers helped the Paraguayan government to craft new laws just after Paraguay's constitution was adopted. The U.S. military will increasingly chum out such chameleons: operatives who combine the traits of soldier, intelligence agent, diplomat, civilian aid worker, and academic. And at the same time that our uniformed officers are acting more like diplomats, our diplomats, particularly our ambassadors, are acting more like generals. It is under the State Department's auspices, not the Pentagon's, that helicopters are leased to the Colombian army to fight narcoterrorists and that a campaign is waged to track small planes suspected of transporting cocaine in the Colombia-Peru-Ecuador region. America's war against narcoterrorists in Colombia has two overseers: General James T. Hill, head of Southern Command, and Anne Patterson, the ambassador to Colombia....

"Of course, in violent and chaotic parts of the world such as Afghanistan and Yemen, it is only natural that the soldier will at first be more sonspicuous than the Peace Corps worker. Because parts of Yemen have become too dangerous for American civilians, the U.S. military is training the Yemeni military to better project power in the tribal badlands, so that, among other things, our foreign-aid personnel can return there. In Central and South America the U.S. military regularly vaccinates farm animals and treats them for diseases..."

{Baba note: to be cont'd}