The Deep State by Mike Lofgren Page B

President Obama announced that he had reached an agreement with the president of Djibouti, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, to lease Camp Lemonnier for the next ten years for the substantial sum of $630 million. The annual lease fee is nearly double the $38 million per year that the United States had been paying to that point. In 2024, the United States has the option to renew the lease for a further ten years at a renegotiated rate. 6
    President Guelleah commented afterward: “The fact that wewelcome the U.S. forces in our country shows our support for international peace and for peace in our region as well. We do that all for peace in the world and for peace in Africa.” Left unmentioned was the issue of why, if all this was done for the sake of peace, it was necessary for the policeman to bribe the protected party for the privilege of protecting him. The comments of Djibouti’s president were all the more ironic in light of the later revelation that local air controllers have expressed hostility to their American guests, have slept on the job (miraculously, there have so far been no aviation catastrophes at the base), and U.S. personnel have been threatened. 7
    Setting aside the question of cost to the taxpayer, the base will certainly be a boon to military infrastructure contractors. In 2013, five contracts worth more than $322 million were awarded for Camp Lemonnier. These included a $25.5 million fitness center and a $41 million joint headquarters facility. All of this suggests the U.S. taxpayer, knowingly or not, is deeply invested in the global war on terrorism business for at least two decades to come. It also suggests that those in the Pentagon who are seeking to emulate Lawrence of Arabia’s warrior spirit clearly did not inherit his asceticism. Twenty-five million dollars for a fitness center? How much can a few sets of barbells and workout machines cost? Congress, which investigated the General Services Administration’s junkets to Las Vegas with the thoroughness of Inspector Javert, might wish to cast a jaundiced eye on the more than half a trillion dollars the Pentagon spends every year.
    The common narrative about AFRICOM, when it is discussed at all, is that this new organization represents our national security policy for dealing with an ever-evolving Islamic extremism: it would appear our military and intelligence services’ eternal whack-a-mole game with al-Qaeda and its affiliates, franchises, and wannabe clones has merely shifted from the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the sands of the Sahara and the Sahel belt farther to the south. There are, however, alternative or at least supplementary explanations.
    One of these is that the United States receives about one-quarter ofits imported oil from Africa, while China, our principal sovereign creditor, now gets roughly a third of its oil from the continent. The fact that China is investing much of its huge capital surplus—derived in large part from its trade with the United States—in Africa has attracted notice in Washington: there are now more than two thousand Chinese companies and well over a million Chinese citizens on the continent. 8 They can be found wherever there are mines, oil fields, container ports, or manufacturing facilities. The dollar volume of China’s trade with Africa is double that of U.S.-African trade, and the disparity will only become greater in the future. 9
    When confronted with the suspicion of ulterior motives for America’s sudden interest in Africa, official Washington demurs. The U.S. Army War College has produced a publication about AFRICOM that, among other things, “debunks” the “myths” that the activities of AFRICOM are about access to African petroleum or countering Chinese moves there. 10 But in testimony before Congress supporting the creation of AFRICOM in 2007, Dr. J. Peter Pham, who has been an adviser to the DOD and the State Department, openly stated that oil and