In June, the United States and Morocco cooperated in operation African Lion, the largest ever US military exercise conducted on Africa. Somehow, think tanks around the world did not publish analyses or complaints of American hegemony and aggression, though. Russia’s state-run RT did not launch a special series blaming America for all the problems on that continent either. If you Google “Africa Lion,” you won’t get a thousand reports on neo-colonialism either. The top story is about Vietnam seizing a shipment of lion bones. Funny, isn’t it? Russia can hold an economic summit focused on Africa, and suddenly Vladimir Putin is recreating the USSR.
US Major General Andrew Rohling, the Commanding General, US Army Southern European Task Force-Africa, led operation Africa Lion. According to the reports, the US, Britain, Brazil, Canada, Tunisia, Senegal, the Netherlands, and Italy all took part in the giant exercise. Strangely, a new analysis featuring a former US Green Beret discusses the past and future Russia-Africa summit from the anti-Putin narrative. The headline reads, “US special operators and their allies say taking on Russia and China in Africa requires strange bedfellows.” The soldier narrative talks about how Russia and Chine are “buying up” everything in Africa and accuses these countries of imperialism while painting US military operations as humanitarian, warm, fuzzy, and harmless to Africans. But Morocco, why Morocco now?
Ah, yes. The Biden administration just refused to reverse President Trump’s recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. That was it. For those unfamiliar, Western Sahara is a disputed territory the United States used to uphold until Chevron and British oil and gas interests, and Israel wants Morocco in the fold. As usual, Washington, London, and energy-dependent allies point fingers to the east, about the time another significant fossil fuel discovery takes place. And Morocco, which sits a few kilometers from the southwestern tip of super-consumer Europe, is a big chip in the next game. Western powers are supposedly engaged in fighting terrorism in Africa. The fact that big energy holds oil and gas leases that could mean trillions of cubic meters of natural gas shipments across Gibraltar to Spain and beyond is only ANOTHER coincidence.
We’ve known for a long time American troops at the 29 bases from one end of Africa to the other are not just playing around shooting blanks at one another. But, a 2018 story at POLITICO blew the whistle on the US has secret programs and American troops carrying out direct combat in Somalia, Kenya, Niger, and other African nations. And this once-secret map from AFRICOM marked a network of 29 US military bases stretching across the old continent. So, it should come as no surprise that the reason for the current focus and the bigger American-led militarism. Chevron Corp, and a variety of investors, of course.
While it may seem a coincidence that the Biden administration let Chevron be the last US oil company operating in Venezuela, it’s not. The second-largest oil and gas producer in the United States is part of a big play in Morocco alongside the UK’s SDX Energy, Chariot Ltd.,
The Anchois gas field, which lies about 40km offshore of Morocco, is the biggest of a series of crucial investments the US and partners will need to protect militarily. I want to focus on this project for the sake of simplifying things for readers. You see, Anchois is already proven, and the infrastructure to connect the field to southern Europe is already in place. Gas from these offshore wells will not be transported via tankers, and it will be supplied domestically and internationally via the Maghreb-Europe gas (MEG) pipeline to customers in Europe.
Few realize that the MEG pipeline extends across Morocco, connecting the Hassi R’Mel gas field in Algeria to the Strait of Gibraltar and the Iberian Peninsula, merging into a network of European gas pipelines. That’s right, competing interests with Russia’s Gazprom are already in place to offer cheap gas to the energy guzzlers in the EU. Chariot Oil & Gas is extracting and delivering the trillion cubic meters of high-grade methane to customers. What’s interesting here, or I should say “who,” are the people associated with these various companies. Take the CEO of Chariot Adonis Pouroulis, for instance.
Pouroulis is the man who founded Petra Diamonds, the company accused of human rights abuses and killings in Tanzania. Security guards working for this company were said to have torturing, killing, and inhuman treatment. Pouroulis’ business partner is Robert Sinclair, who is closely associated with former BP boss Tony Hayward (through Genel Energy Plc). The real money standing behind these energy operations is hidden underneath trusts like Sinclair’s Artemis Trustees Limited, the fund through which the elites work the profit levers. The fact that Artemis has been the bookkeepers of Nathanial Rothschild for some years may not come as a huge surprise to some readers. Remember, Nat financed Genel Energy, and Tony Hayward ran the elite order’s bet in Syria that Assad would be overthrown with US help. So imagine my smile at digging down to find familiar world order worms.
Also in the Morocco can of colonialist worms are UAE Sheiks, Sandhurst graduates turned asset managers, Robert A. Case of Ingalls & Snyder in New York, and a laundry list of puppets doing the bidding of the banking elites in the west. In short, the US military parade in Morocco is just the latest in a long line of demonstrations for the big boys, the wester oligarchs we refer to as business Titans in America. Though I wonder, each time I did, why Russia’s shady billionaires are deemed so scandalous? How many military bases do Russia or China have in Africa, by the way?
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
