To a more favorable view of AFRICOM

As a commentator on AFRICOM and a commentator on African commentators of AFRICOM, I would be remiss in not providing favorable opinions of AFRICOM from, well, Africans. Here, printed in African Path, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, a professor of English and journalism, argues that domestic political shenanigans help circulate rumors and fear around Ghana regarding the establishment of a second military base somewhere in Africa by the United States, a country interested in cordial relations.

Like I said, it's from African Path:

[W]hat needs to be clarified for these myopic and cynical critics is the stark fact that whether, indeed, the United States establishes a military base in Ghana or not would neither strengthen nor vitiate the global superpower status of America. Indeed, as the cynical likes of Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings, founding-proprietor of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), could readily attest, were he known to be an honest man, forging an intimate relationship and/or partnership with the United States, is the prime aspiration of many a Third World country, and even that of advanced industrialized nations like Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

And so pretending to play dumb, in the dubious name of patriotism, is absolutely no perspicuous demonstration of ideological advancement as these political nincompoops and outright charlatans would have unsuspecting compatriots believe. And if these charlatans and cognitively challenged rumor-mongers cared to know, they would have since long discovered to their rude awakening, the fact that the hitherto self-proclaimed inveterate enemy of U. S. “imperialism,” Chairman Rawlings, educated all his three officially known children right here in the United States, and not Cuba, Libya or Russia.

And if these anti-American protesters knew how to count, at least using an abacus, they would also have learned to their withering sense of betrayal that Chairman Rawlings and his wife have taken more trips to the United States than has President Kufuor during the last eight years. And so what is all such nonsense about, really? It is unmistakably about the eerie fact of the NDC Abongo Boys and their allies seeing naked defeat stare them dead-on in their wicked and ugly faces and having absolutely no strategic campaign agenda but to fatuously grab at the proverbial straws and hope that there would be enough misguided potential voters to toe their ostrich line of reasoning come Election 2008.