By Dr Rino Zhuwarara

THE Chilcot Report is about the outcome of an official inquiry demanded by the British public which was set up in 2009 by the then Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, to find out why and how Britain, together with the US, invaded Iraq in 2003.
Judge Chilcot and his team took seven years to compile a detailed narrative which reveals, among other aspects, that:
l Britain and its ally, the US, invaded Iraq on the basis of deeply flawed and patently inadequate intelligence reports which alleged that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
l The Chilcot Report confirms that such claims by the Tony Blair government were unfounded and often exaggerated to justify the invasion of Iraq.
l Britain and the US rushed into an unjustified war against Iraq without exhausting all peaceful means which were at their disposal.
l Britain and its ally did not obtain the necessary authorisation from the United Nations to wage war against Iraq; this alone implies that the Iraq war instigated and led by the US and Britain remains illegal from an international point of view.
The key question is: Why should Africans be concerned about that unjust war which took place thousands of kilometres away from their homes?
The answer is simple and straightforward.
We can only ignore the tragic consequences of such a war at our own peril.
And here is why.
Although the Chilcot Report dwells at length and in detail on immediate events and timelines leading to the outbreak of the war in 2003, it does not dramatise why Britain and the US insisted on waging that war against Iraq, notwithstanding the dire warnings and insightful advice which both received before the outbreak of the same war.
The truth is, both countries knew Iraq hosted some of the largest oil reserves in the Middle-East and that whoever controlled the exploitation of those reserves would also go on to control a large chunk of the global economy of the 21 Century.
Put differently, the Iraq war was designed to facilitate the re-colonisation of the whole Middle-East.
To do so, the West needed to extend its hegemony over oil-rich countries like Saud Arabia and Kuwait to include Iraq, Syria and eventually Iran.
It is not by pure coincidence that all these countries targeted for regime change by the West happen to have huge amounts of underground oil reserves and/or other mineral resources.
This is the big elephant in the room, the point which the Chilcot Report avoids like the plague.
The chaos and terror which the US and Britain unleashed in the Middle-East might appear as an aspect of unintended consequences of the Iraq war.
In reality this kind of chaos is deliberately planned.
The idea is to break up big countries into smaller bits and pieces and thus weaken their governments to a point where they plead for protection from the same West.
And the aim is devastatingly simple to create a constellation of numerous pro-West puppet regimes whose role is to facilitate the looting of oil in the whole region.
This is the same divide and rule logic which the West relied on when it sponsored the invasion of the DRC in 1998.
The idea was to break up the DRC into smaller and less viable states which in turn would facilitate the looting of vast natural resources of the DRC.
The West failed to achieve its diabolic objectives in the DRC because Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia intervened militarily.
In other words, there is a method to the kind of madness that we see in the Middle-East today.
It is a silent but relentless imperialistic logic which underpins the chaos that we see engulfing the Middle-East today.
That chaos, as far as the West is concerned, more so for Britain and the US, is a necessary one, a pre-requisite in fact, for acquiring and sustaining economic hegemony in the area.
The same ‘organised chaos’ which involves toppling of some local governments in the Third World which are not friendly to the West is often undertaken in the name of spreading Western democracy, safeguarding human rights and the so-called rule of law.
Indeed this is part of the argument which both Blair and Bush put forward to justify their military occupation of Iraq.
One can argue this gospel that is sired in the West and spread by Western-sponsored non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has become an imperialist ideology of sorts, a seemingly attractive pseudo gospel which most of us, apparently, find hard to resist.
But most of us now know that in practice, both Britain and the US do not practise what they preach, especially beyond their borders.
They preach in order to attract and then traduce.
They are a deceiving pair.
It is not far-fetched to argue Africa is very much targeted by the West for re-colonisation in the same way the Middle-East has been up to the present.
Africa continues to host vast reserves of minerals such as gold, diamonds, platinum, uranium, iron ore, cobalt and copper, among others.
It is as richly endowed with abundant mineral resources just as the Middle-East is with its oil reserves and the West has no intention whatsoever to leave these two regions of the world alone.
Why?
Because both continue to host fabulous amounts of natural resources which Western countries do not have in sufficient quantities to keep their economies going.
The good thing is we do not need a prophet or a sangoma to tell us that Africa is targeted by the West for re-colonisation.
There is abundant evidence on the ground to tell us as much.
For instance, the same West started a sustained propaganda campaign to demonise Colonel Muammar Gadaffi of Libya by portraying him as a dictator who denied his people freedom, democracy and human rights.
The aim was to influence world opinion against him before invading his country in 2011 and toppling his government.
The result of this unprovoked war by the West is that today, Libya has no strong and credible government to protect its economic interests.
Both Europe and the US are now having a field day looting Libya’s oil reserves for a song.Coming nearer home, here is what Blair himself stated in his memoir titled A Journey: “I would have loved to get rid of Mugabe, but failed to do so because it wasn’t practical since the surrounding nations maintained a lingering support for him and would have opposed any action strenuously.”
In other words, had it not been for the support which Zimbabwe received from the SADC countries surrounding it, Britain would have invaded our country, toppled an elected government and installed a pro-Western puppet government, like the one set up in Iraq, in order to facilitate the looting of natural resources of our country on a grand scale.
In light of the above, it is critical that we take an interest in what is happening in the Middle-East because some aspects of the nightmare which has engulfed that region are already noticeable in Africa itself.
We do not have to agree with all the observations in the Chilcot Report, but it provides us telling descriptions of how imperialist wars are planned and executed, often at the expense of our lives and natural resources.