Chuck Thorpe (left), Dean, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMUQ), congratulating renowned US travel writer Jeffrey Tayler (centre), after sharing his experience in Africa with a selected audience at a function organised by the CMUQ in Doha yesterday. Benjamin Reilly, assistant professor of history, CMUQ, also seen.

Doha • Popular US Travel writer Jeffrey Tayler has said the Muslim masses across the African continent firmly believe that the US government's politics is driven by oil and energy interests.

Tayler, who was here to share his experience of traveling through the greater part of Muslim Africa after the US attack on Iraq, was talking to `The Peninsula' yesterday.

"In my 4,000 mile odyssey I met a large section of people who believed that it is the oil and energy markets that are driving its policy. For more than two centuries now, the US has served as the planetary repository of hope, a country judged by the high standards and enlightened ideals on which it was founded. Everywhere during my travels people told me the attack on Iraq was unprovoked. Why did Americans not protest. And what happened to the American democracy ? They asked me."

“For three months, during the winter of 2002-2003, in the interval between the attacks of 9\11 and the ongoing Iraq war, I travelled some 4,000 miles from Chad to Senegal and across the Shael and Savannah that forms the greater part of Muslim black Africa. And where ever I went I encountered similar queries, said Tayler who knows seven languages including Arab and have been traveling in Islamic countries for more than twenty years.

“From Chad to Senegal I met people conversant in US party politics, the oil market and its effect on American foreign policy, the Israel-Palestinian conflict and Osama Bin Laden and Saddam. And no one needed a lecture in democratic principles, and certainly no one needed to be told how oil and energy interests drive politics in both the West and the East,” he said

After 9\11, mainstream American media abdicated their responsibility to inform the public, and acted as cheerleaders for warmongers. Their complicity in helping launch the current I iraq war has been well documented.

American multinationals, among them Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco, do much of the pumping in joint-venture arrangements with the Nigerian government. Since the attacks of September 11, the Bush administration has sought to reduce US dependence on volatile petro-states in the Middle East and Latin America, and has cultivated relations with Nigeria, he said.

Western agencies like to call the Africans as corrupt. But Rock stars tour to raise money to eradicate poverty in Africa and the G-8 has pledged to double aid to the continent , but since independence, $700 to $800bn — an amount roughly equivalent to all the aid Africa has ever received — have poured out of Africa into the elite's bank accounts in the West. The swamps of the Nigeria Delta are the swamps of rage, he said.

Earlier, sharing his experience in the African continent, Tayler stepped up his attack on Bush and demanded the impeachment of Bush and his accomplices." The case against George W Bush and his accomplices is clear. He and senior members of his government have abused their offices, violated the law and where Iraq is concerned, committed crimes against humanity. For a host of crimes and misdemeanors, Bush and his accomplices should be impeached, brought to trial…", he said.