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NATO, The Ultimate Transformer
Forget about the Hollywood Transformer franchise; as facts on the ground go, the ultimate transformer in real life is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
NATO has just admitted it was "probably" responsible for the humanitarian liberation of nine Libyan civilians, plus 18 injured, via an early morning strike against an apartment building in a densely populated Tripoli neighborhood.
Liberating Northern Africans in their sleep under tons of debris now adds to NATO's - and the Pentagon's - routine liberation of Pashtun wedding parties.
Forget about the Ministry of Truth-style non-denial denials enveloped in newspeak of the "weapons system failure" or "great care in conducting strikes" variety. Or don't - as the war on Libya, under the newspeak moniker Operation Unified Protector, slouches towards its fourth month and over 4,300 "humanitarian" strikes.
After all, NATO's wars - now already spanning the Pentagon-coined "arc of instability" from Northern Africa though the Middle East towards Central Asia - are as much against "unsavory" regimes (as in "not our bastards") as against civilians.
One model army
In the dizzying labyrinth of NATO's Ministry of Truth - which includes schemes such as Partnership for Peace, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, Mediterranean Dialogue, to name but a few - one now finds virtually every certified or aspiring member of the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (also known as GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council), as well as monarchic minions Jordan and Morocco. These paragons of democracy are all involved in liberating the wretched of the world for "humanitarian" reasons.
Unctuous Danish opportunist and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is on overdrive across Europe. He has just boasted that, "NATO is more needed and wanted than ever, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from the coast of Somalia to Libya. We are busier than ever before."
This enthusiastic, across-the-board embrace of Atlanticist weaponry though is still not enough for US Defense Secretary Robert Gates - for whom NATO is not lethal, or overreaching, enough. Considering that NATO is no more than the weaponized European arm of the Pentagon, that was a classic case of once again Martian Americans deriding wimpy Venusian Europeans.
Yet the most sinister Rasmussen utterance was that, "we can help the Arab Spring well and truly blossom". That is code for never-ending bombing of Libya, fierce lobbying for a "humanitarian" intervention in Syria, and, why not, weaponized "humanitarian liberation" slouching towards Algeria and even Lebanon.
As for Egypt and Tunisia, Rasmussen has already stated NATO wants to re-train their military establishments - an operation modeled on the ongoing retraining in Iraq. The Transformer's tentacles are ubiquitous.
The war on Libya started as the Pentagon's Africom first African war - remember Odyssey Dawn? - and then merged into NATO's first Mediterranean and also first African war. NATO's overt agenda is to rule the Mediterranean - Ancient Rome's mare nostrum - as a NATO lake.
That explains the current Pentagon/NATO Sea Breeze 2011 naval exercise in the Black Sea, off the coast of Ukraine and quite close to the Sebastopol-based Russian Black Sea fleet.
The Pentagon is being joined by the United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, Algeria, Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Macedonia, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine. All of these - except Algeria and Moldova - fall into another NATO scheme; they are Troop Contributing Nations for NATO's war in Afghanistan.
Sea breeze is not a pop song; it is an overt intimidation directly related to Syria. Russia's Black Sea fleet has a base in Syria - that is, in the Mediterranean. The Pentagon/NATO want it gone. Thus the categorical imperative of regime change in Syria.
So Libya is just the beginning. Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin has been quick to point out, "the war in Libya means ... the beginning of [NATO's] expansion south."
Transformer NATO - the global Robocop - is on a roll, from Southeastern Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean; from the Persian Gulf to South and Central Asia. All hail the One Model Army. As for civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, duck for cover.
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8 Comments so far
Show AllYes indeed, NATO grew like a beanstalk from the humble magic bean of a principally political mutual defense pact-- it originally resembled a regional mini-United Nations with a military "No More Mister Nice Guy" option tucked into the back pocket of its striped trousers like a Saturday Night Special.
But, as Escobar astutely observes, it has since swollen, bulked up, and turned mean, as if gobbling increasing doses of steroids over the years. Now it's become the Western hegemony's own Waffen S.S.-- a multi-ethnic, multi-national elite stormtrooper corps that functions as the long-reaching mailed fist in the hegemonic glove.
It's become the sturdy third leg-- along with national armed forces and mercenary armies-- of a stool that's being used to beat hapless victim governments and populations over the head with vigor and impunity.
RE: "Unctuous Danish opportunist and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is on overdrive across Europe." - Escobar
MY COMMENT: Anders Fogh Rasmussen missed his true calling. He would have made a great used car salesman!
Yes, Blah Blah Blah, but where is the call to action? How do we do this? How do we stand up and say "NOT IN MY NAME"?
Simple. We stand up and say, "NOT IN MY NAME!"
Yeah, it's not enough, I know.
Robert Gates' parting lament as Sec. of Defense is actually quite telling in its rebuke of other NATO "allies" for not carrying their weight, when NATO originally was organized as a post-war counterweight to the Warsaw Pact. My impression is that many Western European countries were quite ambivalent about the Cold War bullshit, and, as many may recall, it took extreme CIA intervention in Greece to keep it outside the Russian orbit.
The debt-financing to keep the Greeks "capitalists" is coming home to roost.
There are rugged places in the world where the only means of human livelihood is tending the olive groves and the grapes, and the livestock, so what do we and the Israelis do? Bulldoze the means of human survival and then send in "relief" packages.
Whatever the politics, Libya has had a relatively stable government based on distribution of the wealth for a generation. So why has NATO done 4,300 air strikes in four months? And is it really true that NATO is running out of ammo?
The Warsaw Pact broke up a long time ago, and maybe half its former members are now aligned with the EU in an economic pact ostensibly intended to replace militarism. Why are we supporting the NATO bombing of Libya? To me, it feels like the last gasp of what Escobar calls "the global Robocop." Maybe Europeans are simply tired of living in the poisoned mist of American economic and political dominance growing out of WWII---including the mythology of Western European "superiority" over their eastern and southern neighbors.
In any case, it is good to see that CD is borrowing some opinion from Asia Times (atimes.com), which (used to?) host Henry CK Liu, an incredible economic historian. And Pepe Escobar is one of the few remaining journalists who is unpredictable in a positive way. I suspect that he even surprises himself sometimes, which would be a good thing.
Why are we trying to destroy Libya? From the article:
"Sea breeze is not a pop song; it is an overt intimidation directly related to Syria. Russia's Black Sea fleet has a base in Syria - that is, in the Mediterranean. The Pentagon/NATO want it gone. Thus the categorical imperative of regime change in Syria."
If this is so, then this "categorical imperative" would be a direct assault on Russia, which spent CENTURIES seeking a secure southern naval port.
As a people, we need to acknowledge that our invasion of Iraq was insane, pure and simple. It wasn't just Dubya. Psychologists have long studied the nature of Collective Insanity. Donald Rumsfeld was insane. By invading Iraq the United States violated virtually every International Treaty that exists (at least on paper)---the very International Treaties that Eleanor Roosevelt pursued. The United States in mid-20th-century sought a level playing field. Today, might makes right. But what is might? Is it Dick Cheney in a Texas (or Wyoming) bunker, making strategic phone calls?
NATO is originally a Cold War construct. It is an artifact. U.S. efforts to browbeat Europe into investing more scarce capital into the manufacture of arms and weapons is, actually, beyond the pale.
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Good points !
Except for "U.S. efforts to browbeat Europe into investing more scarce capital into the manufacture of arms and weapons is, actually, beyond the pale."
You got it wrong....we want the NATO countries to BUY....OUR weapons, not manufacture themselves. We don't have too many other exports for the war profiteering corporations to sell.
Thanks curmudgeon99---
You have a point here. We manufacture weapons and lead and DU bullets.
Germany manufactures machines that manufacture machines! A concept known to science fiction writers for now a couple of generations, as you doubtless know.
Something that has occurred to me in recent years is the question of the ecological effect of all that lead lying on the ground, contaminating everything around it. (Probably even worse in Viet Nam in the long run than Agent Orange...) I suppose some metal detectors can find it, but in general it is non-magnetic, so others cannot.
Be well.
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