El lazo transatlántico secreto de la OTAN: Armas nucleares en Europa
Stop NATO
December 8, 2009
El lazo transatlántico secreto de la OTAN
Armas nucleares en Europa
Rick Rozoff
Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por Germán Leyens
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“Veinte años después de la caída del Muro de Berlín, pilotos holandeses, belgas, italianos y alemanes siguen listos para participar en la guerra nuclear.”
“Fuerzas nucleares basadas en Europa y comprometidas con la OTAN proveen un vínculo político y militar esencial entre los miembros europeos y norteamericanos de la Alianza. La Alianza mantendrá por ello fuerzas nucleares adecuadas en Europa.”
“Aunque técnicamente son de propiedad de EE.UU., las bombas nucleares almacenadas en las bases de la OTAN están destinadas a ser lanzadas por aviones del país anfitrión.”
“El Departamento de Defensa, en coordinación con el Departamento de Estado, debería involucrar a sus contrapartes apropiadas entre los aliados de la OTAN en la reevaluación y confirmación del papel de las armas nucleares en la estrategia y política de la Alianza para el futuro.”
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¿Es Italia capaz de lanzar un ataque termonuclear? ¿Podrían belgas y holandeses lanzar bombas de hidrógeno sobre objetivos enemigos?… No es posible que la fuerza aérea alemana esté entrenando para lanzar bombas 13 veces más poderosas que la que destruyó Hiroshima, ¿O tal vez sí?
Lo anterior proviene del párrafo de apertura de un artículo en la edición en línea del 2 de diciembre de Time magazine online, titulado “Qué hacer respecto a las bombas nucleares secretas de Europa.”
En respuesta a las preguntas retóricas planteadas adopta el tono enormemente serio que corresponde al tema al declarar: “Es el secreto sucio de Europa que la lista de países con capacidad nuclear va más allá de los que –Gran Bretaña y Francia– han construido sus propias armas. Bombas nucleares se almacenan en bases de la fuerza aérea en Italia, Bélgica, Alemania y Holanda –y aviones de cada uno de esos países son capaces de lanzarlas.”
El autor del artículo, Eben Harrell, quien escribió un trabajo igualmente revelador para el mismo medio noticioso en junio de 2008, cita a la Federación de Científicos Estadounidenses que afirma que se estima que hay 200 bombas termonucleares de gravedad B61 estadounidenses estacionadas en los cuatro Estados miembro de la OTAN mencionados. Una quinta nación de la OTAN que alberga ojivas, Turquía, no se menciona en el artículo. En la noticia previa de Time aludida anteriormente, el autor Harrell escribió que “EE.UU. mantiene unas 350 bombas termonucleares en seis países de la OTAN.” [1] Hay tres variaciones de la B61, “hasta 10 [ó 13] veces más poderosas que la bomba de Hiroshima [2] – B61-3s, B61-4s y B61-10s – estacionadas en ocho bases en Estados de la Alianza.
El autor recordó a los lectores de la revista que “bajo un acuerdo de la OTAN hecho durante la Guerra Fría, las bombas, que son técnicamente de propiedad de EE.UU., pueden transferirse al control de la fuerza aérea de la nación anfitriona en tiempos de conflicto. Veinte años después de la caída del Muro de Berlín, los pilotos holandeses, belgas, italianos y alemanes siguen listos para participar en una guerra nuclear.” [3]
La B61 es la principal arma de hidrógeno del Pentágono, una “bomba de peso ligero [que puede ser lanzada por… aviones de la Fuerza Aérea, de la Armada y de la OTAN a altitudes muy elevadas y a velocidades sobre Mach 2.”
También, “se puede lanzar a altas velocidades desde altitudes de sólo 15 metros. Hasta 22 tipos diferentes de avión pueden transportar externa o internamente la B61. Esta arma se puede lanzar en caída libre o retardada por paracaídas; se puede detonar por explosión en el aire o en tierra.” [4]
Los aviones capaces de transportar y utilizar la bomba incluyen los aviones stealth de nueva generación como el bombardero B-1 y el F-35 Lightning II (Joint Strike Fighter multirol), capaz de penetrar defensas aéreas y de lanzar cargas convencionales y nucleares.
El programa Prompt Global Strike del Pentágono que “podría incluir nuevas generaciones de aviones y armamentos cinco veces más rápidos que cualquier cosa en el actual arsenal estadounidense,” incluidos el “misil crucero hipersónico X-51, diseñado para llegar a Mach 5 –aproximadamente 1.600 metros por segundo.” [5] También se podría configurar para uso en Europa, ya que EE.UU. posee misiles crucero con ojivas nucleares para despliegue en aviones y barcos. Pero los aviones de guerra destinados a transportar armas nucleares estadounidenses en Europa son los de sus aliados de la OTAN, incluidos Tornados alemanes, variantes de los cuales se utilizaron en la guerra aérea de la OTAN en 1999 contra Yugoslavia, y que actualmente están desplegados en Afganistán.
Se supone que hay 130 ojivas nucleares de EE.UU. en Ramstein y 20 en la base aérea Buechel en Alemania y 20 en la Base Aérea Kleine Brogel en Bélgica. Además, hay informes sobre docenas más en Italia (en Aviano y Ghedi), e incluso más, el mayor contingente de armas nucleares estadounidenses fuera del propio EE.UU., en Turquía en la base aérea Incirlik. [6]
Las ojivas no sólo están estacionadas en naciones de la OTAN sino que lo hacen explícitamente como parte de una política de sesenta años de la Alianza, en realidad una piedra angular importante de la OTAN. Un artículo de esta serie escrito antes de la cumbre del sesenta aniversario del bloque en Francia y Alemania en abril pasado, “NATO’s Sixty Year Legacy: Threat Of Nuclear War In Europe [7], examinó el inextricable vínculo entre la fundación de la OTAN en 1949 y el despliegue de armas nucleares y sistemas de lanzamiento de EE.UU. en Europa. Uno de los propósitos principales de la fundación de la Alianza fue exactamente que permitiera la colocación y uso de armas nucleares estadounidenses en el continente.
Siete meses después de la creación del bloque, la Doctrina de Defensa de la OTAN de noviembre de 1949 especificó que se asegurara “la capacidad de realizar bombardeos estratégicos incluido el rápido transporte de la bomba atómica. Es primordialmente una responsabilidad de EE.UU. con la ayuda en la medida de lo posible de otras naciones.” [8]
El actual Manual de la OTAN contiene una sección titulada Fuerzas Nucleares de la OTAN en el Nuevo Entorno de Seguridad que contiene el pasaje siguiente:
“Durante la Guerra Fría, las fuerzas nucleares de la OTAN tuvieron un papel central en la estrategia de reacción flexible de la Alianza… Las fuerzas nucleares estaban integradas en el conjunto de la estructura de la fuerza de la OTAN, y la Alianza mantenía una variedad de planes, incluidos objetivos que se podía realizar a corto plazo. Este papel demandaba altos niveles de preparación y posturas de alerta de rápida reacción para partes importantes de las fuerzas nucleares de la OTAN.” [9]
En ningún momento el despliegue y el pretendido uso de armas nucleares de EE.UU. formaron parte de una estrategia de disuasión nuclear. La antigua Unión Soviética era mostrada como si tuviera una superioridad en armas convencionales en Europa y la doctrina de EE.UU. y de la OTAN preveía el primer uso de bombas nucleares. Éstas estaban basadas en varios Estados de la OTAN en el continente como parte de lo que se llamó un arreglo de “repartición nuclear” o de “repartición de la carga nuclear”: Aunque las bombas almacenadas en Europa eran estadounidenses y estaban bajo el control del Pentágono, los planes de guerra preveían que se cargasen en bombarderos de otras naciones de la OTAN para su uso contra la Unión Soviética y sus aliados (no-nucleares) europeos orientales. La propia URSS, a propósito, no ensayó con éxito su primera bomba atómica hasta cuatro meses después de la formación de la OTAN.
Con la disolución del Pacto de Varsovia, formado seis años después de la OTAN y como reacción a la inclusión de la República Federal de Alemania en el bloque (y el envío por EE.UU. de armas nucleares a esa nación), y de la propia Unión Soviética en 1991, el Pentágono retiró la mayor parte de las 7.000 ojivas que tuvo en Europa, pero sigue manteniendo cientos de bombas nucleares tácticas.
En la cumbre del cincuenta aniversario de la OTAN en 1999 en Washington, D.C., mientras el bloque realizaba su primera guerra, la campaña de bombardeo de 78 días contra Yugoslavia, y se expandía para incorporar a tres antiguos miembros del Pacto de Varsovia (la República Checa, Hungría y Polonia), también aprobó su nuevo y todavía operativo Concepto Estratégico que declara en parte:
“La suprema garantía de la seguridad de los Aliados es suministrada por las fuerzas nucleares estratégicas de la Alianza, particularmente las de EE.UU.; las fuerzas nucleares independientes del Reino Unido y Francia, que tienen un papel disuasivo propio, contribuyen a la disuasión general y a la seguridad de los Aliados.
“Una postura nuclear verosímil de la Alianza y la demostración de solidaridad de la Alianza… siguen requiriendo la amplia participación de Aliados Europeos involucrados en la planificación de la defensa colectiva en roles nucleares, en la instalación en tiempos de paz de fuerzas nucleares en su territorio y en acuerdos de comando, control y consulta. Las fuerzas nucleares basadas en Europa y comprometidas con la OTAN suministran un vínculo político y militar esencial entre los miembros europeos y norteamericanos de la Alianza. Por ello la Alianza mantendrá fuerzas nucleares adecuadas en Europa.” [10]
El informe de Time de 2008 dice que la política actual es:
“Un acuerdo de ‘repartición de cargas’ que ha sido parte del centro de la política militar de la OTAN desde su inicio.
“Aunque técnicamente son de propiedad de EE.UU., las bombas nucleares almacenadas en bases de la OTAN están destinadas a ser lanzadas por aviones del país anfitrión. [11]
También se refirió a la Air Force Blue Ribbon Review of Nuclear Weapons Policies and Procedures publicada en febrero de 2008 que “recomendó que los recursos nucleares estadounidenses en Europa se consoliden, lo que los analistas interpretan como una recomendación de que se desplacen las bombas a bases de la OTAN bajo ‘alas estadounidenses’ queriendo decir bases de EE.UU. en Europa.” [12]
Ambos artículos en Time de Eben Harrell, el del año pasado y el de este mes, subrayan que la colocación de ojivas nucleares en el territorio de naciones no nucleares –y Bélgica, Alemania, Italia, Holanda y Turquía son naciones no nucleares– constituye una crasa violación del Tratado de No Proliferación Nuclear (TNP), cuyos primeros dos Artículos declaran, respectivamente:
Cada uno de los Estados de armas nucleares Parte del Tratado, asume no transferir a ningún país las armas nucleares u otros instrumentos explosivos o controlar tales armas o explosivos directa o indirectamente; y no ayudar de ninguna manera, animar o inducir a ningún Estado no nuclear a fabricar o adquirir armas nucleares u otros instrumentos explosivos o controlar sobre tales armas o instrumentos explosivos.
Cada Estado carente de arma nuclear, Parte del Tratado, asume no recibir la transferencia por ningún transferidor de las armas nucleares u otros instrumentos explosivos o controlar sobre tales armas o explosivos directa o indirectamente; no manufacturar o adquirir armas nucleares u otros instrumentos nucleares; y no buscar o recibir ninguna asistencia en la fabricación de las armas nucleares u otros instrumentos nucleares explosivos. [13]
Luego, el artículo de Time del 2 de diciembre, señala que la presencia continua de ojivas nucleares de EE.UU. en Europa es “más que un anacronismo o una rareza histórica. Éstas [las armas] constituyen una violación del espíritu del Tratado de No Proliferación Nuclear (TNP)…”
“Porque ‘la repartición de la carga nuclear,’ como se llama la dispersión de B61 en Europa, se estableció antes de que el TNP entrara en vigor, es técnicamente legal. Pero como firmantes del TNP, los cuatro países y EE.UU. se han comprometido a ‘no recibir la transferencia… de armas nucleares o controlar sobre tales armas directa, o indirectamente.’ Eso, por cierto, es precisamente lo que representa el antiguo arreglo de la OTAN.” [14]
El autor también mencionó el informe de la Fuerza de Tareas del Secretario de Defensa sobre Administración de Armas Nucleares, presidida por el ex secretario de defensa de EE.UU. James Schlesinger, Fase I [15] que se publicó en septiembre y la Fase II [16] en diciembre de 2008. La segunda parte del informe contiene una sección llamada: Disuasión: el caso especial de la OTAN, que declara:
“La Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN) representa un caso especial de disuasión, tanto por la historia como por la presencia de armas nucleares… La presencia de armas nucleares de EE.UU. sigue siendo un pilar de la unidad de la OTAN. El despliegue de armas nucleares en Europa no es un tema de Servicio o de comando combatiente regional – es un tema de la Alianza. Mientras los miembros de la OTAN se basen en armas nucleares de EE.UU. para la disuasión – y mientras mantengan sus propios aviones de doble capacidad como parte de esa disuasión – no se debéría emprender ninguna acción para removerlas sin un proceso exhaustivo y deliberado de consulta.
“El Departamento de Defensa, en coordinación con el Departamento de Estado debe involucrar a sus contrapartes apropiadas entre los aliados de la OTAN en la reevaluación y confirmación del papel de las armas nucleares en la estrategia y política para el futuro de la Alianza.
“El Departamento de Defensa debe asegurar que el F-35 de doble capacidad se mantenga dentro del plazo previsto. Más demoras podrían llevar a crecientes niveles de riesgo político y estratégico y a la reducción de las opciones estratégicas para EE.UU. y la Alianza.”
El F-35 es el Joint Strike Fighter, avión de combate de multirol, del que su fabricante Lockheed Martin alardea que “suministra a EE.UU. y gobiernos aliados un avión de combate abordable, furtivo, de 5ª generación para el Siglo XXI.” [17]
Lejos de que el fin de la Guerra Fría haya señalado la eliminación de una catástrofe nuclear en Europa, de muchas maneras las cosas son ahora aún más precarias. La expansión de la OTAN durante la última década la ha llevado ahora a las fronteras de Rusia. Cinco miembros plenos (Estonia, Letonia, Lituania, Noruega y Polonia) y otros tantos asociados de la Asociación para la Paz (Azerbaiyán, Finlandia, Georgia, Kazajstán y Ucrania) están directamente contiguos al territorio ruso y durante cinco años aviones de combate de la OTAN han realizado patrullas aéreas sobre la región del Mar Báltico, a tres minutos de vuelo de San Petersburgo. [18]
Si el lanzamiento hace diez años del primer ataque armado sin provocación previa contra una nación europea desde las guerras de Hitler de 1939-1941 y la actual guerra – la más larga y de mayor escala en el Sur de Asia – no fueran motivos suficientes para exigir la abolición del único bloque militar del mundo, la así llamada OTAN global, la insistencia de la Alianza en su derecho a estacionar – y emplear – armas nucleares en Europa es ciertamente motivo suficiente para relegarla a los tenebrosos días de la Guerra Fría y al olvido.
Notas
1) Time, June 19, 2008
2) Ibíd.
3) Time, December 2, 2009
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943799,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
4) Global Security
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b61.htm
5) Popular Mechanics, January 2007
6) Turkish Daily News, June 30, 2008
7) NATO’s Sixty Year Legacy: Threat Of Nuclear War In Europe
Stop NATO, March 31, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/natos-sixty-year-legacy-threat-of-nuclear-war-in-europe
8) www.nato.int/docu/stratdoc/eng/intro.pdf
9) http://www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/hb0206.htm
10) NATO, April 24, 1999
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_27433.htm
11) Time, June 19, 2008
12) Ibid
13) http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/npttreaty.html
14) Time, December 2, 2009
15) http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/Phase_I_Report_Sept_10.pdf
16) www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/PhaseIIReportFinal.pdf
17) Lockheed Martin
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/f35
18) Baltic Sea: Flash Point For NATO-Russia Conflict
Stop NATO, February 27, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/baltic-sea-flash-point-for-nato-russia-conflict
Scandinavia And The Baltic Sea: NATO’s War Plans For The High North
Stop NATO, June 14, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/scandinavia-and-the-baltic-sea-natos-war-plans-for-the-high-north
Nobel Committee Celebrates War As Peace
Stop NATO
December 8, 2009
Nobel Committee Celebrates War As Peace
Rick Rozoff
On Thursday December 10 U.S. President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection for the prize on October 9 of this year, less than nine months after Obama assumed the mantle of the American presidency and less than a month after that announced the doubling of his nation’s troops for the world’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. The first contingent of new forces, consisting of 1,500 Marines, is to arrive next week, right before Christmas.
Nine days before the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize, the American president delivered a speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he pledged an additional 30,000 troops for a war now in its ninth year. His (and his predecessor George W. Bush’s) Defense Secretary Robert Gates hastened to add that 3,000 more support troops would be deployed, bringing the total to over 100,000, only 20,000 short of American soldiers in Iraq, and with as many as 50,000 more non-U.S. forces serving under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. In his West Point address Obama reminded his listeners that “When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan….” He has ordered that number to be more than tripled.
A brief report on Obama’s peace prize appeared on the CBS News website on December 7 with the seemingly paradoxical title “A Peace Prize for a War President” by the news agency’s White House correspondent, Mark Knoller.
Neither the title nor the article it introduced was ironic. They reflected the straightforward truth.
The feature stated “There’ll be no effort by Barack Obama to disguise or obscure the fact that he’s a war president when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday.
“The ceremony takes place ten days after he announced plans to escalate the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 American troops there.”
The selection of Obama evoked a prompt and aptly indignant response from Michel Chossudovsky at the Centre for Research on Globalization, who on October 11 published a piece called “Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War Becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth” [1] which stated inter alia that “When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,” then “the Lie becomes the Truth.”
Although there are no firm, codified guidelines for nominating and agreeing upon a Peace Prize recipient, Alfred Nobel’s will states that it should be conferred upon a “person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Those criteria have arguably never been honored or strictly abided by since the annual prize was first awarded in 1901. Several winners have been cited for helping to end wars – often by simply prevailing in them. One of the two American presidents previously awarded the prize, Woodrow Wilson, is such a one.
The other was Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897 said “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
Both Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919 were standing presidents when they received the prize. The first had fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (the war he demanded a year before it began) and Wilson brought the United States into the First World War.
The Spanish-American War inaugurated the expansion of the U.S. from a hemispheric to an Asia Pacific power. And an empire. World War I placed the American army on the European continent for the first time and signaled its emergence as a international military power. Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 when William McKinley, who launched the conflict with Spain and acquired Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico as spoils of war, was assassinated; Wilson not only sent over one million soldiers to France but also deployed 13,000 troops to fight the new Russian government of Vladimir Lenin in 1918.
But neither Roosevelt nor Wilson were commanders-in-chief of a war when they were given the Nobel Prize. And they received it for, at least in theory, contributing to ending wars; the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to a head of state escalating a war already in its ninth year half a world away from his own nation is a precedent that was reserved for this year.
Reuters quoted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on December 7 stating “We’ll address directly the notion that many have wondered, which is the juxtaposition of the timing for the Nobel Peace Prize and – and his [Obama's] commitment to add more troops around – into Afghanistan.”
Juxtaposition, paradox, irony, contradiction and so forth are terms too weak and inaccurate to describe the timing of the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, coming as it did between two pledges of military reinforcements for the world’s largest-scale and longest-running war. Travesty is a better word.
Speculation was rife after October 9 regarding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s rationale and motives for awarding Obama the prize, and press pundits were not amiss in offering explanations. But actions are more revealing than assumed or imaginary intentions and what the Nobel Committee has accomplished is to yet further tarnish its reputation and that of the prize it grants.
It is hard to think of any recipient, and surely any recent one, who personifies the qualities indicated by Alfred Nobel himself. Advocating and working for peace seem to have little if anything to do with being awarded the nominal Peace Prize. But twice in the last three years it has been conferred upon individuals far more deserving of indictment for violating the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, especially that section of Principle VI, Crimes against peace, which is defined as “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.”
Two years ago the prize was shared by Al Gore, who as the vice president of the U.S.’s first post-Cold War administration helped preside over deadly street battles in Somalia and bombing – incessant bombing – attacks in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia. And the launching of Plan Colombia in 1999, the latest fruit of which is the Pentagon’s acquisition of seven new military bases in the country and the resulting threat of armed conflict with its neighbors. Arranged by this year’s Peace Prize recipient. But, again, Gore received the prize years after leaving office and for work in an area unrelated to his former government posts.
Obama’s December 1 speech was larded with lines evocative of the worst rhetorical excesses of his predecessor combined with allusions to broadening the war reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s expansion of what had previously been America’s longest war from Vietnam into Cambodia in 1970. “[S]hortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies….”
The current administration has, in addition to plans to boost combined U.S. and NATO (“our allies”) military forces to 150,000 in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated drone missile attacks inside neighboring Pakistan and, as the above quote demonstrates, declared western and southern Pakistan part of the expanding war theater.
The president mentioned or alluded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization several times in his address, in one instance with a degree of hyperbole that is as frightening as it is extravagant. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.
“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”
The entire world is threatened by a spreading cancer. This alarmist and crude phraseology was employed by a 21st century leader of the world’s superpower, a Harvard graduate, but could as well have been lifted from the lowest yellow journalism screed of the Cold War.
In attempting to deny the obvious – the inevitable – Obama continued by stating that “there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations….” Troops from America’s NATO and NATO partner vassals and tributaries in the war against barbarians – the terms are those of Zbigniew Brzezinski from his 1997 The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives – will not be limited to the war in Afghanistan, which in fact is a laboratory for a far broader global strategy, as “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan….Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones said in October that “according to the maximum estimate, al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters operating in Afghanistan without any bases or ability to launch attacks on the West.” Government estimates for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are in the neighborhood of 20,000.
This is the global cancer that requires 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops and an Afghan army of a quarter million or more troops. And a war that will continue well beyond the 2011 deadline mentioned in the West Point speech and be fought with intensified vigor and as far from Afghanistan as the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Southeast Asian archipelago.
With the deployment of “senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council,” as the New York Times characterized them, on the Sunday morning television news program circuit on December 7, the scope and the length of the already biggest and longest war in the world became undeniable.
The National Security Adviser, former Marine general and NATO top military commander James Jones, told CNN’s State of the Union: “We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times. We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”
He added that the influx of more American and NATO troops “will allow us to move our forces back towards the border regions, where really the most important struggle that we’re going to have is to make sure that on the Pakistani side of the border, that we eliminate the safe havens.”
Pentagon chief Robert Gates said on NBC’s Meet the Press that although there would still be over 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan in 2011, only “some handful, or some small number, or whatever the conditions permit, will begin to withdraw at that time.”
The Pentagon’s Central Command chief, General David Petraeus, appeared on Fox News Sunday and acknowledged that there were no plans for a “rush to the exits” and that there “could be tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan for several years.” [2]
Little noted with the expansion of the war is that its range is widening as its intensity is deepening.
The top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe and Eurasia, General Roger A. Brady, was in Georgia on December 7 and in the neighboring South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan on the 8th to discuss both nations’ increased troop deployments to Afghanistan and solidifying strategic military relations.
The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has recently and once again threatened war against Nagorno Karabakh and by unavoidable implication Armenia, which is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia. The latter is obligated to provide Armenia military assistance under terms of the treaty in the event of it becoming the victim of aggression. With the American commander listening attentively, defense minister of Azerbaijan Colonel-General Safar Abiyev said that ongoing negotiations over Nagorno Karabakh “were not fruitful and such a situation forced Azerbaijan to use other ways to liberate its lands from the occupation.” [3]
On December 4 the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who fought a five-day war with Russia in August of last year, spoke of his offering the U.S. and NATO 1,000 more troops for the Afghan war and ominously added: “This is a unique chance for our soldiers to receive a real combat baptism.
“We do not need the army only for showing it in military parades….While our allies – in this case the United States and Europe – are concentrating on other issues [Afghanistan and Iraq], our enemy is getting active. The sooner the Afghan situation is resolved and sooner the war is over in Iraq, [the sooner] Georgia will be more protected.” [4]
The enemy is Russia and the quid pro quo is U.S.-trained Georgian troops receiving a war zone “baptism” for a future conflict with their “numerous, dangerous and perfidious” adversary. The adjectives are also Saakashvili’s, as are these words: “We need an army that knows how to fight. And participation in the operation in Afghanistan is a unique chance to study this and receive experience….Our final aim is to free the occupied territories [Abkhazia and South Ossetia] and unite and integrate Georgia.” [5]
Other nations are obtaining combat experience in Afghanistan under NATO auspices for use in and on the borders of their homelands, including, like Azerbaijan and Georgia, nations bordering Russia – Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Norway, Poland and Ukraine – as well as future belligerents in conflicts elsewhere like Colombia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
If the world’s sole superpower and its NATO entourage can employ the military necessity at will to advance their interests abroad, their “vassals” will be emboldened to do so nearer home and will receive the arms and training to execute their designs.
Far from promoting peace, even an enforced peace, a Pax Americana, the war in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in general are igniting power kegs around the world.
If it can be argued that Obama inherited the war in South Asia from George W. Bush and is intent on “finishing the job,” his signing of the $106 billion Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations in July and the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act in late October belies any claim of objection to the enhanced use of the military in general and war in particular.
Next year’s Pentagon budget is the largest, in both current and real U.S. dollars, since 1945, the last year of World War II. Although it contains $130 billion for the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq that previously would have been appropriated as separate supplemental funds, immediately after the signing of the Defense Department budget the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, stated “he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” [6] with the first request to be approximately $50 billion.
With the announcement on December 1 of another Afghan troop surge, the Pentagon’s requests for “emergency financing” can be expected to grow in both size and frequency. As with the claim of a troop withdrawal (or “drawdown”) by 2011, the alleged ending of war supplements is a public relations ploy and sleight of hand trick employed to beguile a gullible public.
Even in a world that over the last decade has been afflicted with such logical and moral affronts as humanitarian war and preemptive retaliation, awarding a peace prize to a war president represents a new nadir of cynical realpolitik and a flagrant endorsement of militarism, however well-disposed many may have been toward its most recent recipient.
1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=15622&context=va
2) New York Times, December 7, 2009
3) Azeri Press Agency, December 8, 2009
4) Civil Georgia, December 5, 2009
5) Rustavi2, December 4, 2009
6) Associated Press, November 1, 2009
U.S., NATO War In Afghanistan: Antecedents And Precedents
Stop NATO
December 5, 2009
U.S., NATO War In Afghanistan: Antecedents And Precedents
Rick Rozoff
———-
The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order.
The combined U.S. and NATO forces would represent a staggering number, in excess of 150,000 soldiers. By way of comparison, as of September of this year there were approximately 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only a small handful of other nations’ personnel, those assigned to the NATO Training Mission – Iraq, remaining with them.
“Secretary Gates has made clear that the conflicts we’re in should be at the very forefront of our agenda. He wants to make sure we’re not giving up capabilities needed now for those needed for some unknown future conflict. He wants to make sure the Pentagon is truly on war footing….For the first time in decades, the political and economic stars are aligned for a fundamental overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business.”
———-
Over the past ten years citizens of the United States and other Western nations, and unfortunately most of the world, have become accustomed to Washington and its military allies in Europe and those appointed as armed outposts on the periphery of the “Euro-Atlantic community” engaging in armed aggression around the world.
Wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and lower profile military operations and surrogate campaigns in nations as diverse as Colombia, Yemen, the Philippines, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Ossetia and elsewhere have become an unquestioned prerogative of the U.S. and its NATO partners. So much so that many have forgotten to consider how comparable actions have been or might be viewed if a non-Western nation attempted them.
Thirty years ago this December 24 the first Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to assist a neighboring nation’s government to combat an armed insurgency based in Pakistan and surreptitiously (later quite openly) supported by the United States.
In the waning days of that year, 1979, and in the early ones of the following Soviet troop strength grew to some 50,000 soldiers.
(In 1839 Britain invaded Afghanistan with 21,000 of its own and Indian colonial troops and in 1878 with twice that number to counter Russian influence in the country in what came to be called the Great Game.)
On January 23, 1980 U.S. President James Earl (Jimmy) Carter stated in his last State of the Union Address that “The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War.”
When the Soviet Union began withdrawing its forces from the nation – the first half from May 15 to August 16, 1988 and the last from November 15, 1988 to February 15, 1989 – their peak number had been slightly over 100,000.
On December 1 of 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was deploying 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in addition to the 68,000 already there and two days later “Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress…that the surge force of 30,000 going to Afghanistan will grow to at least 33,000 when support troops are included.” [1]
That is, over 100,000 troops. Along with private military and security contractors whose number is even larger.
Soviet troops were in Afghanistan barely over nine years. American troops are now involved in the ninth year of combat operations in the country and in less than four weeks will be engaged in their tenth calendar year of war there.
On November 25 White House spokesman Robert Gibbs assured the people of his nation that “We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan. We are not going to be there another eight or nine years.” [2] The implication is that the U.S. may wage a war in Afghanistan that could last until 2017. For sixteen years.
The longest war in American history prior to the current one was that in Vietnam. U.S. military advisers were present in the country from the late 1950s onward and covert operations were carried on in the early 1960s, but only in the year after the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident – 1965 – did the Pentagon begin major combat operations in the south and regular bombing raids in the north. The last American combat unit left South Vietnam in 1972, seven years later.
The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order.
Since late last summer the U.S. and its NATO allies have launched regular drone missile and attack helicopter assaults inside Pakistan. Had the Soviets attempted to do likewise thirty years ago – when their own borders were threatened – Washington’s response might well have triggered a third world war.
The USSR did not deploy troops from any of its fellow Warsaw Pact nations in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In a historical irony that warrants more commentary that it has received – none – every one of those nations now has forces serving under NATO and killing and dying in the Afghan war theater: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the former German Democratic Republic (subsumed under a united Federal Republic, which has almost 4,500 soldiers stationed there).
They are among troops from close to 50 nations serving or soon to serve under NATO command on the Afghanistan-Pakistan war front, which include the following from the Alliance and several of its partnership programs:
NATO members:
Albania
Belgium
Britain
Bulgaria
Canada
Croatia
The Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
The Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Turkey
The United States (35,000 troops with as many more on the way)
Partnership for Peace/Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC):
Armenia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bosnia
Finland
Georgia
Ireland
Macedonia
Montenegro
Sweden
Switzerland (withdrawn last year)
Ukraine
Contact Countries:
Australia
Japan (naval forces)
New Zealand
South Korea
Adriatic Charter (overlaps with the Partnership for Peace):
Albania
Bosnia
Croatia
Macedonia
Montenegro
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative:
United Arab Emirates
Trilateral Afghanistan-Pakistan-NATO Military Commission:
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Miscellaneous:
Colombia
Mongolia
Singapore
The above roster includes seven of fifteen former Soviet republics (another development worthy of consideration), with Moldova after this year’s “Twitter Revolution” and Kazakhstan, where in September the U.S. ambassador pressured the government for troops, candidates for deployments under Partnership for Peace obligations. (Both had earlier sent troops to Iraq.) Their participation would lead to 60% of former Soviet states having troops committed to NATO in Afghanistan. With Moldova added, every European nation (excluding microstates like Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City) except for Belarus, Cyprus, Malta, Russia and Serbia will have military forces serving under NATO in Afghanistan.
Never in the history of world warfare have military contingents from so many nations – fifty or more – served in one war theater. In a single nation. Troops from five continents, Oceania and the Middle East. [3]
Even the putative coalition of the willing stitched together by the U.S. and Britain after the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and until troops were pulled for redeployment to Afghanistan only consisted of forces from thirty one nations: The U.S., Britain, Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Japan, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand and Ukraine. Twenty two of those thirty one contributors were former Soviet bloc (Albania remotely) nations or former Yugoslav republics that had recently (1999) joined NATO or were being prepared for integration into or in other manners with the bloc.
The world’s last three major wars – those in and against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq – have been used as testing and training grounds for the expansion of global NATO.
The consolidation of an international rapid response (strike) force and occupation army under NATO control was further advanced this week with Obama’s troop surge speech on the 1st and follow-up efforts by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen to recruit more allied troops at the recently concluded meeting of NATO (and allied) foreign ministers.
On December 4 “NATO’s top official said…that at least 25 countries will send a total of about 7,000 additional forces to Afghanistan next year ‘with more to come,’ as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to bolster allied resolve.” [4] In attendance at the NATO meeting in Brussels were also an unspecified number of foreign ministers of non-NATO nations providing troops for the Afghan war, top military commander of all U.S. and NATO forces General Stanley McChrystal and Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta.
7,000 more NATO troops with “more to come” would, added to some 42,000 non-U.S. soldiers currently serving with NATO and 35,000 U.S. forces doing the same, mean at least 85,000 troops under NATO command even without the 33,000 new U.S. troops headed to Afghanistan. The bloc’s largest foreign deployment before this was to Kosovo in 1999 when at its peak the Alliance-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) consisted of 50,000 troops from 39 nations. [5]
The combined U.S. and NATO forces would represent a staggering number, in excess of 150,000 soldiers. By way of comparison, as of September of this year there were approximately 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and only a small handful of other nations’ personnel, those assigned to the NATO Training Mission – Iraq, remaining with them.
Among NATO member states Italian Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa recently announced an increase of 1,000 troops, bringing the nation’s total to almost 4,500, 50% more than had previously been stationed in Iraq.
Poland will send another 600-700 troops which, added to those already in Afghanistan, will constitute the largest aggregate Polish military deployment abroad in the post-Cold War era and the highest number of troops ever deployed outside Europe in the nation’s history.
Britain will provide another 500 troops, with its total rising to close to 10,000.
Bulgarian Defense Minister Nikolay Mladenov said last week that “there is a strong possibility that the country will increase its military contingent in Afghanistan.” [6] To indicate the nature of the commitments new NATO member states shoulder when they join the Alliance and what their priority then becomes, three days earlier Mladenov, speaking of budgetary constraints placed on the armed forces because of the current financial crisis, affirmed that “We may cut down some other items of the army budget, but there will always be enough money for missions abroad.” [7]
Washington has also pressured Croatia, which became a full member of the bloc this past April, to supply more troops and Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor hastened to pledge that “Croatia, being a NATO member, would fulfill its obligations.” [8]
The Czech republic’s defense minister, Martin Bartak, spoke after the Obama troop surge speech earlier this week and threatened the Czech parliament by stating “it will have to be explained to allies why the Czech Republic does not want to take part in the reinforcements while Slovakia and Britain, for instance, will reinforce their contingents….” [9]
Slovakia has announced that it will more than double its forces in Afghanistan.
The German parliament has just renewed for another year the deployment of the nation’s almost 4,500 troops in Afghanistan, the maximum allowed by the Bundestag, although discussions are being held to increase that number to 7,000 after a conference on Afghanistan in London on January 28. German armed forces in the country are engaged in their nation’s first ground combat operations since World War II.
A news report on December 3 said that U.S. ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey was pressuring Ankara to provide a “specific number” of troops and to be “”more flexible” [10] in how they will be deployed, meaning that Turkey must drop so-called combat caveats and engage in active fighting along with its NATO allies.
After meeting with U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden on December 4, Hungarian Prime Minister Gyorgy Gordon Bajnai vowed to send 200 more soldiers to the South Asian war zone, an increase of 60% as Hungary currently has 360 there.
Regarding NATO partner states, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Celeste Wallander was in Armenia to secure that nation’s first military deployment to Afghanistan, the handiwork of NATO’s first Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia Robert Simmons [11], who has also gained a doubling of troops from neighboring Azerbaijan and a pledge of as many as 1,000 Georgian troops by next year.
During a press conference at NATO headquarters on the first day of the Alliance’s recent Afghan war council, December 3, the bloc’s chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed gratitude to the United Arab Emirates for dispatching troops to Afghanistan and “hosting…the alliance’s International Conference on NATO-UAE Relations and the Way Forward in the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative last October.” [12]
The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative was launched at the NATO summit in Turkey in 2004 to upgrade military partnerships with members of the Mediterranean Dialogue (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). [13]
A U.S. military news agency published an article on December 3 that discussed the Quadrennial Defense Review currently being deliberated on at the Pentagon.
Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III, who before assuming that post was Vice President of Government Operations and Strategy for Raytheon, was quoted as boasting that “The Quadrennial Defense Review…will be unlike any other: the first to be driven by current wartime requirements, to balance conventional and nonconventional capabilities, and to embrace a ‘whole of government’ approach to national security….This is a landmark QDR.”
Lynn also said that “Secretary Gates has made clear that the conflicts we’re in should be at the very forefront of our agenda. He wants to make sure we’re not giving up capabilities needed now for those needed for some unknown future conflict. He wants to make sure the Pentagon is truly on war footing….For the first time in decades, the political and economic stars are aligned for a fundamental overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business.” [14]
The more than eight-year war in Afghanistan is not going to end in 2011, Obama’s asseverations notwithstanding, nor will it be the last of its kind. It will continue to engulf neighboring Pakistan with the threat of also spilling over into Central Asia and Iran.
The crisis confronting the world is not only the war in South Asia: It is war itself. More particularly, the recklessness of the self-proclaimed sole superpower and the military bloc it heads in arrogating to themselves the exclusive right to threaten nations around the world with military aggression.
If that policy is not brought to an end by the real international community – the more than six-sevenths of humanity outside the greater Euro-Atlantic world (as it deems itself) – Afghanistan will not be this century’s last war front but its first and prototypical one. Portents are of even worse to come.
1) New York Daily News, December 4, 2009
2) New York Times, November 26, 2009
3) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army
Stop NATO, August 9, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army
4) Associated Press, December 4, 2009
5) U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan’s History
Stop NATO, September 24, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/u-s-nato-poised-for-most-massive-war-in-afghanistans-history
6) Sofia News Agency, November 26, 2009
7) Standart News, November 23, 2009
8) Xinhua News Agency, December 3, 2009
9) Czech News Agency, December 2, 2009
10) PanArmenian.net, December 3, 2009
11) Mr. Simmons’ Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border
Stop NATO, March 4, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/mr-simmons-mission-nato-bases-from-balkans-to-chinese-border
12) Emirates News Agency, December 3, 2009
13) NATO In Persian Gulf: From Third World War To Istanbul
Stop NATO, February 6, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/nato-in-persian-gulf-from-third-world-war-to-istanbul
14) American Forces Press Service, December 3, 2009
NATO’s Secret Transatlantic Bond: Nuclear Weapons In Europe
Stop NATO
December 3, 2009
NATO’s Secret Transatlantic Bond: Nuclear Weapons In Europe
Rick Rozoff
———-
“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear war.”
“Nuclear forces based in Europe and committed to NATO provide an essential political and military link between the European and the North American members of the Alliance. The Alliance will therefore maintain adequate nuclear forces in Europe.”
“Although technically owned by the U.S., nuclear bombs stored at NATO bases are designed to be delivered by planes from the host country.”
“The Department of Defense, in coordination with the Department of State, should engage its appropriate counterparts among NATO Allies in reassessing and confirming the role of nuclear weapons in Alliance strategy and policy for the future.”
———-
Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike? Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets?…Germany’s air force couldn’t possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?
The above is from the opening paragraph of a feature in Time magazine’s online edition of December 2, one entitled “What to Do About Europe’s Secret Nukes.”
In response to the rhetorical queries posed it adopts the deadly serious tone befitting the subject in stating, “It is Europe’s dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those — Britain and France — who have built their own weapons. Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them.”
The author of the article, Eben Harrell, who wrote an equally revealing piece for the same news site in June of 2008, cites the Federation of American Scientists as asserting that there are an estimated 200 American B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs stationed in the four NATO member states listed above. A fifth NATO nation that is home to the warheads, Turkey, is not dealt with in the news story. In the earlier Times article alluded to previously, author Harrell wrote that “The U.S. keeps an estimated 350 thermonuclear bombs in six NATO countries.” [1] They are three variations of the B61, “up to 10 [or 13] times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb” [2] – B61-3s, B61-4s and B61-10s – stationed on eight bases in Alliance states.
The writer reminded the magazine’s readers that “Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are technically owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in times of conflict. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear war.” [3]
The B61 is the Pentagon’s mainstay hydrogen weapon, a “lightweight bomb [that can] be delivered by…Air Force, Navy and NATO planes at very high altitudes and at speeds above Mach 2.”
Also, it “can be dropped at high speeds from altitudes as low as 50 feet. As many as 22 different varieties of aircraft can carry the B61 externally or internally. This weapon can be dropped either by free-fall or as parachute-retarded; it can be detonated either by air burst or ground burst.” [4]
The warplanes capable of transporting and using the bomb include new generation U.S. stealth aircraft such as the B-2 bomber and the F-35 Lightning II (multirole Joint Strike Fighter), capable of penetrating air defenses and delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads.
The Pentagon’s Prompt Global Strike program, which “could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal,” including “the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, which is designed to hit Mach 5 — roughly 3600 mph,” [5] could be configured for use in Europe also, as the U.S. possesses cruise missiles with nuclear warheads for deployment on planes and ships. But the warplanes mandated to deliver American nuclear weapons in Europe are those of its NATO allies, including German Tornados, variants of which were used in NATO’s 1999 air war against Yugoslavia and are currently deployed in Afghanistan.
There are assumed to be 130 U.S. nuclear warheads at the Ramstein and 20 at the Buechel airbases in Germany and 20 at the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium. Additionally, there are reports of dozens more in Italy (at Aviano and Ghedi) and even more, the largest amount of American nuclear weapons outside the United States itself, in Turkey at the Incirlik airbase. [6]
Not only are the warheads stationed in NATO nations but are explicitly there as part of a sixty-year policy of the Alliance, in fact a major cornerstone of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. An article in this series written before the bloc’s sixtieth anniversary summit in France and Germany this past April, NATO’s Sixty Year Legacy: Threat Of Nuclear War In Europe [7], examined the inextricable link between the founding of NATO in 1949 and the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons and delivery systems in Europe. One of the main purposes of founding the Alliance was exactly to allow for the basing and use of American nuclear arms on the continent.
Seven months after the creation of the bloc, the NATO Defense Doctrine of November 1949 called for insuring “the ability to carry out strategic bombing including the prompt delivery of the atomic bomb. This is primarily a US responsibility assisted as practicable by other nations.” [8]
The current NATO Handbook contains a section titled NATO’s Nuclear Forces in the New Security Environment which contains this excerpt:
“During the Cold War, NATO’s nuclear forces played a central role in the Alliance’s strategy of flexible response….[N]uclear weapons were integrated into the whole of NATO’s force structure, and the Alliance maintained a variety of targeting plans which could be executed at short notice. This role entailed high readiness levels and quick-reaction alert postures for significant parts of NATO’s nuclear forces.” [9]
At no time was the deployment and intended use of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe part of a nuclear deterrence strategy. The former Soviet Union was portrayed as having a conventional arms superiority in Europe and U.S. and NATO doctrine called for the first use of nuclear bombs. The latter were based in several NATO states on the continent as part of what was called a “nuclear sharing” or “nuclear burden sharing” arrangement: Although the bombs stored in Europe were American and under the control of the Pentagon, war plans called for their being loaded onto fellow NATO nation’s bombers for use against the Soviet Union and its (non-nuclear) Eastern European allies. The USSR itself, incidentally, didn’t successfully test its first atomic bomb until four months after NATO was formed.
With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, formed six years after NATO and in response to the inclusion of the Federal Republic of Germany in the bloc (and the U.S. moving nuclear weapons into the nation), and of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, the Pentagon withdrew the bulk of 7,000 warheads it had maintained in Europe, but still maintains hundreds of tactical nuclear bombs.
At the 1999 NATO fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington, D.C., during which the bloc was conducting its first war, the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and expanding to incorporate three former Warsaw Pact members (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland), it also approved its new and still operative Strategic Concept which states in part:
“The supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States; the independent nuclear forces of the United Kingdom and France, which have a deterrent role of their own, contribute to the overall deterrence and security of the Allies.
“A credible Alliance nuclear posture and the demonstration of Alliance solidarity…continue to require widespread participation by European Allies involved in collective defence planning in nuclear roles, in peacetime basing of nuclear forces on their territory and in command, control and consultation arrangements. Nuclear forces based in Europe and committed to NATO provide an essential political and military link between the European and the North American members of the Alliance. The Alliance will therefore maintain adequate nuclear forces in Europe.” [10]
The Time report of 2008 wrote of the ongoing policy that it is:
“A ‘burden-sharing’ agreement that has been at the heart of NATO military policy since its inception.
“Although technically owned by the U.S., nuclear bombs stored at NATO bases are designed to be delivered by planes from the host country.” [11]
It also discussed the Air Force Blue Ribbon Review of Nuclear Weapons Policies and Procedures released in February of 2008 which “recommended that American nuclear assets in Europe be consolidated, which analysts interpret as a recommendation to move the bombs to NATO bases under ‘U.S. wings,’ meaning American bases in Europe.” [12}
Both Time articles by Eben Harrell, that of last year and that of this month, emphasize that the basing of nuclear warheads on the territory of non-nuclear nations - and Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey are non-nuclear nations - is a gross violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT], whose first two Articles state, respectively:
“Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.”
“Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” [13]
The Time piece of December 2, then, points out that the continued presence of U.S. nuclear warheads in Europe is “more than an anachronism or historical oddity. They [the weapons] are a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)….”
“Because ‘nuclear burden-sharing,’ as the dispersion of B61s in Europe is called, was set up before the NPT came into force, it is technically legal. But as signatories to the NPT, the four European countries and the U.S. have pledged ‘not to receive the transfer…of nuclear weapons or control over such weapons directly, or indirectly.’ That, of course, is precisely what the long-standing NATO arrangement entails.” [14]
The author also mentioned the report of the Secretary of Defense Task Force on Nuclear Weapons Management, chaired by former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Phase I [15] of which was released in September and Phase II [16] in December of 2008. The second part of the report contains a section called Deterrence: The Special Case of NATO which states:
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) represents a special case for deterrence, both because of history and the presence of nuclear weapons….[T]he presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe remains a pillar of NATO unity. The deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe is not a Service or regional combatant command issue — it is an Alliance issue. As long as NATO members rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for deterrence — and as long as they maintain their own dual-capable aircraft as part of that deterrence — no action should be taken to remove them without a thorough and deliberate process of consultation.
“The Department of Defense, in coordination with the Department of State, should engage its appropriate counterparts among NATO Allies in reassessing and confirming the role of nuclear weapons in Alliance strategy and policy for the future.
“The Department of Defense should ensure that the dual-capable F-35 remains on schedule. Further delays would result in increasing levels of political and strategic risk and reduced strategic options for both the United States and the Alliance.”
The F-35 is the Joint Strike Fighter multirole warplane discussed earlier, which its manufacturer Lockheed Martin boasts “Provides the United States and allied governments with an affordable, stealthy 5TH generation fighter for the 21st century.” [17]
Far from the end of the Cold War signaling the elimination of the danger of a nuclear catastrophe in Europe, in many ways matters are now even more precarious. NATO’s expansion over the past decade has now brought it to Russia’s borders. Five full member states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Poland) and as many Partnership for Peace adjuncts (Azerbaijan, Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine) directly adjoin Russian territory and for over five years NATO warplanes have conducted air patrols over the Baltic Sea region, a three minute flight from St. Petersburg. [18]
If launching the first unprovoked armed assault against a European nation since Hitler’s wars of 1939-1941 ten years ago and currently conducting the world’s longest and most large-scale war in South Asia were not reasons enough to demand the abolition of the world’s only military bloc, so-called global NATO, then the Alliance’s insistence on the right to station – and employ – nuclear weapons in Europe is certainly sufficient grounds for its consignment to the dark days of the Cold War and to oblivion.
1) Time, June 19, 2008
2) Ibid
3) Time, December 2, 2009 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943799,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
4) Global Security
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b61.htm
5) Popular Mechanics, January 2007
6) Turkish Daily News, June 30, 2008
7) NATO’s Sixty Year Legacy: Threat Of Nuclear War In Europe
Stop NATO, March 31, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/natos-sixty-year-legacy-threat-of-nuclear-war-in-europe
8) www.nato.int/docu/stratdoc/eng/intro.pdf
9) http://www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/hb0206.htm
10) NATO, April 24, 1999 http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_27433.htm
11) Time, June 19, 2008
12) Ibid
13) http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/npttreaty.html
14) Time, December 2, 2009
15) http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/Phase_I_Report_Sept_10.pdf
16) www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/PhaseIIReportFinal.pdf
17) Lockheed Martin
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/f35
18) Baltic Sea: Flash Point For NATO-Russia Conflict
Stop NATO, February 27, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/baltic-sea-flash-point-for-nato-russia-conflict
Scandinavia And The Baltic Sea: NATO’s War Plans For The High North
Stop NATO, June 14, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/scandinavia-and-the-baltic-sea-natos-war-plans-for-the-high-north
Loose Cannon And Nuclear Submarines: West Prepares For Arctic Warfare
Stop NATO
December 1, 2009
Loose Cannon And Nuclear Submarines: West Prepares For Arctic Warfare
Rick Rozoff
———-
The Arctic Ocean, in particular that part of it under the ice cap, is Russia’s last retaliatory refuge, that spot on the earth where any element of its strategic forces is comparatively safe from a Western first strike and least targetable by interceptor missiles after such an attack.
That Canada has advanced to the front rank of Western nations confronting and challenging a disproportionately stronger Russia in the Arctic strongly suggests that it has been put up to the task. Being a smaller and weaker nation allows it to be cast in the role of a sympathetic victim of “Russian aggression,” much like Estonia two years ago with alleged cyber attacks and Georgia last year after its invasion of South Ossetia. Leading Western elected officials were champing at the bit to activate NATO’s Article 5 in the last two cases (even though Georgia is not yet a full member of the bloc), and Canada could provide a casus belli impossible to resist.
———-
This year is ending as it began, with heightened U.S. interest in the Arctic Ocean. For energy, transportation and military purposes. Especially the third.
An American website has scanned and posted a 36-page document released by the U.S. Department of the Navy on November 10, 2009 called Navy Arctic Roadmap [1]
The paper states that “The primary policy guidance statements influencing this roadmap are the National Security Presidential Directive 66/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 25 (NSPD 66/HSPD 25) and the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (CS21).” [2] The second policy document was issued by the U.S. Navy on October of 2007 and the first, the National Security Directive, was written on January 9 of this year. A previous article in this series examined the second in detail shortly after it was made public. [3]
The key components of January’s National Security Directive are these, the first reproduced verbatim:
“The United States has broad and fundamental national security interests in the Arctic region and is prepared to operate either independently or in conjunction with other states to safeguard these interests. These interests include such matters as missile defense and early warning; deployment of sea and air systems for strategic sealift, strategic deterrence, maritime presence, and maritime security operations; and ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight.”
The document also speaks unapologetically of the intent to “Preserve the global mobility of United States military and civilian vessels and aircraft throughout the Arctic region” and stipulates in its fourth point that “The Senate should act favorably on U.S. accession to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea promptly, to protect and advance U.S. interests, including with respect to the Arctic. Joining will serve the national security interests of the United States, including the maritime mobility of our Armed Forces worldwide. It will secure U.S. sovereign rights over extensive marine areas, including the valuable natural resources they contain.” [4]
A Russian news source commented four days after the directive’s release as follows: “In his final days in power, President George W. Bush asserted U.S. military ’sea power’ over the oil-rich Arctic in a fresh effort to ensure permanent American presence in the region and the deployment of missile defense facilities there.
“According to the text of a sweeping new directive on the Arctic released just eight days before Barack Obama is to be sworn in, the United States declares the territories within the Arctic Circle a zone of its strategic interests and the new Administration is advised to expand the US foothold in the Arctic.” [5]
Indeed the new American administration has here as in most every other instance proven a faithful enforcer of its predecessor’s geopolitical blueprints.
Less than three weeks after the Bush White House unveiled its new Arctic strategy, NATO held a hastily convened two-day meeting in Iceland attended by its secretary general and its top military commanders. The get-together, called a Seminar on Security Prospects in the High North, dutifully followed the American Arctic initiative and proclaimed that “the High North is going to require even more of the Alliance’s attention in the coming years.” [6]
Four of the five official Arctic claimants – the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway – were represented as founding members of the military bloc; Russia was not invited to send even an observer.
Another Russian news report wrote of the inescapable logic of the meeting: “NATO is seriously thinking of [establishing] military presence in the Arctic. It considers global warming and consequently an Arctic thaw as an occasion for this. NATO sees this as a possibility for its Arctic expansion.
“When taking into account the fact that all Arctic littoral nations but Russia are NATO member countries, it is quite clear who the alliance considers its rival in this region.” [7]
In the intervening months the four NATO members with longstanding territorial claims in the region – Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States – have made military moves into the Arctic Circle in fulfillment of the Alliance’s pledge in January.
Norway has moved its Operational Command Headquarters into the Arctic and purchased 48 Lockheed F-35 fighter jets for Arctic patrols, and Denmark announced plans to establish an all-service Arctic Command, an Arctic Response Force and a military buildup at the Thule airbase in Greenland, to be shared with its NATO allies. [8]
Great Britain, Finland and Sweden have been conscripted into the common effort, the latter two nations having been surreptitiously integrated into NATO behind the backs of their peoples. [9]
But it is Canada that has been appointed the role of vanguard in the impending showdown with Russia over the Arctic. Specifically, over the Lomonosov Ridge which runs 1,800 kilometers from Russia’s New Siberian Islands through the center of the Arctic Ocean to Canada’s Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. [10]
Ottawa has conducted its largest-ever military exercises, established new bases and exhibited increasing truculence and saber rattling toward Russia in the region.
Washington, although it along with Brussels is employing Canada to confront Russia at the top of the world, is not shy in asserting its own military presence and pursuing its own geostrategic objectives in the Arctic.
The Navy Arctic Roadmap – a curious choice of nouns when speaking of a part of the globe without land – as the document itself takes pains to point out, proceeds from the National Security Directive of the beginning of the year and reaffirms most of the latter’s major goals.
It highlights these strategic components for the intensified application of military deployments in the Arctic region:
Strategy, policy, mission and plans
Operations and training
Investments in weapons, platforms, sensors, command, control. communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C41SR) installations, and facilities
Strategic communications and outreach
In another section of the document these are the four operations mentioned first:
Undersea Warfare
Expeditionary Warfare
Strike Warfare
Strategic Sealift
The Navy Arctic Roadmap also states that “the naval services must be prepared to prevent or limit regional conflict when required,” giving particular emphasis to strategic deterrence and ballistic missile defense. [11]
A reiteration of the priorities itemized in the National Security Presidential Directive 66 ten months earlier.
What the practical implementation of this policy means is the expanded penetration of the Arctic Circle by the U.S. Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) third of the American nuclear triad, as will be examined later, and the extension of plans for a U.S.-NATO-Asian NATO worldwide interceptor missile system already being put into place near Russia’s western, southern and eastern borders. U.S. and NATO radar, submarine and missile deployments in the so-called High North will complete the encirclement.
The U.S. and Britain have conducted joint submarine warfare exercises under the polar ice cap over the past three years, Operation Ice Exercise 2007 and Operation Ice Exercise 2009. A U.S. Navy website said during the first exercise that “The submarine force continues to use the Arctic Ocean as an alternate route for shifting submarines between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans….Submarines can reach the western Pacific directly by transiting through international waters of the Arctic rather than through the Panama Canal.” [12]
The Arctic Ocean, in particular that part of it under the ice cap, is Russia’s last retaliatory refuge, that spot on the earth where any element of its strategic forces is comparatively safe from a Western first strike and least targetable by interceptor missiles after such an attack.
Earlier this month the American attack submarine the USS Texas “completed an Arctic mission, with some U.S. media outlets noting the nuclear-powered submarine broke through the ice near the North Pole and stayed on the surface for 24 hours.” [13]
A Canadian news agency reported that the government’s Foreign Affairs spokesman Alain Cacchione “said information about submarine operations is considered secret. He noted…that Canada permits shipping through its Arctic waters….” [14]
A rather broad definition of shipping, to be sure, but Cacchione’s attempt at evasiveness wore thin when he added “There are safety protocols in place under NATO that provide for the exchange of information on allied submarine movements….” [15] That is, the U.S. submarine was off the Canadian coast with Ottawa’s full knowledge. And blessings. “The U.S. navy did not release details on what, if any, weapons tests were performed by the Texas.” Nor did the Canadian government ask, even though January’s U.S. National Security Directive explicitly challenges Canada’s claim to exclusive rights over the legendary Northwest Passage, now navigable for the first time in recorded history.
Instead, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon “have taken a hard line in regard to excursions by the Russians into the Arctic. Earlier this year, [Defence Minister Peter] MacKay accused the Russians of sending military aircraft too close to Canadian northern airspace. He vowed that Canadian Forces CF-18 fighter aircraft would intercept Russian aircraft each and every time they came near the country.”
By excursions (perhaps the word intended was incursions) are meant routine patrols over neutral, international waters conducted according to the terms of the relevant treaties.
“In March, Cannon said Canada ‘will not be bullied’ by a Russian plan to create a new security force for the Arctic.” [16]
If loose lips could sink ships, Harper, Cannon and McKay would have sent the entire Russian navy to the bottom of the Arctic and the North Atlantic. All three have delivered a steady stream of exhortations, bluster and downright threats to Russia throughout the year.
This blunt, eminently non-diplomatic, and incessant saber rattling by a relatively minor military and international political player would not persist for as long as it has – questionable domestic gains notwithstanding – if the three ministers were not assured of support from the United States and NATO. In the second case, the Article 5 mutual obligation to engage in armed intervention if any member state requests it. In fact Canada has nothing to back it up except for its military ties with Washington and the Alliance.
That Canada has advanced to the front rank of Western nations confronting and challenging a disproportionately stronger Russia in the Arctic strongly suggests that it has been put up to the task. Being a smaller and weaker nation allows it to be cast in the role of a sympathetic victim of “Russian aggression,” much like Estonia two years ago with alleged cyber attacks and Georgia last year after its invasion of South Ossetia. Leading Western elected officials were champing at the bit to activate NATO’s Article 5 in the last two cases (even though Georgia is not yet a full member of the bloc), and Canada could provide a casus belli impossible to resist.
In line with that scenario, the Canadian foreign affairs minister, the self-styled Lawrence of the Arctic, was back on the warpath on November 23, warning “the world…that this country will respond ‘firmly’ when other nations ‘push the envelope’ with military exercises or other provocative actions anywhere along Canada’s northern frontier.” [17]
He was not, of course, referring to the United States or Great Britain or Denmark, who as NATO allies are allowed to parade their military presence off Canada’s coast as they choose to do. He singled out Russia.
Cannon spoke three days after U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates addressed the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. “The future of NATO and international claims on untapped Arctic oil [also] dominated discussions, largely behind closed doors, between Gates and top officials from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, Germany, India, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.
“Gates announced…that Washington planned to boost cooperation with Canada in the Arctic, as Russia and others eye its vast energy and mineral resources.” [18]
Cannon’s – laughable except for the broader context – comments were made at the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto where he retrieved a chestnut from the archives (“Arctic superpower” and “energy superpower” from last August) and “said the country’s future as an ‘energy superpower’ is closely tied to potentially rich deposits of Arctic oil and gas on land and seabed.” [19]
This year’s study by the U.S. Geological Survey “assessed the area north of the Arctic Circle and concluded that about 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil may be found there, mostly offshore under less than 500 meters of water. Undiscovered natural gas is three times more abundant than oil in the Arctic and is largely concentrated in Russia.” [20]
Hence Cannon’s assertion that “This is why we react so strongly when other nations, like Russia, engage in exercises and other activities that appear to challenge our security in the North….” [21]
Three North American news sources, one Canadian and two U.S., all not unsympathetic to the initiative, recently wrote about the new Navy Arctic Roadmap.
The National Post recently published this:
“The U.S. Navy is planning a massive push into the Arctic to defend national security, potential undersea riches and other maritime interests.
“An ‘Arctic road map’ released by the Department of the Navy details a five-year strategic plan to expand fleet operations into the North in the expectation the frozen Arctic Ocean will be open water in summer by 2030.
“[I]t is clear the United States is intent on seriously retooling its military presence and naval combat capabilities in a region increasingly seen as a potential flashpoint as receding polar ice allows easier access.” [22]
An American source which linked the online version of the Roadmap added of it in relation to U.S.-Canadian collaboration in the Arctic:
“It includes a comprehensive, three-phase outline of measures the Navy hopes to undertake in the Arctic region within four years: develop new, resilient vessels and weaponry; map the seabed floor for potential resources and geological information; and innovate diagnostic tools to more accurately predict when the cap will thaw.
“Even as the ratification process lurches through the Senate, the U.S. Navy is launching the first phases of its program. In August, Navy service-members and administrators took part in a Canadian training program, Nanook, where they learned tactical strategy for rugged climates and underwent disaster-relief training. In October, the United States Naval War College hosted the 19th biennial Seapower Symposium, where American and Canadian Naval administrators discussed their 6,500-nautical-mile dispute over waterway boundaries.” [23]
Third, with the unabashed title of “U.S. Navy Prepares for Militarization of the Arctic,” another report revealed that “the U.S. Navy is…planning for potential combat situations that may arise once global warming has melted the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice within two decades. A 35-page memo from the Department of the Navy spells out a five-year plan expressing the need to develop new technology and strategies in the event things become contentious in the open waters of the Arctic Circle by 2030.” [24]
As the U.S. and NATO campaign in Afghanistan is being intensified to an all-time high level of fighting (with more foreign troops in that nation than at any previous period in its history), with the Pentagon expanding into Colombia in a move that could trigger a regional and even continental war, and with Western proxies in the South Caucasus eager to launch new armed hostilities on Russia’s southern border, even the top of the world, the remote Arctic Circle, is not being spared the threat of war.
1) http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2009/11/us-navy-arctic-roadmap-nov-2009.pdf
2) Ibid
3) NATO’s, Pentagon’s New Strategic Battleground: The Arctic
February 2, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/natos-pentagons-new-strategic-battleground-the-arctic
4) National Security Presidential Directive 66
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-66.htm
5) Voice of Russia, January 16, 2009
6) NATO, January 29, 2009
7) Voice of Russia, January 30, 2009
8) Encroachment From All Compass Points: Canada Leads NATO Confrontation With
Russia In North
Stop NATO, August 5, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/encroachment-from-all-compass-points-canada-leads-nato-confrontation-with-russia-in-north
9) End of Scandinavian Neutrality: NATO’s Militarization Of Europe
Stop NATO, April 10, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/end-of-scandinavian-neutrality-natos-militarization-of-europe
10) Canada: Battle Line In East-West Conflict Over The Arctic
Stop NATO, June 3, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/canada-battle-line-in-east-west-conflict-over-the-arctic
11) Navy Arctic Roadmap, November 10, 2009
12) Navy NewsStand, March 20, 2007
13) Canwest News Service, November 16, 2009
14) Ibid
15) Ibid
16) Ibid
17) Canwest News Service, November 24, 2009
18) Agence France-Presse, November 22, 2009
19) Ibid
20) Science, May 29, 2009
21) Canwest News Service, November 24, 2009
22) National Post, November 27
23) World Politics Review, November 30, 2009
24) AllGov, November 30, 2009
Geopolitical Crossroads: Pentagon, NATO Complete Conquest Of Balkans
Stop NATO
November 28, 2009
Geopolitical Crossroads: Pentagon, NATO Complete Conquest Of Balkans
Rick Rozoff
———-
Bosnia and Montenegro being incorporated as full NATO members and Macedonia following suit would expand the world’s only military bloc to 31 nations, almost twice that of ten years ago when it first began its drive into Eastern Europe. And with Serbia and Kosovo, which even before becoming a member is the world’s first NATO political entity, included the Alliance’s numbers will have more than doubled since 1999, a decade after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. All seventeen new acquisitions would be in Eastern Europe, and the majority of NATO member states would be former Warsaw Pact members or Yugoslav republics and a province.
———-
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen visited the capital of Montenegro on November 26 and that of Bosnia the following day.
A Balkans news source wrote of the visits that Rasmussen would “discuss the possibility of approving Montenegro’s action plan for NATO membership” and “discuss strengthening NATO and BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina] cooperation.” [1]
Ahead of the Balkans tour Rasmussen was in Germany to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel and recruit more troops for the war in Afghanistan.
The NATO chief has been even busier than usual of late, simultaneously recruiting troops from nations throughout Europe for Afghanistan on Washington’s behalf, working on the bloc’s new Strategic Concept, drumming up support for a continent-wide, U.S.-led interceptor missile system and preparing for a NATO foreign ministers meeting on December 3-4.
The Balkans fit into all the above aspects of what has in recent years routinely been referred to as 21st Century, global and expeditionary NATO, one feverishly seeking new “third millennium challenges” and invoking “a myriad deadly threats” [2] as pretexts for increasing its already widening role in five continents and the Middle East.
Several days before Rasmussen arrived in the world’s newest (recognized) nation, Montenegro, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Alexander Vershbow was in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo to preside over the fifth meeting of defense chiefs of the US-Adriatic Charter, set up by Washington in 2003 to fast-track Balkans nations into NATO.
The first three members enlisted by the U.S. were Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. The first two were formally inducted into full NATO membership at the bloc’s sixtieth anniversary summit this April and Macedonia also would have been dragged into the Alliance except for the lingering dispute with Greece over its name. Bosnia and Montenegro were added to the Charter last year and Serbia – and breakaway Kosovo – are to be next. With Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia becoming full member states at the Istanbul summit in 2004 and Greece and Turkey members for decades, all of Southeast Europe has been transformed into NATO territory, from the Adriatic to the Black and from the Aegean to the Ionian Seas.
The November 17 meeting in Bosnia was attended by, in addition to the Pentagon’s Vershbow (who was U.S. ambassador to NATO during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia), the deputy defense minister of Albania and the defense chiefs of Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro. Also present were the defense ministers of Serbia and Slovenia, Dragan Sutanovac and Ljubica Jelisic, the last two nations in a category labeled “guest and observer countries.”
“Vershbow reiterated US support for the early approval of BiH and Montenegro’s applications for the Membership Action Plan (MAP). He also said full NATO membership for Macedonia will be backed, as soon as the issue of its name is resolved.” Additionally, the defense chiefs “agreed to sign a joint statement on enhancing co-operation through regional centres in the Western Balkans.” [3]
An Associated Press dispatch at the time of the Adriatic Charter meeting mentioned of the December 3-4 assembly in Brussels (which will also be a forum for enlisting thousands of more NATO troops for the Afghan war) that “An upcoming meeting of NATO foreign ministers will provide a boost for Bosnia and Montenegro to become the 29th and 30th members of the trans-Atlantic alliance.” [4]
Bosnia and Montenegro being incorporated as full NATO members and Macedonia following suit would expand the world’s only military bloc to 31 nations, almost twice that of ten years ago when it first began its drive into Eastern Europe. And with Serbia and Kosovo, which even before becoming a member is the world’s first NATO political entity, included the Alliance’s numbers will have more than doubled since 1999, a decade after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. All seventeen new acquisitions would be in Eastern Europe, and the majority of NATO member states would be former Warsaw Pact members or Yugoslav republics and a province.
The Pentagon has already secured seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania [5] which border the Black Sea in the Northern Balkans, including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer airbases in the first country and the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in the second. The airfields have been used for “downrange” military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Romanian installation now hosts the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force – East.
The U.S.’s colossal Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo is now ten years old and the use and upgrading of Croatian and Montenegrin Adriatic harbors for U.S. Navy deployments is an imminent possibility.
The further the fragmentation of former Yugoslavia proceeds, the more thoroughly the region will be transformed into a string of so-called forward operating bases and “lily pads” (Donald Rumsfeld’s term) for military action to the east and south.
The 2006 Western-supported dissolution of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, itself a transitional mechanism devised by Javier Solana, NATO Secretary General during the 1999 war and since then the European Union’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, completed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia into its six federal republics. The unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia by Kosovo in 2008, not only backed but engineered by NATO and its civilian complements, the government of the United States and the European Union, began the second phase of the dismemberment of the nation: The breaking apart of former republics into mini-states. [6]
Behind Kosovo lie Vojvodina, the Presevo Valley and Sandzak in Serbia, where ethnic separatism, cross-border armed attacks and outright terrorism have raised their heads, respectively.
Macedonia faces the same alarming prospect. Attacks by adjuncts of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army – the National Liberation Army (NLA) of Ali Ahmeti – from inside Kosovo in 2001 placed the new nation on the precipice of all-out war and violent fragmentation.
Last week Menduh Thaci, head of the Democratic Party of Albanians, called on his sponsors in the West to reduce Macedonia to an international protectorate. Speaking of a current political crisis largely of his making, Thaci said “I am convinced that the only way out is an urgent international protection, which will be a preventive measure for possible events.” The next step is for the name of the nation to be changed or adjusted and for whatever it will then be called to be brought into NATO. Both the Greek government and pan-Albanian forces in Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, South Serbia and Montenegro will be satisfied with the result and NATO will acquire its 29th (or 31st) member state. [7]
Montenegro, barely three years old, will soon deploy the first contingent of its armed forces to serve under NATO in Afghanistan. When it arrives it will join troops from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia. The last seven nations also provided soldiers for the military occupation of Iraq after 2003. Montenegro didn’t exist as an independent state at that time, so its initiation as a NATO candidate country will be in Afghanistan.
With Serbia as an observer nation of the Adriatic Charter and with it having joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace transitional program in 2006, Washington and Brussels will also soon call on it to prove its right to Alliance candidacy by dispatching troops to the Afghan war front. As the U.S. and NATO are on the verge of a qualitative escalation of the war in South Asia, the Serbian foreign and defense ministries have announced the opening of a mission at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “[T]he point of the mission will be to improve cooperation and everyday communication with NATO, participate in the work of 100 expert committees, and improve…cooperation with ‘50 member-states’ of the ‘political’ alliance.” [8] Fifty states are almost exactly the number that have provided NATO troops for the war in Afghanistan. Serbia could be the 51st.
Even for the representative of a battered, splintered, demoralized nation, recent statements by current Serbian Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovac are offensive in their shameless fawning and obsequiousness.
He will soon be the first Serbian defense chief to visit the Pentagon in a quarter of a century, a fact he is proud of, and recently said that his trip will be “without a doubt, politically and militarily very important,” as much of the money – $500 million – Washington has bribed Belgrade authorities with since the overthrow of President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 “[was] used by the Serbian military.”
Sutanovac, who graduated from the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, jointly run by the U.S. Department of Defense and the German Defense Ministry, and who is described as “speaking perfect English,” added these revealing details:
“The Serbian MoD [Ministry of Defense] has stable relations with the U.S. military and we can say that cooperation in defense is the backbone of relations between the United States and Serbia at the moment.”
“Considering the fact that the U.S. defense budget is as large as the defense budget of the rest of the world, it is crystal clear what the most important thing is to U.S. foreign policy and international relations.” [9]
The former Kosovo Liberation Army, then Kosovo Protection Corps (and now Kosovo Security Force) offered troops to the U.S. for the war in Iraq shortly after the invasion of 2003 and the NATO-equipped and trained Kosovo Security Force, a nascent national army in all but name, will offer troops to NATO for the Afghan war as it drags on indefinitely. [10]
During recent municipal elections in Kosovo, the first since its nominal independence, one not recognized by 140 of 192 nations and by few outside the NATO world (the exceptions including Afghanistan, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Marshall Islands, San Marino, Belize, Malta, Samoa, the Maldives, the Comoros, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru and Palau), supporters of former KLA chieftains Hashim Thaci – the Western-recognized prime minister – and war criminal Ramush Haradinaj were at daggers drawn and “people used rocks to attack a line of cars that transported Hashim Thaci….Thaci’s party accused Haradinaj of directly inciting and organizing [the] attack….” [11]
A Russian report on the Western-endorsed and -celebrated elections placed the West’s Kosovo strategy in a broader context:
“EU officials are the ones forcing the Serbian government to accept several very unpleasant decisions – recognition of the municipal elections in Kosovo, dissociation from Russia and the pullout of joint energy projects with Russia.
“As for democratic values in the EU policy with regard to Serbia, they are hard to believe in, given the EU officials’ open sympathies with the Albanian militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Incidentally, the supporters of two KLA leaders, former ‘prime minister’ Ramush Haradinaj and his successor Hashim Thaci, caused a violent clash in one of the Albanian enclaves.
“It is worth reminding here that Haradinaj was allowed to leave the Hague occasionally ‘to rule’ Kosovo during his trial, while Thaci was eventually cleared by the Hague Tribunal of all charges of genocide against Serbs.” [12]
Nevertheless the United States and its NATO allies, the self-proclaimed “international community” and champions of democracy, human rights and so forth wherever and whenever it suits their political purposes, continue to embrace the Kosovo entity as a brother-in-arms in the new global order.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was in the Kosovo capital of Pristina on November 1 for the unveiling of a particularly vulgar and meretricious gold-sprayed statue of himself [13], the ceremony presided over by the former head of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Hashim “The Snake” Thaci, the creation of whose pseudo-nation is a cause of great pride in Western capitals.
The Associated Press reported on the event in Europe’s drug-smuggling criminal black hole:
“The statue portrays Clinton with his left arm raised and holding a portfolio bearing his name and the date when NATO started bombing Yugoslavia, on March 24, 1999.
“Many waved American, Albanian and Kosovo flags and chanted ‘USA!’ as the former president climbed on top of a podium with his poster in the background reading ‘Kosovo honors a hero.’” [14]
That Albanian flags were flaunted reveals what NATO mercilessly bombed the length and breadth of Yugoslavia for 78 days to achieve.
Three weeks afterward the mayor of a town in Albania – the distinction between that nation and Kosovo is now a strictly academic one – announced plans to follow suit and dedicate a statue to George W. Bush. Bush and Clinton have jointly sired the Kosovo/Greater Kosovo aberration. “The small Albanian town of Fushe-Kruje plans to erect a statue of former U.S. President George W. Bush to commemorate his June 2007 visit, when he was feted as a hero in an outpouring of love for America.”
The town’s mayor, Ismet Mavriqi, was quoted as saying, “If I had the final say, I would very much like a three-meter statue, probably in bronze, that captures his trademark way of walking with energy.” [15]
The legacy that Washington and Brussels have left the people of Kosovo – those remaining that is, as hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Roma and others have fled for their lives since June of 1999 – was detailed in a recent Reuters report.
It said that although “Over the past decade it has received 3 billion euros in aid, according to the World Bank, and is expecting another billion by 2011,” nevertheless “unemployment is 40 percent and average per capita income is 1,760 euros. That compares with average joblessness of just under 10 percent in the European Union and an average salary of about 24,000 euros ($35,930).” [16]
Ten years of NATO-KLA collaboration have produced this human catastrophe.
This is the stability and prosperity that the West has brought to the Balkans.
That afflicted part of Europe has been the testing ground for NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and since into Asia, Africa and the Middle East, starting with Bosnia in 1995 when NATO dropped its first bombs and deployed its first troops outside the territory of its member states.
As early as January of 1996 the now deceased American scholar Sean Gervasi warned that “There are deeper reasons for the dispatch of NATO forces to the Balkans, and especially for the extension of NATO to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in the relatively near future. These have to do with an emerging strategy for securing the resources of the Caspian Sea region and for ’stabilizing’ the countries of Eastern Europe – ultimately for ’stabilizing’ Russia and the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.” [17]
NATO now has solidified military partnerships, conducts regular war games and has established permanent bases in several countries on and near the Caspian Sea – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, not to mention Afghanistan.
It has absorbed three former Soviet republics – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and continues to insist that former Commonwealth of Independent States member Georgia and current one Ukraine will become full members of the Alliance.
Thirteen years ago Gervasi also warned that “The United States is now seeking to consolidate a new European-Middle Eastern bloc of nations….This grouping includes Turkey, which is of pivotal importance in the emerging new bloc. Turkey is not just a part of the southern Balkans and an Aegean power. It also borders on Iraq, Iran and Syria. It thus connects southern Europe to the Middle East, where the US considers that it has vital interests….With the war against Iraq [1991], the US established itself in the Middle East more securely than ever. The almost simultaneous disintegration of the Soviet Union opened the possibility of Western exploitation of the oil resources of the Caspian Sea region.” [18]
Events in the interim have proceeded exactly as Gervasi indicated they would and for the motives he attributed to them.
Having undermined the United Nations, violated international law, humiliated Russia and moved NATO forces into the Balkans, the West was embarked in earnest on its drive for global domination in the post-Cold War world. As NATO’s first war, the Operation Allied Force bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, was dragging on and assuming ever more ominous dimensions, even before the destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO bombs, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin appeared on his nation’s television and said: “I told Nato, the Americans, the Germans, don’t push us towards military action.
“Otherwise there will be a European war for sure – and possibly world war.” [19]
That Yeltsin was the dependable friend of Washington that he was made the statement even more foreboding. Less than a month afterward the Chinese embassy was in ruins as the war raged on.
Europe and the world avoided a broader war ten years ago. But NATO, using the Balkans as its global springboard, may yet succeed in triggering a conflict that will not be contained and will not remain within the realm of conventional warfare.
1) Macedonian Radio and Television, November 26, 2009
2) Thousand Deadly Threats: Third Millennium NATO, Western Businesses Collude
On New Global Doctrine
Stop NATO, October 2, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/thousand-deadly-threats-third-millennium-nato-western-businesses-collude-on-new-global-doctrine
3) Southeast European Times, November 20, 2009
4) Associated Press, November 18, 2009
5) Bulgaria, Romania: U.S., NATO Bases For War In The East
Stop NATO, October 24, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/bulgaria-romania-u-s-nato-bases-for-war-in-the-east
6) Adriatic Charter And The Balkans: Smaller Nations, Larger NATO
Stop NATO, May 13, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/adriatic-charter-and-the-balkans-smaller-nations-larger-nato
7) Threat Of New Conflict In Europe: Western-Sponsored Greater Albania
Stop NATO, October 8, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/new-threat-of-conflict-in-europe-western-sponsored-greater-albania
8) Vecernje Novosti, November 4, 2009
9) Politika, November 27, 2009
10) Balkans: Staging Ground For NATO’s Post-Cold War Order
Stop NATO, February 9, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/balkans-staging-ground-for-natos-post-cold-war-order
11) Tanjug News Agency, November 12, 2009
12) Russian Information Agency Novosti, November 17, 2009
13) Kosovo: Marking Ten Years Of Worldwide Wars
Stop NATO, October 31, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/kosovo-marking-ten-years-of-worldwide-wars
14) Associated Press, November 1, 2009
15) Reuters, November 21, 2009
16) Reuters, November 20, 2009
17) Sean Gervasi, Why Is NATO In Yugoslavia?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/GER108A.html
18) Ibid
19) BBC News, April 9, 1999
Christmas 2009: U.S., NATO To Expand New Millennium’s Longest War
Stop NATO
November 25, 2009
Christmas 2009: U.S., NATO To Expand New Millennium’s Longest War
Rick Rozoff
———-
Assuming as there is every reason to that the majority of new U.S. troops will be assigned to ISAF, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will field a 100,000-troop, 50-nation army in the heart of Asia.
In his report of three months ago the commander of all U.S. and NATO occupation forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, recommended increasing the size of the Afghan National Army from what he claimed is currently 92,000 troops to 240,000, as his counterinsurgency strategy requires nearly 400,000 troops in all. McChrystal, former head of the Joint Special Operations Command, was appointed to his current dual role because of his counterinsurgency background.
However, efforts to build a national Afghan army with numbers in the six figures have been announced since shortly after the invasion of the nation in 2001 and that threshold has never been crossed. Nor is it ever likely to be. Afghans are in no rush to join a colonial adjunct force to assist in the subjugation of their country and its people by North American and European invaders.
———-
At a joint press conference with visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on November 24, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke of the war in Afghanistan that is now in its ninth year and pledged, “After eight years – some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done – it is my intention to finish the job.”
The comments came after the previous evening’s war council as it was described in the American media, the tenth (ninth by some counts) such meeting and the culmination of a three-month strategic review process following top U.S. and NATO military commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal’s 66-page Commander’s Initial Assessment of August 30.
The latter spoke of the “criticality of time” and unequivocally emphasized a counterinsurgency rather than a counter-terrorism approach for the war’s next and deadliest stage. That is, war against all ethnic Pushtun fighters (on both side of the Afghan-Pakistani border) subsumed under the rubric of Taliban rather than a narrower campaign against alleged al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.
In fact McChrystal identified only three insurgent groups to be targeted in the upcoming round of the Pentagon’s and NATO’s South Asian war: The Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani Network and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin. The third is the fighting force of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the U.S.’s main ally during the first phase of the 30-year-old Afghan war from 1978-1992.
The so-called Quetta Shura Taliban are accused of being based, as the name would suggest, in the capital of the Pakistani province of Balochistan – Quetta – and that it is on the top of McChrystal’s list indicates that the war’s focus is larger than just Afghanistan.
With all the objectivity, sophistication and subtle delicacy of phrase the American press prides itself on, the nation’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, offered this choice specimen early this February:
“From Quetta, Taliban leaders including Mullah Muhammad Omar, a reclusive, one-eyed cleric, guide commanders in southern Afghanistan, raise money from wealthy Persian Gulf donors and deliver guns and fresh fighters to the battlefield, according to Obama administration and military officials.” [1]
Another sterling pillar of the American free press, the Christian Science Monitor, characterized the Haqqani Network as “a shadowy outfit that many officials consider to be the biggest threat to the American presence in the country.” [2] It is not part of Taliban, however that term is defined. The source also situates that group’s headquarters in Pakistan.
Its founder and leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, has a resume not dissimilar to that of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. “Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, who worked closely with the anti-Soviet insurgency (inspiring the 2007 Tom Hanks film ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’), once called Haqqani ‘goodness personified.’
“In the 1980s, Haqqani quickly established himself as one of the preeminent field commanders. ‘He could kill Russians like you wouldn’t believe,’ says one US intelligence officer who knew him at the time. The Central Intelligence Agency forged close links with him, and through the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency funneled large amounts of weapons and cash his way.” [3]
Two of McChrystals’ enemies, then, are old friends and beneficiaries of current U.S. Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency armed and trained them in the 1980s.
Gates and McChrystal both participated in Obama’s war council on the evening of November 23 and were joined by, on the civilian side:
-Vice President Joseph Biden
-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
-Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg
-National Security Adviser and former European Command and NATO top military commander James Jones
-Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon
-Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy
-U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke
-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice
-Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan
-U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, previously U.S. Army Lieutenant General, Commander of the Combined Forces Command in Afghanistan, and immediately before becoming a “diplomat” Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee
-U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson
And in uniform:
-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen
-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General James Cartwright
-U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus
-Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan (formerly George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan) Lieutenant General Douglas Lute
McChrystal, Eikenberry and Patterson appeared via video conference. [4]
It is unclear why Admiral James Stavridis, current NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and European Command chief wasn’t involved.
News reports, or more properly government leaks to the subservient press corps, indicate that Obama is to announce a new round of troops increases after the Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, a time when Americans gather for a day of family, food and football, and as such not to be spoiled by alarming or distressing news, such as deployment notices for service members currently Stateside.
For similar reasons the announcement cannot be delayed for long after that federal holiday as another one, Christmas, arrives 29 days later. American retailers estimate that between 25% and 40% of their annual sales occur in the interim and news that anywhere from 30-40,000 more of the nation’s troops are headed to the world’s largest and most protracted war zone would cast a pall over both the holiday and spending for it.
That the day celebrates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who in the Sermon on the Mount said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” and on the night before being brutally put to death said “Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” will not deter Washington’s war plans.
The timing of the escalation, which may triple the amount of American forces in Afghanistan from the 36,000 at the beginning of the year, is also synchronized with the December 3-4 meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels. Hillary Clinton will then present the new U.S. plan and demand complementary reinforcements from the other 27 member states.
Obama is expected to deliver a televised message on December 1, two days before the NATO meeting commences.
If he announces that as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops are to be assigned for deployment to Afghanistan, that number, added to the 68,000 currently there, would almost equal the amount of Soviet forces in the nation at the time of the beginning of their withdrawal twenty years ago. [5]
There are also an estimated 42,000 non-U.S. soldiers from almost 50 nations serving under NATO in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). That number, part of NATO’s first ground war and first armed conflict in Asia, is also being increased.
At a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Slovakia late last month the attendees “endorsed the ambitious counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, giving new impetus to his recommendation to pour more troops into the eight-year-old war.” [6] McChrystal himself made an unannounced appearance to rally the bloc’s defense chiefs for a full-scale Vietnam-style counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
Since the meeting several NATO member states, particularly new ones in Eastern Europe, have pledged additional troops, even before Obama’s speech of early next week and the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting to follow it.
During a five-day session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh, Scotland in the middle of this month, the 28-nation military bloc renewed its intention to, to quote Obama’s later expression, finish the job in South Asia against the forces of “evil” and “barbarianism.” [7]
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen vowed “In a few weeks, I expect we will decide, in Nato, on the approach, and troop levels needed, to take our mission forward.
“I’m confident it will be a counter-insurgency approach, with substantially more forces.” [8]
The same news source quoted above added: “His announcement follows a meeting of the North Atlantic Council last week, in which the alliance’s member states broadly endorsed a strategy proposed by the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal….” [9]
To stoke the fires of hysteria and pound the drums of war ever more deafeningly, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on November 20 told The Guardian that “The Afghan government would quickly be overthrown if NATO troops pulled out of the country now,” [10] over eight years after the invasion of the nation, thousands of civilian deaths and billions of Western dollars poured into the war. Miliband’s country has lost over 230 soldiers in the conflict, more than in any fighting since the Falklands/Malvinas war of 1982.
He specified “If international forces leave, you can choose a time – five minutes, 24 hours or seven days – but the insurgent forces will overrun those forces that are prepared to put up resistance and we would be back to square one.” [11]
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has vowed to send at least 500 more troops, bringing his nation’s total close to 10,000, the second largest contingent after that of the United States.
The Times of London wrote earlier this month that “President Obama is to ask members of Nato to provide up to 4,000 more troops to help to break the deadlock in Afghanistan” and “is expected to confirm that the campaign in Afghanistan needs another 40,000 troops, meeting the request made by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Kabul, more than ten weeks ago, but that a proportion of the 40,000 — up to ten per cent — should be for other Nato countries to provide.” [12]
Four days ago the Wall Street Journal claimed a larger figure in an article subtitled “Americans Seek Up to 7,000 Extra NATO Troops for Ramp-Up in Afghanistan,” and stated that “The Obama administration is in advanced talks with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies for a coordinated rollout of a new Afghan war strategy, which U.S. officials hope will include a commitment by European allies to send several thousand additional troops.” [13]
7,000 more non-U.S. troops would add up to almost 50,000 serving under NATO – from 50 nations – in addition to as many as 108,000 U.S. forces, 34,000 currently assigned to NATO and roughly the same amount with the U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom. Assuming as there is every reason to that the majority of new U.S. troops will be assigned to ISAF, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will field a 100,000-troop, 50-nation army in the heart of Asia.
To further demonstrate the geographical reach of the embryonic global army [14] that the U.S. and NATO are forging in the crucible of the South Asia war, the Financial Times reported that “Georgia, which is not in Nato, has said it will send close to 1,000 extra troops. Other fresh contributions have come from Armenia, New Zealand and Sweden…..Colombia is seeking to send an infantry company….Nato officials are negotiations with Mongolia, which is aiming to send 250.” [15]
Also, “South Korea will send hundreds of troops to create a new ‘provincial reconstruction team’….” [16] Along with troops from Australia (which is the largest non-NATO contributor with 1,550 soldiers), the United Arab Emirates and two of the nations contributing the largest amount of forces, the U.S. and Canada, NATO will have a combined army of soldiers from five of six inhabited continents, the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and the South Pacific.
On November 21 NATO took control of training the Afghan army and police:
“The existing U.S. training mission, CSTC-A, until now responsible for most of the training, is to merge with the new NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A), under a single NATO command, commanders said on Saturday at a ceremony in Kabul.
“Deputy Commander of the new NATO mission Major General Michael Ward said he believed the move would encourage more NATO training personnel to be sent to Afghanistan, helping to speed the expansion of local forces.” [17]
In his report of three months ago the commander of all U.S. and NATO occupation forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, recommended increasing the size of the Afghan National Army from what he claimed is currently 92,000 troops to 240,000, as his counterinsurgency strategy requires nearly 400,000 troops in all. McChrystal, former head of the Joint Special Operations Command, was appointed to his current dual role because of his counterinsurgency background. [18]
However, efforts to build a national Afghan army with numbers in the six figures have been announced since shortly after the invasion of the nation in 2001 and that threshold has never been crossed. Nor is it ever likely to be. Afghans are in no rush to join a colonial adjunct force to assist in the subjugation of their country and its people by North American and European invaders.
Reports and formal announcements of increases in NATO and NATO partner armed forces to the war front are widespread.
Germany, which has the third largest number of troops deployed to Afghanistan (and which is engaged in its first ground combat operations since the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945) – nearly 4,500, the limit imposed by the Bundestag – may expand that figure substantially: “According to current and former U.S. officials, senior officials in the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel have signaled a willingness to press Germany’s parliament to raise its troop ceiling to as much as 7,000 from 4,500.” [19]
Poland has announced that it will deploy 600 more troops, raising the nation’s total to nearly 3,000. Romania and Turkey are reported to have been tapped for 600 more troops apiece. The Czech Republic will double its contingent to 600 soldiers and add a combat helicopter squadron and purchase “Raven U.S. remote-controlled miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAV) for 20 million crowns that are to help protect Czech soldiers in foreign missions, mainly in Afghanistan….” [20]
Slovakia will more than double its almost 250 troops. The world’s newest nation, Montenegro, is deploying its first batch of soldiers to join those already in Afghanistan from fellow Balkans nations Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia.
What fresh U.S. and NATO ally forces will confront in the war zone is indicated by a brief report from the Voice of Russia eleven days ago:
“Between 7,000 and 10,000 militants of Taliban, Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have been moved from central and southeastern Afghanistan northward to cut northern supply routes for the NATO-led coalition forces.
“Interfax agency quotes a senior Russian military source as saying that almost the whole of northern Afghanistan has been under Taliban’s control since June.” [21]
Combined Western military deaths this year are approaching 500, making 2009 the deadliest year of the war.
On November 16 the head of French military forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier General Marcel Druart, barely escaped being killed in a rocket attack only 30 miles from the capital.
At the same time new German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg paid an unannounced visit to northern Afghanistan and the helicopter convoy he was travelling in came under fire.
Four days earlier five Swedish soldiers, part of a contingent of 500 troops heading up NATO ISAF operations in the north of Afghanistan also, were wounded in a bomb attack while Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt was visiting the country.
Swedish Radio reported on November 19 that the nation’s parliament authorized the extended deployment of Swedish troops and even approved as many as 855 soldiers to serve under NATO command.
Mounting attacks on NATO supply convoys have spread from northwestern Pakistan where the Khyber Pass has been blocked to Balochistan on Afghanistan’s southeastern border.
U.S. and NATO attack helicopters and fighter jets continue to violate Pakistani airspace and U.S. President Obama recently sent a letter to the nation’s government “stepping up pressure on Pakistan to expand its fight against Taliban and al Qaeda militants, warning that the success of [the U.S.'s] new Afghanistan strategy depends on it….” [22]
The Pentagon is also escalating drone missile attacks inside Pakistan and intensifying bombing runs in Afghanistan.
“The US has carried out more than 40 attacks with its pilotless, missile-firing aircraft in north-west Pakistan this year….” [23]
In October U.S. and NATO airstrikes were the highest in any month since June of 2008, despite assurances from McChrystal and the White House that they have been decreased. “Coalition warplanes dropped 647 bombs during 2,359 close-air support sorties….The bomb total is the highest since July 2008, when 752 bombs were released….The airstrike numbers don’t include strafing runs, attacks by special operations AC-130 gunships, launches of small missiles or helicopter attacks.” [24]
….
Ten years ago the world was preparing to welcome the advent of a new millennium, some with eager anticipation and others with alarm.
No one could have foreseen that the new century and millennium would usher in a war in Afghanistan that in a few weeks will enter its tenth calendar year.
1) New York Times, February 10, 2009
2) Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 2009
3) Ibid
4) New York Daily News, November 23, 2009
5) U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan’s History
Stop NATO, September 24, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/u-s-nato-poised-for-most-massive-war-in-afghanistans-history/
6) New York Times, October 23, 2009
7) Press Association, November 13, 2009
8) The Guardian, November 17, 2009
9) Ibid
10) Reuters, November 21, 2009
11) Ibid
12) The Times, November 11, 2009
13) Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2009
14) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army
Stop NATO, August 9, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army
15) Financial Times, November 13, 2009
16) The Guardian, November 17, 2009
17) Reuters, November 21, 2009
18) South Asia, Latin America: Pentagon’s 21st Century Counterinsurgency
Wars
Stop NATO, July 29, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/south-asia-latin-america-pentagons-21st-century-counterinsurgency-wars
19) Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2009
20) Czech News Agency, November 17, 2009
21) Voice of Russia, November 13, 2009
22) Reuters, November 16, 2009
23) Financial Times, November 20, 2009
24) Army Times, November 11, 2009
Former Soviet States: Battleground For Global Domination
Stop NATO
November 23, 2009
Former Soviet States: Battleground For Global Domination
Rick Rozoff
———-
A Europe united under the EU and especially NATO is to be strong enough to contain, isolate and increasingly confront Russia as the central component of U.S. plans for control of Eurasia and the world, but cannot be allowed to conduct an independent foreign policy, particularly in regard to Russia and the Middle East. European NATO allies are to assist Washington in preventing the emergence of “the most dangerous scenario…a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran” such as has been adumbrated since in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Four years after the publication of The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski’s recommended chess move was made: The U.S. and NATO invaded Afghanistan and expanded into Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests converge and where the basis for their regional cooperation existed, and Western military bases were established in the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where they remain for the indefinite future.
———-
As the United States escalates its joint war with NATO in Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border, expands military deployments and exercises throughout Africa under the new AFRICOM, and prepares to dispatch troops to newly acquired bases in Colombia as the spearhead for further penetration of that continent, it is simultaneously targeting Eurasia and the heart of that vast land mass, the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Within months of the formal breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December of 2001, leading American policy advisers and government officials went to work devising a strategy to insure that the fragmentation was final and irreversible. And to guarantee that the fifteen new nations emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union would not be allied in even a loose association such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) founded in the month of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
Three of the former Soviet republics, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, never joined the CIS and in 2004 became full members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in all three cases placing the U.S.-led military bloc on Russian borders.
That left eleven other former republics to be weaned from economic, political, infrastructural, transportation and defense sector integration with Russia, integration that was extensively and comprehensively developed for the seventy four years of the USSR’s existence and in many cases for centuries before during the Czarist period.
A change of its socio-economic system and the splintering of the nation with the world’s largest territory only affected U.S. policy toward former Soviet space insofar as it led to Washington and its allies coveting and moving on a vast expanse of Europe and Asia hitherto off limits to it.
Two months after the end of the Soviet Union then U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy in the Pentagon, Lewis Libby, authored what became known as the Defense Planning Guidance document for the years 1994–99. Some accounts attribute the authorship to Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad under Wolfowitz’s tutelage.
Afghan-born Khalilzad is a fellow alumnus of Wolfowitz at the University of Chicago and worked under him in the Ronald Reagan State Department starting in 1984. From 1985-1989 he was the Reagan administration’s special adviser on the proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and on the Iran-Iraq war. In the first capacity he coordinated the Mujahideen war against the government of Afghanistan waged from Pakistan along with Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Robert Gates, now U.S. Secretary of Defense. (Gates has a doctorate degree in Russian and Soviet Studies, as does his former colleague the previous U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.)
The main recipient of U.S. arms and training within the Mujahideen coalition during those years was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose still extant armed group Hezb-e-Islami assisted in driving American troops out of Camp Keating in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province this October. Hekmatyar remains in Afghanistan heading the Hezb-e-Islami and top U.S. and NATO military commander General Stanley McChrystal in his Commander’s Initial Assessment of September – which called for a massive increase in American troops for the war – identified the party as one of three main insurgent forces that as many as 85,000 U.S. and thousands of NATO reinforcements will be required to fight.
The Wolfowitz-Libby-Khalilzad Defense Planning Guidance prototype appeared in the New York Times on March 7, 1992 and to demonstrate that the end of the Soviet Union and the imminent fall of the Afghan government (Hekmatyar and his allies would march into Kabul two months later) affected U.S. policy toward Russia not one jot contained these passages:
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to general global power.”
“We continue to recognize that collectively the conventional forces of the states formerly comprising the Soviet Union retain the most military potential in all of Eurasia; and we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others….We must, however, be mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.”
In its original and revised versions the 46-page Defense Planning Guidance document laid the foundation for what would informally become known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine and later the Bush Doctrine, indistinguishable in any essential manner from the Blair, alternately known as Clinton, Doctrine enunciated in 1999: That the U.S. (with its NATO allies) reserves the unquestioned right to employ military force anywhere in the world at any time for whichever purpose it sees fit and to effect “regime change” overthrows of any governments viewed as being insufficiently subservient to Washington and its regional and global designs.
Five years later former Carter administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who launched the Afghan Mujahideen support project in 1978 and worked with Khalilzad at Colombia when the latter was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs from 1979 to 1989 and Brzezinski headed the Institute on Communist Affairs, wrote an article called “A Geostrategy for Eurasia.”
It was in essence a precis of his book of the same year, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It’s Geostrategic Imperatives, and was published in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
The framework for the piece is contained in this paragraph:
“America’s status as the world’s premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key dimensions of power – military, economic, technological, and cultural – that confer global political clout. Short of American abdication, the only real alternative to American leadership is international anarchy. President Clinton is correct when he says America has become the world’s ‘indispensable nation.’”
Brzezinski identified the subjugation of Eurasia as Washington’s chief global geopolitical objective, with the former Soviet Union as the center of that policy and NATO as the main mechanism to accomplish the strategy.
“Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead in Eurasia. America’s stake in democratic Europe is enormous. Unlike America’s links with Japan, NATO entrenches American political influence and military power on the Eurasian mainland. With the allied European nations still highly dependent on U.S. protection, any expansion of Europe’s political scope is automatically an expansion of U.S. influence. Conversely, the United States’ ability to project influence and power in Eurasia relies on close transatlantic ties.
“A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of U.S. policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East….”
The double emigre – first from Poland, then from Canada – advocated a diminished role for nation states, including the U.S., and Washington’s collaboration in building a stronger Europe in furtherance of general Western domination of Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa and the world as a whole.
“In practical terms, all this will eventually require America’s accommodation to a shared leadership in NATO, greater acceptance of France’s concerns over a European role in Africa and the Middle East, and continued support for the European Union’s eastward expansion even as the EU becomes politically and economically more assertive….A new Europe is still taking shape, and if that Europe is to remain part of the ‘Euro-Atlantic’ space, the expansion of NATO is essential.”
While giving lip service to the role of the European Union, he left no doubt as to which organization – the world’s only military bloc – is to lead the charge in the conquest of the former Soviet Union as well as the world’s “periphery.” It is NATO.
Already stating in 1997, two years before his native Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary would become full members of the Alliance, that “Ukraine, provided it has made significant domestic reforms and has become identified as a Central European country, should also be ready for initial negotiations with the EU and NATO,” he added:
“Failure to widen NATO, now that the commitment has been made, would shatter the concept of an expanding Europe and demoralize the Central Europeans. Worse, it could reignite dormant Russian political aspirations in Central Europe. Moreover, it is far from evident that the Russian political elite shares the European desire for a strong American political and military presence in Europe….If a choice must be made between a larger Europe-Atlantic system and a better relationship with Russia, the former must rank higher.”
That a former U.S. foreign policy official and citizen of the country would so blithely determine years before the event which nations would join the European Union went without comment on both sides of the Atlantic. That the nominal geographic location of a nation – placing Ukraine in Central Europe – would be assigned by an American was similarly assumed to be Washington’s prerogative evidently.
Despite vapid maunderings about desiring to free post-Soviet Russia from its “imperial past” and “integrating [it] into a cooperative transcontinental system,” Brzezinski presented a blueprint for surrounding the nation with a NATO cordon sanitaire, in truth a wall of military fortifications.
“Russia is more likely to make a break with its imperial past if the newly independent post-Soviet states are vital and stable. Their vitality will temper any residual Russian imperial temptations. Political and economic support for the new states must be an integral part of a broader strategy….Ukraine is a critically important component of such a policy, as is support for such strategically pivotal states as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.”
Adding Georgia and Moldova, the three states he singles out became the nucleus of the GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova) bloc originally created in the same year as Brzezinski’s article and book appeared. (Uzbekistan joined in 1999 and left in 2005.)
GUAM was promoted by the Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright administration as a vehicle for planned Trans-Eurasian energy projects and to tear apart the Commonwealth of Independent States by luring members apart from Russia toward the European Union, the so-called soft power preliminary stage, and NATO, the hard power culmination of the process.
In the above-quoted article Brzezinski also wrote, in addressing Turkey, that “Regular consultations with Ankara regarding the future of the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia would foster Turkey’s sense of strategic partnership with the United States. America should also support Turkish aspirations to have a pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan on its own Mediterranean coast serve as a major outlet for the Caspian sea basin energy reserves.”
Eight years later, in 2005, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline transporting Caspian Sea oil to Europe came online, followed by the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline and the Kars-Akhalkalaki-Tbilisi-Baku railway, with the Nabucco natural gas pipeline next to be activated. The last-named is already slated to include, in addition to Caspian supplies, gas from Iraq and North Africa.
The book whose foreword Brzezinski’s “A Geostrategy for Eurasia” in a way was, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It’s Geostrategic Imperatives, laid out in greater detail plans that have been expanded upon in the interim.
The volume’s preface states, “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book….Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran….Averting this contingency, however remote it may be, will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.”
In pursuance of “America’s role as the first, only, and last truly global superpower,” Brzezinski noted that “the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”
The military fist inside the diplomatic glove is and will remain NATO.
“The emergence of a truly united Europe – especially if that should occur with constructive American support – will require significant changes in the structure and processes of the NATO alliance, the principal link between America and Europe. NATO provides not only the main mechanism for the exercise of US influence regarding European matters but the basis for the politically critical American military presence in Western Europe….Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.”
In a section with the heading “The NATO Imperative,” the author reiterated earlier policy demands: “It follows that a wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve well both the short-term and the longer-term goals of US policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence — and, through the admission of new Central European members, also increase in the European councils the number of states with a pro-American proclivity — without simultaneously creating a Europe politically so integrated that it could soon challenge the United States on geopolitical matters of high importance to America elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East.”
A Europe united under the EU and especially NATO is to be strong enough to contain, isolate and increasingly confront Russia as the central component of U.S. plans for control of Eurasia and the world, but cannot be allowed to conduct an independent foreign policy, particularly in regard to Russia and the Middle East. European NATO allies are to assist Washington in preventing the emergence of “the most dangerous scenario…a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran” such as has been adumbrated since in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Four years after the publication of The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski’s recommended chess move was made: The U.S. and NATO invaded Afghanistan and expanded into Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests converge and where the basis for their regional cooperation existed, and Western military bases were established in the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where they remain for the indefinite future.
Western-controlled pipelines traverse the South Caucasus – Azerbaijan and Georgia – to drive Russia and Iran out of the European and ultimately world energy markets, with a concomitant U.S. and NATO takeover of the armed forces of both nations. The two countries have also been tapped for increased troop deployments and transport routes for the war in South Asia.
The West is completing the process described by Brzezinski in his 1997 book in which he stated “In effect, by the mid-1990s a bloc, quietly led by Ukraine and comprising Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and sometimes also Kazakhstan, Georgia and Moldova, had informally emerged to obstruct Russian efforts to use the CIS as the tool for political integration.”
Note, not to obstruct a new “imperial” Russia from exploiting the Commonwealth of Independent States to dominate much less absorb former parts not only of the Soviet Union but of historical Russia, but to integrate – or rather maintain the integration of – nations which were within one state until eighteen years ago. At that time, 1991, the Soviet Union precipitately disintegrated into fifteen new nations and four independent “frozen conflict” zones – Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transdniester – and Russia made a 180 degree turn in its political structure and orientation, both domestically and in its foreign policy.
The response to those developments by the U.S. and its NATO cohorts was to scent blood and move in for the kill.
Starting in 1994 NATO recruited all fifteen former Soviet republics into its Partnership for Peace program, which has subsequently prepared ten nations – all in Eastern Europe, three of them former Soviet republics – for full membership.
As noted above, in 1997 the West absorbed four and for a period five former Soviet states – Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Uzbekistan – into the GUAM, now Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, format, which has recently been expanded to include Armenia and Belarus with the European Union’s Eastern Partnership initiative. The latter includes half (six of twelve) of the CIS and former CIS nations, all except for Russia and the five Central Asian countries. [1]
Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian and Ukrainian troops have been enlisted by the U.S. and NATO for the war in Afghanistan, with Moldova to be the next supplier of soldiers. All five nations also provided forces for the war and occupation in Iraq.
The five Central Asian former Soviet republics – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – have provided the Pentagon and NATO with bases and transit rights for the war in South Asia and as such are being daily dragged deeper into the Western military nexus. Kazakhstan, for example, sent troops to Iraq and may soon deploy them to Afghanistan.
In recent days the West has stepped up its offensive in several former Soviet states.
GUAM held a meeting of its Parliamentary Assembly in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on November 9 and the leader of the host nation’s parliamentary majority, David Darchiashvili, said “GUAM has significant potential, as its member states have common interests while the CIS is a union of conflicting interests” and “It is important for GUAM members to have a specific attitude to the EU. GUAM has a potential to develop a common direction with the EU under the policy of the Eastern Partnership.” [2]
Georgian Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze said at the event that “Our relations are extending, new partners appear. The US, the Czech Republic, Japan and the Baltic states will become GUAM partners soon. They will participate in economic projects with us.” [3]
The Secretary General of the Council of Europe Torbjorn Jagland met with GUAM member states’ permanent representatives to the Council of Europe and during the meeting “the Azerbaijani side emphasized the need to intensify the Council of Europe’s efforts in the settlement of ‘frozen conflicts’ in the GUAM area.” [4] The allusion is again to Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transdniester where several thousand lives were lost in fighting after the breakup of the Soviet Union and, in the case of South Ossetia, where a Georgian invasion of last year triggered a five-day war with Russia.
Later at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland from November 13-17, Azerbaijani member of parliament Zahid Oruj said that “the territories of both Georgia and Azerbaijan were occupied and the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s policy in the region proved that” and he “characterized these steps as an action against NATO.” [5] The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is a post-Soviet security bloc consisting of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Belarus (initially) and Uzbekistan both boycotted the creation of the new CSTO rapid reaction force last month and the Eastern Partnership is designed in part to pull Armenia and Belarus out of the organization. Comparable initiatives are underway in regards to the four Central Asian members states, with the Afghan war the chief mechanism for reorienting them toward NATO.
During the NATO Parliamentary Assembly session, for example, a Turkish parliamentarian said “Armenia’s releasing the occupied Azerbaijani territories [Nagorno Karabakh] will create a security zone in the South Caucasus and pave the way for NATO’s cooperation with this region.”
An Azerbaijani counterpart was even more blunt in stating “NATO should defend Azerbaijan” and stressing “that otherwise, security will not be firm in the region, stability can be violated anytime [and a] new military conflict will be inevitable.” [6]
The day after the NATO session ended the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, revealed the context for NATO “defending Azerbaijan” when he announced that “There is strong support for building the national army. Our army grows stronger. We are holding negotiations but we should be ready to liberate our territories any time from the invaders by military means.” [7]
The same day Daniel Stein, senior assistant to the U.S. Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy, was in Azerbaijan where he confirmed strategic ties with the nation’s government and said that as “global energy security is one of the priorities of US foreign policy, his country supports diversification of energy resources while delivering them to world markets.” [8]
Also on November 18 Stein’s superior, U.S. Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar, addressed the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think-tank, and said “Turkey will become a very strong transit country in transporting the gas of the Caucasus and Central Asia to Europe” – via Azerbaijan and Georgia – and “Turkmenistan and Iraq could join in as other suppliers besides Azerbaijan….” [9]
The following day, November 19, a conference on NATO’s New Strategic Concept: Contribution to the Debate from Partners was held in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The host country’s deputy foreign minister, Araz Azimov, stated at the meeting:
“I offer the signing of bilateral agreements between NATO and partner countries to cover security guarantees for partner countries along with the responsibility and commitments of the parties.
“Yes, we (partner countries) are important for NATO in general for the security architecture of the Euro-Atlantic area. Today Azerbaijan’s borders are the borders of Europe.” [10]
On November Azerbaijan hosted an international conference titled Impediments to Security in the South Caucasus: Current Realities and Future Prospects for Regional Development, co-sponsored by Britain’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. Speakers included Ariel Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and the Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation’s President Glenn Howard and Senior Fellow Vladimir Socor.
Socor, a Romanian emigre and former Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty employee, in addressing the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, “stressed the necessity of an undertaking by NATO of analogous steps in this conflict taken for the settlement of the conflicts in the Balkans and former Yugoslavia.” [11]
Novruz Mammadov, head of the Foreign Relations Department of Azerbaijan’s presidential administration, said that “Azerbaijan is the only country in the post-Soviet space usefully and really cooperating with the West,” and Elnur Aslanov, head of the Political Analysis and Information Department for the President of Azerbaijan, said:
“The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum and Baku-Tbilisi-Kars projects…stimulate the development of regional cooperation, and also are important from the security standpoint….Azerbaijan is a reliable partner of the European security architecture…the country plays an important role in ensuring European energy security.” [12]
Jamestown Foundation chief Glenn Howard added “that Azerbaijan is an important partner for NATO in terms of energy security,” and backed the nation’s deputy foreign minister’s demand the previous day that NATO must offer Yugoslav war-style support to its Caucasus partners “especially after the war in Georgia last year.”
Howard added:
“NATO can give security guarantees to a country in case of an attack, which is what happened in 1979 in the Persian Gulf – after the fall of the Shah of Iran the US gave security guarantees to countries through bilateral agreements with those countries….If Azerbaijani troops are going to help in one area, that will lessen the need for NATO troops in this particular area, so that they can be involved in some other area, for example, that helps put more troops in fighting the Taliban….” [13]
Azerbaijan is not the only former Soviet republic the U.S. intends to use to penetrate the Caspian Sea Basin. After leaving Baku the State Department’s Daniel Stein arrived in Turkmenistan where he stated that “The United States offers its mediating mission in Turkmen-Azerbaijan disputes over the Caspian status,” in relation to a border demarcation conflict in a sea that the two nations share with Russia and Iran. He added, “The U.S. and EU member countries try to assure Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan that they should reach an agreement on the division of the Caspian to create real opportunities for Nabucco and other projects.” [14]
The same day U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia George Krol was also in the Turkmen capital to deliver an address at the the annual Oil and Gas Conference there and said, “The U.S. considers energy security as a priority issue, and Central Asia is an important region in the global energy map.” [15]
In Azerbaijan’s fellow GUAM member state Moldova, the new government of acting president Mihai Ghimpu, which came to power after April’s so-called Twitter Revolution, announced that it was establishing a national committee to implement an Individual Partnership Action Plan for NATO membership. To indicate the importance the new administration attaches to integration with the bloc, “Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration Iurie Leanca has been appointed committee chairman.” [16]
Earlier this month it was reported that the government’s Prosecutor General’s Office had “dropped criminal proceedings against the people accused of masterminding riots in the republic’s capital in April, following the Opposition’s protest against the results of the parliamentary election….After the early parliamentary election on July 29 when the Opposition came to power, most cases were closed” and instead “When the new prosecutor general was appointed, criminal cases were opened against police who took part in driving the protesters from the city center and their arrests.” [17]
On the same day that the Jamestown Foundation’s Glenn Howard and Vladimir Socor were in Azerbaijan advocating NATO intervention in the South Caucasus, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden held a phone conversation with Georgian president and former U.S. resident Mikheil Saakashvili in which the first “reiterated the United States’ ’strong support’ for Georgia´s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “underscored the importance of sustaining the commitment to democratic reform to fulfill the promise of the Rose Revolution.” [18]
Also on November 20 a major Russian news source reported that Washington had shipped nearly $80 million in weapons to Georgia in 2008 and plans to supply more in the future.
“Despite the economic crisis, Georgia is increasing expenditure on arms purchases in the U.S.,” although “Independent sources say[ing] Georgia´s unemployment stands at about one-third of its able-bodied population.” [19]
On the same day a delegation from the Pentagon was in the Georgian capital to meet with Temur Iakobashvili, the nation’s State Reintegration Minister – for “reintegration” read forcible incorporation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – and the Georgian official announced “We introduced to the guests our plan to ensure security in the occupied territories. We also talked about the role the U.S. will play in assisting the ensuring of regional security.” [20]
The U.S. Defense Department representatives, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia Celeste Wallander, met with Georgian Defense Minister Bacho Akhalaia “to hold consultations on defence cooperation issues concerning the two countries,” and “Wallander personally inspected ongoing military trainings aimed at the preparation of the 31st Battalion of the GAF [Georgian Armed Forces] for participation in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. The sides evaluated the US assistance provided during 2009 and considered in detail future cooperation prospects for 2010/2011.
“Under the visit’s agenda the high-ranking US official met with the Security Council Secretary, Eka Tkeshelashvili, State Minister for Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili and Defence and Security Committee members of parliament.” [21] The inspection mentioned above was of training following that conducted by U.S. Marines. The first contingent of new Georgian troops thus prepared was sent to Afghanistan four days before.
Two days earlier NATO spokesman James Appathurai announced that the Alliance was forging ahead with plans for both Georgia’s and Ukraine’s full membership and that “assessments would be made at a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine and NATO-Georgia Commissions to be held in Brussels in early December at the level of NATO foreign ministers.” [22]
Also on November 18 Georgian Vice Premier and State Minister for Euro-Atlantic Integration Giorgi Baramidze met with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Brussels. “The Georgian delegation also included Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria and Deputy Defense Minister Nikoloz Vashakidze. A meeting of the NATO-Georgia Commission at the ambassadorial level was also held in Brussels.” [23]
The day preceding the meeting, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Tina Kaidanow were in Georgia to convene “working meetings with Georgian authorities within the Strategic Partnership Charter.
“The delegation will monitor the implementation of the U.S.-Georgia Strategic Partnership Plan” inaugurated in January of this year, less than four months after the war with Russia. [24]
The prior week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Western and allied nations of continuing to arm Georgia, stating “I hope many take lessons from last year’s August events. But I have to say that according to the reports of various sources, some countries are sending arms and ammunition demanded by the Georgian leadership via different complicated schemes.” [25]
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin warned on the same day that “[Georgian] military drones have started flying over South Ossetia and Abkhazia” [26} and the day before Nikolay Makarov, Chief of the General Staff, said "Georgia is getting large amounts of weapons supplied from abroad" and "Georgian military potential is currently higher than last August." [27]
Makarov’s contention was confirmed by Georgian Defense Minister Bacho Akhalaia on November 14 when he said “the country’s defense capabilities are now better than they were a year ago and they are further improving.”
The defense chief added, “a strong army will be one of our key priorities until the last occupant leaves our territories.” [28] The “occupants” in question are Russian troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Azerbaijan is not the only South Caucasus NATO partner preparing for war.
Regarding the recently concluded two-week Immediate Response 2009 exercises run by the U.S. Marine Corps in Georgia, a leading Russian news site wrote “Perhaps, the exercises were aimed at issuing a warning to Russia.” [29]
On November 13 the Russian General Staff revealed that “Russian secret services have declassified information about Georgia’s plans to start forming its special forces in a move that will be implemented in close cooperation with Turkey,” and “voiced concern about Georgia’s ongoing push for muscle-flexing amid efforts by Israel, Ukraine and NATO countries to re-arm the Saakashvili regime.” [30]
In Ukraine, on November 19 Deputy Foreign Minister Kostiantyn Yeliseyev said of until recently American ambassador to Georgia and currently ambassador designate to Ukraine John Tefft that “The U.S. Senate [Foreign Relations] Committee has approved his candidacy and we are expecting him to arrive soon.” [31] In time for January’s presidential election. Incumbent president and U.S. client Viktor Yushchenko is running dead last among serious candidates and his poll ratings are never higher than 3.5%. Tefft’s task is to engineer some variant of the 2004 “Orange Revolution.”
Yushchenko is a die-hard, intractable, unrelenting advocate of forcing his nation into NATO despite overwhelming popular opposition and for evicting the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea.
On November 16 NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen addressed High-Level NATO-Ukraine Consultations at the Alliance’s headquarters in Brussels and said:
“In 2008 at the Bucharest Summit NATO Heads of State and Government welcomed Ukraine’s aspirations for membership in NATO and agreed that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance. To reflect this spirit of deepening cooperation, Ukraine has developed its first Annual National Programme which outlines the steps it intends to take to accelerate internal reform and alignment with Euro-Atlantic standards.” [32]
The same day Reuters revealed that “Poland and Lithuania want to forge military cooperation with Ukraine to try to bring the former Soviet republic closer to NATO.” Poland’s Deputy Defense Minister Stanislaw Komorowski was quoted as saying of the initiative, “This reflects our support for Ukraine. We want to tie Ukraine closer to Western structures, including military ones.” [33]
The agreement was reached at talks in Brussels attended by Ukraine’s acting Defense Minister Valery Ivashchenko, Lithuania’s Minister of National Defense Rasa Jukneviciene and Poland’s Komorowski.
The combined military unit will be stationed in Poland and include as many as 5,000 troops. The joint buildup on Russia’s western and northwestern borders “may have a political objective. It is meant to set up an alternative center of military consolidation for West European projects, a center which could embrace former Soviet republics (above all Ukraine), now outside NATO. There is no doubt who will control this process, considering U.S. influence in Poland and the Baltics.” [34]
On the same day that the Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian defense chiefs reached the agreement, Poland hosted multinational military exercises codenamed Common Challenge 09 with “2,500 troops from Germany, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland – forming the so-called EU Combat Group….Common Challenge is being held for the first time in Poland. Exercises are conducted simultaneously in Poznan, western Poland, and the nearby military range in Wedrzyn.” [35]
In a complementary development, The Times of London published an interview with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on November 15 in which he “said Italy would push for the creation of a European Army after the ‘new Europe’ takes shape at this week’s crucial November 19 EU summit following the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty.” [36] A commentary from Russia, which of course will not be included in the plans, mentioned that “NATO has been actively discussing the possibility of establishing a joint European army for a long time” and that Frattini had “reiterated the need for deploying a joint naval fleet or air force in the Mediterranean or other areas crucial to European security.” [37]
In a Wall Street Journal report titled “Central Europe Ready To Send More Soldiers To Afghanistan,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, again emphasizing the connection between war zone training in Afghanistan and preparation for action much closer to home, was quoted as saying “The credibility of NATO will be decided in Afghanistan. If NATO can be successful with what was a success in the Balkans and Iraq, its deterrent potential will rise, and it is in Poland’s national interest.” [38]
On November 18 the ambassadors from all 28 NATO member states gathered in Brussels commented on Belarusian-Russian military exercises conducted months earlier, Operation West, and “expressed concerns about the large scale of the exercises and a scenario that envisioned an attack from the West….” [39]
Sikorski’s allusion to so-called NATO deterrent potential is, then, clearly in reference to Russia.
On November 17 the European Union’s Special Representative for the South Caucasus Peter Semneby announced that the first foreign ministers meeting of the Eastern Partnership program will be held next month. He said that “The Eastern Partnership will be under the jurisdiction of a new representative for foreign affairs and security. The appointment will come after the Lisbon summit,” [40] as will the creation of the new European Army Italian Foreign Minister Frattini spoke of earlier.
Participants will include the foreign ministers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, half – six of twelve – of the members or former members of the Commonwealth of Independent States and all those in Europe and the Caucasus except for Russia, which is not invited.
Comparable efforts to pull the five Central Asian CIS members – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – away from cooperation with Russia through a combination of an analogous EU partnership, energy project agreements and involvement in the Afghan war are also proceeding apace.
The eighteen-year-old project of Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski et al. to destroy the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States and effect a cordon sanitaire around Russia, enclosing it with NATO member states and partners, has continued uninterruptedly since 1991.
Washington will not tolerate rivals and will ruthlessly attempt to eliminate even the potential of any nation to challenge it globally or regionally. In any region of the world. Russia, because of what it was, what it is, where it is and what it has – massive reserves of oil and natural gas, a developed nuclear industry and the world’s only effective strategic triad outside the U.S. – is and will remain the main focus of efforts by the United States and NATO to rid themselves of impediments to achieving uncontested global domination.
Carthage must be destroyed is the West’s policy toward the former Soviet Union.
1) Eastern Partnership: The West’s Final Assault On the Former Soviet Union
Stop NATO, February 13, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/eastern-partnership-the-wests-final-assault-on-the-former-soviet-union
2) Georgia Online, November 9, 2009
3) Azeri Press Agency, November 10, 2009
4) Azeri Press Agency, November 12, 2009
5) Azeri Press Agency, November 17, 2009
6) Azeri Press Agency, November 16, 2009
7) Azertag, November 18, 2009
8) Azeri Press Agency, November 18, 2009
9) Azeri Press Agency, November 18, 2009
10) Azerbaijan Business Center, November 19, 2009
11) Azertag, November 20, 2009
12) Ibid
13) Ibid
14) Azeri Press Agency, November 18, 2009
15) Trend News Agency, November 18, 2009
16) Focus News Agency, November 11, 2009
17) Itar-Tass, November 12, 2009
18) Civil Georgia, November 20, 2009
19) Voice of Russia, November 20, 2009
20) Trend News Agency, November 20, 2009
21) Georgia Ministry of Defence, November 20, 2009
22) Rustavi2, November 19, 2009
23) Civil Georgia, November 18, 2009
24) Rustavi2, November 17, 2009
25) Azeri Press Agency, November 11, 2009
26) Russian Information Agency Novosti, November 11, 2009
27) Voice of Russia, November 10, 2009
28) Civil Georgia, November 14, 2009
29) Voice of Russia, November 9, 2009
30) Voice of Russia, November 13, 2009
31) Interfax-Ukraine, November 19, 2009
32) NATO, November 16, 2009
33) Reuters, November 16, 2009
34) Russian Information Agency Novosti, November 18, 2009
35) Polish Radio, November 16, 2009
36) Russian Information Agency Novosti, November 17, 2009
37) Ibid
38) Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2009
39) Reuters, November 18, 2009
40) Azertag, November 17, 2009
Rumors Of Coups And War: U.S., NATO Target Latin America
Stop NATO
November 18, 2009
Rumors Of Coups And War: U.S., NATO Target Latin America
Rick Rozoff
———-
There is no way of overestimating the challenge that the emergence of ALBA and the overall reawakening of Latin America pose to the role that the U.S. arrogates to itself as lord of the entire Western Hemisphere. The almost two-century-old Monroe Doctrine exemplifies Washington’s claim to exclusive influence over all of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean Basin and its self-claimed right to subordinate them to its own interests. Never before the election victories of anti-neoliberal forces throughout Latin America over the past eleven years has the prospect of a truly democratic, multipolar New World existed as it does now.
It is in response to those developments that the U.S. and its former colonialist allies in NATO are attempting to reassert their influence in the Americas south of the U.S. border.
———-
November 28 will mark five months since the coup led by U.S.-trained commanders deposed the president of Honduras, the next day will see a mock election in the same nation designed to legitimize the junta of Roberto Micheletti, and the day following that will be a month since Washington signed an agreement with the Alvaro Uribe government in Colombia for the use of seven military bases in the country.
While intensifying a full-scale war in South Asia, continuing occupation missions in Iraq and the Balkans, maintaining warships off the coasts of Somalia and Lebanon, and deploying troops and conducting war games in most parts of the world, the United States and its NATO allies have not neglected Latin America.
Central and South America and the Caribbean are receiving a degree of attention from the U.S. and its partners not witnessed since the Cold War and in some ways are the targets of even more intense scrutiny and intervention.
Nearly five months since the June 28 coup d’etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya led by General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, a graduate of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas, Washington has not used its substantial – decisive – leverage with the illegal government and its military supporters to reverse the armed takeover of power. Instead it has conspired with the junta to drag out deliberately futile negotiations and has thrown its weight behind the November 29 election which, occurring without the previous reinstalling of President Zelaya, will be a travesty of law and international protocols and is in fact intended to lend false credibility to the current regime.
On November 15 Manuel Zelaya wrote a letter to American President Barack Obama decrying Washington’s machinations and stating that accepting the terms of the U.S.-sanctioned (to say no more) arrangement with Micheletti regarding the upcoming election would amount to “covering up the coup d’etat, which we know has a direct impact due to the military repression on the human rights of the inhabitants of our country.”
The letter also said “The same day that the accord’s Verification Commission was set up in Tegucigalpa the statements by officials from the State Department surprised (everyone) where they modify their position and interpret the accord unilaterally with the following statement: ‘the elections should be recognized by the United States with or without the reinstatement’” of President Zelaya. [1]
The accord in question was one brokered by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias and signed on October 29 which would have led to a unity government with Manuel Zelaya returned to the presidency preparatory to a new election.
Micheletti and his supporters in the country’s business community and “muscle” in the military unilaterally abrogated the terms of the agreement by thwarting Zelaya’s reinstatement and appointing all members of the national cabinet. With the active connivance of Washington, as Zelaya’s letter to Obama contends.
If a government friendly to the United States was overthrown in the manner that the Honduran one was on June 28 it would not take the White House and the State Department five months to respond, and even then only to abet the crime. Censure, sanctions and covert operations would have been resorted to immediately.
In nations where candidates not entirely to the West’s liking win elections or unapproved presidents win reelection, the whole panoply of “regime change” interventions are put into effect with some variation of a “color revolution” ultimately negating and reversing the result. That such efforts have not been extended in Honduras is ample proof that the U.S. is satisfied with matters as they stand and would prefer the likes of Micheletti and General Vasquez to preside over a country where the Pentagon has a military facility at the Soto Cano Air Base and there stations its Joint Task Force Bravo replete with Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.
On November 16 a photograph appeared on a Pentagon website, Defense Link, of the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and his Colombian opposite number, General Freddy Padilla de Leon, shaking hands outside the Pentagon three days earlier. [2]
No story on or details of their meeting are available, not even on Defense Department sites. Only the photograph and brief notices on Facebook and Twitter.
Padilla’s resume is both illustrative and typical. He earlier matriculated in “terrorism studies” at George Washington University and received a fellowship for the Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University, as well as taking a course on advanced military studies at Fort Belvoir, Virginia and and training in strategic intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center in Washington, D.C.
The transcripts of his discussions with Mullen would prove intriguing, focusing as they no doubt did on the buildup at the seven military bases in Colombia recently turned over to the Pentagon and on the uses thereof.
Since the agreement on their acquisition by the United States was signed on October 30 confirmation of the bases’ dual purpose – escalating the counterinsurgency war inside the country and containing and confronting two of its neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador – has been witnessed.
Bogota reported that nine of its soldiers were killed and four wounded in a major clash with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) fighters in the southwestern department of Cauca on November 10.
Five days later Colombia seized four Venezuelan border guards on a river off Colombia’s Vichada Department. A few days earlier two Venezuelan National Guard troops were killed in the state of Tachira on the Colombian border, leading Caracas to deploy 15,000 troops to the area on November 5.
The preceding week Venezuela arrested eight Colombian nationals and two locals suspected of paramilitary activity on the two countries’ border. Government official Ricardo Sanguino “denounced increasing paramilitary activity as a strategy to conceal soaring US access to Colombian military bases” and said “they are trying to destabilize the government of Venezuela….” [3]
Recently Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez renewed repeated concerns over the new American bases on the territory of his western neighbor, saying “that according to recently produced documents, the military bases would be used for espionage purposes, allowing US troops there to launch a military offensive against Venezuela.” [4]
On November 8 Bolivian President Evo Morales said that “the use of Colombian military bases by U.S. troops meant a provocation to the Latin American peoples, mainly to the members of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA).”
He specified that “With the excuse of fighting against drug trafficking and terrorism, thousands of U.S. soldiers will be deployed in Colombia.” [5]
ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, consists of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras (until the coup), Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda, the last three nations joining this June.
Washington using Colombia as the nucleus of a new Latin American military bloc to counteract ALBA has been explored in a previous article in this series. [6] Other prospective candidates include post-coup Honduras, Panama, Peru and Chile, with pressure placed on Brazil, Guyana and Suriname to either supply bases or in other ways augment American and European military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. [7]
The seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia allow the Pentagon far more scope than is required merely for alleged drug interdiction surveillance and even for the counterinsurgency war against the FARC. The agreement on the bases, bearing the sleep-inducing title of Supplemental Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defense and Security Between the Governments of The United States of America and the Republic of Colombia, lists where U.S. military personnel and equipment will be deployed:
German Olano Moreno Air Base, Palanquero; Alberto Pawells Rodriguez Air Base, Malambo; Tolemaida Military Fort, Nilo; Larandia Military Fort, Florencia; Capitan Luis Fernando Gomez Nino Air Base, Apiay; ARC Bolivar Naval Base in Cartagena; and ARC Malaga Naval Base in Bahia Malaga. [8]
The document also states that “the Parties agree to deepen their cooperation in areas such as interoperability, joint procedures, logistics and equipment, training and instruction, intelligence exchanges, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, combined exercises, and other mutually agreed activities” and Washington’s Colombian client concedes, in addition to the seven bases named above, “access to and use of other facilities and locations as may be agreed by the Parties.”
Furthermore, “The authorities of Colombia shall, without rental or similar costs to the United States, allow access to and use of the agreed facilities and locations, and easements and rights of way, owned by Colombia that are necessary to support activities carried out within the framework of this Agreement, including agreed construction. The United States shall cover all necessary operations and maintenance expenses associated with its use of agreed facilities and locations.”
U.S. military, intelligence and drug enforcement personnel – and American private contractors – “and their dependents” are granted “the privileges, exemptions, and immunities accorded to the administrative and technical staff of a diplomatic mission under the Vienna Convention….Colombia shall guarantee that its authorities verify, as promptly as possible, the immunity status of United States personnel and their dependents who are suspected of criminal activity in Colombia and hand them over as promptly as possible to the appropriate United States diplomatic or military authorities.”
One of the military bases obtained by the United States – the Larandia Military Fort in Florencia – is within easy striking distance of Ecuador (as the Alberto Pawells Rodriguez Air Base in Malambo is of Veneuzela).
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and Defense Minister Javier Ponce visited Russia late last month and on October 29 the two nations signed a declaration on strategic partnership. Correa and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev discussed energy and military cooperation. Ahead of the visit Ecuador’s president stated, “We need to restore the might of our army” in reference to the U.S. buildup in Colombia, its neighbor to the north. “Ecuador has been alarmed by the decision of Colombia, with which it severed diplomatic relations in March 2008, to allow U.S. troops to use its bases.” [9] The severing of relations occurred after Colombia’s army launched an attack inside Ecuador.
Ecuador and Russia signed a contract for the delivery of Mi-171E Hip transport helicopters to the Ecuadoran Ground Forces and a Russian newspaper said “Russia could supply six Su-30MK2 Flanker multirole fighters, several helicopters, and air defense systems to Ecuador, which would increase the value of their military cooperation to over $200 million.” [10]
Like other members of ALBA – Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua – Ecuador is purchasing Russian military equipment as a counterbalance to traditional U.S. domination of its defense procurements, with the potential for sabotage and blackmail it entails, and as protection against potential attacks from Washington and its proxies, most notably Colombia.
There is no way of overestimating the challenge that the emergence of ALBA and the overall reawakening of Latin America pose to the role that the U.S. arrogates to itself as lord of the entire Western Hemisphere. The almost two-century-old Monroe Doctrine exemplifies Washington’s claim to exclusive influence over all of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean Basin and its self-claimed right to subordinate them to its own interests. Never before the election victories of anti-neoliberal forces throughout Latin America over the past eleven years has the prospect of a truly democratic, multipolar New World existed as it does now.
It is in response to those developments that the U.S. and its former colonialist allies in NATO are attempting to reassert their influence in the Americas south of the U.S. border.
The Pentagon recommissioned the Navy’s Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950 after World War II, last year and fully activated it this one. Its area of responsibility is the Caribbean Sea and Central and South America.
In early November a new commander for U.S. Army South was appointed, Major General Simeon Trombitas. The Army Times of November 10 provided background information on him:
“Trombitas, a 1978 West Point graduate, began his career in the 2nd Armored Division and served three tours with 7th Special Forces Group. He served in U.S. Southern Command and Special Operations Command in Panama and commanded the U.S. Military Group in Colombia. His general officer assignments include commanding general of Special Operations Command, Korea, and he served on the Iraq National Counter-Terrorism Force Transition Team.” [11]
The United States is not alone in threatening a newly and truly independent Latin America and Colombia and Honduras are not the only parts of Washington’s plans. On November 5 Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo replaced the nation’s top military commanders – Army General Oscar Velazquez, Navy Rear Admiral Claudelino Recalde and Air Force General Hugo Aranda – against a backdrop of what Agence France-Presse reported as a fear of “an ouster similar to the one that befell Honduran President Manuel Zelaya….” [12]
That the Honduran putsch is intended to be the first in a series of similar plots in Latin America and is neither an aberration nor the last of its kind was also indicated last week when Nicaragua expelled a Dutch European Union parliamentarian. Radio Netherlands characterized the motivation for the action as follow: “Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega says Dutch MEP Hans van Baalen was in Nicaragua to see how the army felt about attempting a coup d´etat, but found no officers willing to go along with the idea.”
Van Baalen then moved to Honduras to “mediate in the political conflict between ousted President Manuel Zelaya and his de facto successor Roberto Micheletti.” [13]
Mexican journalist Luis Gutierrez, speaking at a conference against NATO’s global expansion in Berlin last month and in particular of the bloc’s Article 5 military mutual assistance clause, observed that “Mexico’s 3,000 kilometer border with the United States is also a border with NATO.” [14] Troops from 50 nations on five continents and in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and the South Pacific are serving or pledged to serve under NATO command in Afghanistan at the moment because of Article 5.
The Netherlands, for example, is not only assisting its American NATO ally in Nicaragua and Honduras, but allows its island possessions in the Caribbean – the Netherlands Antilles – to be employed for surveillance of and future military actions against Venezuela.
In Curacao, a Dutch possession only 70 kilometers from the Venezuelan coast, the leader of an opposition party, Pueblo Soberano (Sovereign People), demanded that the U.S. military base on the island be closed down.
Helmin Wiels said that “he wants to prevent Curacao from being dragged into what he predicts will be a future war between the US and Venezuela.
“The US has a number of military bases in Colombia, and Mr Wiels claims the country is intent on a confrontation with Venezuela’s leftwing President Hugo Chavez.” [15]
In May of 2008 a U.S. warplane flying from Curacao violated Venezuelan airspace, conducting surveillance of the Venezuelan military base on Orchila Island. President Chavez said of the intrusion: “They’re spying, they’re even testing our reaction capacity.” [16]
Moreover, Venezuela accused the U.S. of coordinating the action with Colombia, whose soldiers had crossed the Venezuelan border the day before.
In 2005 Chavez appeared on the American television news program Nightline and warned that the U.S. and its NATO allies were rehearsing invasion plans for his nation, codenamed Balboa, which involved aircraft carriers and warplanes, and said that American troops had been deployed to Curacao as part of the preparations.
He further admonished: “We are coming up with a counter-Balboa plan. That is to say if the government of the United States attempts to commit the foolhardy enterprise of attacking us, it would be embarked on a 100-year war. We are prepared.” [17]
A former Dutch possession in the Caribbean, Suriname, one country (Guyana) removed from Venezuela, offered the Pentagon bases to test military vehicles for jungle warfare in 2007.
In Guyana, Venezuela’s eastern neighbor, the nation’s former colonial master Britain canceled a security agreement after the Guyanese government questioned its partner’s real intentions.
The nation’s Office of the President released a statement which in part said: “This decision by the UK Government is believed to be linked to the administration’s refusal to permit training of British Special Forces in Guyana using live firing in a hinterland community on the western border with Brazil and Venezuela.” [18]
The Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, stated, “It could be that the UK Government did not fully appreciate how dearly held was our position on the non-violation of the sovereignty of Guyana. Their insistence in installing in their design in April…management features that seriously compromise Guyana’s ownership and when our new design re-established ownership that was more consistent with our notions of sovereignty, the plug was pulled….” [19]
With U.S. bases in Colombia to the west and in the Netherlands Antilles to the north, British military presence in the east would tighten the encirclement of Venezuela. A collective siege conducted by NATO allies the U.S., the Netherlands and Britain.
This June the chief of the Pentagon command that covers Central America, South America and the Caribbean – Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) – Admiral James Stavridis, was transferred to Brussels to become top military commander of United States European Command (EUCOM) and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
The transition was seamless, as one of the first initiatives on his new watch was to recruit U.S.-trained Colombian counterinsurgency troops for the war in Afghanistan. When they arrive they will be the first forces from Latin America, and the Western Hemisphere in general except for NATO members the U.S. and Canada, to serve under the Alliance’s command in the escalating South Asian war. [20]
Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Panamanian opposition sources report that Washington is in the process of securing four air and naval bases in their country. A news story from late September revealed that a preliminary agreement on the bases “was reached between Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during recent talks in New York.” [21]
On November 9 Senator Bill Nelson of Florida spoke out against drilling for oil off his state’s coast, saying “many of the activities at Florida military bases, including testing missile and drone systems and training pilots, depend on the vast open stretches of ocean, much of it restricted airspace.”
He mentioned that the Gulf of Mexico is “the largest testing and training area for the U.S. military in the world.” [22]
A Cuban analysis of three years ago described the overall American military blueprint for Latin America and the Caribbean:
“The United States has a system of bases that has managed to establish two areas of control:
“1. The circle formed by the Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico and Central America, which covers the largest oil deposits in Latin America, and is formed by the bases of Guantanamo, Reina Beatriz, Hato Rey, Lampira, Roosevelt, Palmerola, Soto Cano, Comalapa and other lesser military posts.
“2. The circle that surrounds the Amazon basin, downward from Panama, where the canal, the region’s wealth and the location of an entry to South America have been essential, and which is formed by the bases of Manta [closed by Ecuador this July], Larandia, Tres Esquinas, Cano Limon, Marandua, Riohacha, Iquitos, Pucallpa, Yurimaguas and Chiclayo, which in their turn are linked to those of the region further north….” [23]
The U.S. strategy to control the Amazon Basin and the Andean region depends on Colombia on the northwest of the South American continent and on obtaining bases and military allies further south. Peru is one such likely location and so is another which is at loggerheads with it, Chile.
Under former defense minister and current president Michelle Bachelet the nation has amassed a formidable arsenal of advanced weapons from NATO states: Hundreds of German, French and American tanks; F-16s from the Netherlands and the United States; Dutch and British destroyers; French Scorpion submarines. [24]
This unprecedented – and unjustified – arms buildup has alarmed Chile’s neighbors: Argentina, Bolivia and Peru.
A commentary from four years ago pointed out that “Foreign analysts have said that Chile is seeking hegemonic military power in Latin America vis-a-vis Peru, Argentina and Bolivia in order to defend Chilean economic interests in those countries and, in case of armed conflict, to expand its territory in the way it has done in the past.” [25]
On November 6 Bachelet appointed General Juan Miguel Fuente-Alba Poblete as new commander in chief of the Chilean army, which “aroused objections from human rights organizations, since he has been accused of being involved in a series of massive [violations] during the military regime of 1973-1990.” [26]
Six days later the Reuters news agency reported that the U.S. is to provide Chile with $655 million dollars worth of new arms: “The Pentagon on Thursday [November 5] advised the U.S. Congress of the possible sale of stinger missiles worth about $455 million, AIM medium-range missiles worth $145 million and Sentinel radar systems worth $65 million.” [27]
Several days later a report titled “U.S. Authorizes Sale of German Missiles to Chile” detailed:
“Seven months after Chile’s Defense Minister expressed interest in purchasing a fleet of used (U.S. made) F-16 Fighter Jets from Holland, the U.S. government helped seal the deal by supporting Chile’s bid to buy missiles for the jets.”
It added: “Also last week, the Pentagon endorsed two other possible defensive arms sales for Chile’s army. The first purchase would include six new Sentinel radar systems and six SINCGARS radio systems, at a cost of US$65 million. The second deal could include 36 Avenger planes and 390 ground-to-air missiles at a cost of US$455 million.” [28]
….
The accelerating pace and wide-ranging scope with which the U.S. and its allies are militarizing the world is unparalleled. Even during the depth of the Cold War most nations avoided being pulled into military blocs, arms buildups and wars. No longer. And Latin America is no exception.
1) CNN, November 15, 2009
2) Photograph
ttp://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/homepagephoto/2009-11/hires_091116-N-0696M-004d.jpg
3) Prensa Latina, November 2, 2009
4) Press TV, November 16, 2009
5) Xinhua News Agency, November 10, 2009
6) Colombia: U.S. Escalates War Plans In Latin America
Stop NATO, July 22, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/colombia-u-s-escalates-war-plans-in-latin-america
7) Twenty Years After End Of The Cold War:
Pentagon’s Buildup In Latin America
Stop NATO, November 4, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/stop-nato
8) http://justf.org/content/supplemental-agreement-cooperation-and-technical-assistance-defense-and-security-between-gov
9) Vedomosti, October 27, 2009
10) Ibid
11) Army Times, November 10, 2009
12) Agence France-Presse, November 6, 2009
13) Radio Netherlands, November 15, 2009
14) World Future Online, October 24, 2009
15) Radio Netherlands, November 16, 2009
16) Bloomberg News, May 21, 2008
17) Associated Press, September 16, 2005
18) Stabroek News, October 28, 2009
19) Ibid
20) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army
Stop NATO, August 9, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army
South Asia, Latin America: Pentagon’s 21st Century
Counterinsurgency Wars
Stop NATO, July 29, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/south-asia-latin-america-pentagons-21st-century-counterinsurgency-wars
21) Russian Information Agency Novosti, September 27, 2009
22) Tampa Tribune, November 10, 2009
23) Granma International, April 18, 2006
24) NATO Of The South: Chile, South Africa,
Australia, Antarctica
Stop NATO, May 30, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/nato-of-the-south-chile-south-africa-australia-antarctica
25) OhmyNews International, December 31, 2005
26) Xinhua News Agency, November 7, 2009
27) Reuters, November 12, 2009
28) Santiago Times, November 16, 2009
In Israel wurde der Raketenabwehrschild der NATO geschmiedet und der Krieg gegen den Iran geprobt
Stop NATO
November 16, 2009
In Israel wurde der Raketenabwehrschild der NATO geschmiedet und der Krieg gegen den Iran geprobt
Von Rick Rozoff
[Von Luftpost]
—————-
“Das ist das perfekteste Abwehrsystem gegen anfliegende Raketen, das wir jemals irgendwo auf der Welt installiert haben.”
Die Entfernung zwischen Tel Aviv und Teheran beträgt 993 Meilen [1.598 km]; die Reichweite des US-Radars zur Raketenabwehr (das in Israel positioniert wurde) übertrifft diese Distanz um fast 2.000 Meilen (3.218 km). Das reicht aus, um das ganze östliche und den größten Teil des südlichen Russlands abzudecken, wo ein Großteil der strategischen Raketen dieses Landes aufgestellt ist.
—————–
Die Vereinigten Staaten und Israel haben gerade die größte gemeinsame Übung zum Abfangen von Raketen beendet, die jemals von den beiden Staaten durchgeführt wurde; sie war, was den Umfang und die Raffinesse angeht, vielleicht das umfassendste Manöver, das mehrere Staaten gemeinsam veranstaltet haben, und schloss sogar das Abfeuern von Raketen ein, die zum Abfangen ballistischer Raketen geeignet sind.
Die Operation Juniper-Cobra 10 begann am 21. Oktober und endete am 3. November. (2009). Während der beiden Wochen nahmen mehr als 1.000 Soldaten der Vereinigten Staaten und eine gleiche Anzahl israelischer Soldaten an einer Reihe integrierter Übungen mit Raketen teil, deren Hauptziel es war, “fünf verschiedene Raketenabwehrsysteme zu testen … und die Infrastruktur zu schaffen, die notwendig ist, falls sich die Obama-Administration dazu entschließt, im Falle eines Konflikts US-Systeme hierher zu entsenden”. [1]
Die fünf in den Übungen verwendeten Raketenabwehrsysteme waren:
• das taktische Raketenabwehrsystem Arrow 2 gegen in großer Höhe anfliegende ballistische Raketen, das von den Vereinigten Staaten und Israel gemeinsam entwickelt wurde – und zwar von den Firmen Isreal Aerospace Industries und Boeing unter Aufsicht des israelischen Verteidigungsministeriums und der Missile Defense Agency (der Raketenabwehr-Agentur) des Pentagons (s. http://www.army-technology.
com/projects/arrow2/ ),
• das System Terminal High Altitude Area Defense / THAAD, das von der Firma
Lockheed Martin Space Systems entwickelt wurde und ballistische Kurz- und Mittelstreckenraketen kurz vor dem Einschlag zerstören soll (s. http://www.army-technology. com/projects/thaad/ ),
• die Patriot Advanced Capability 3 / PAC-3, eine ferngesteuerte Abwehrrakete, 1/15 Friedenspolitische Mitteilungen aus der
US-Militärregion Kaiserslautern/Ramstein LP 254/09 – 16.11.09
mit der siebenfachen Reichweite früherer Patriot-Modelle (s. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/PAC-3/index.html ),
• das auf Schiffen installierte Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, ausgestattet mit der Standardrakete 3 / SM-3 und dem AN/SPY-1 Radar mit einem Wirkungsbereich von 360 Grad (s. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/AegisBallistic-
MissileDefense/index.html ).
• Die SM-3, mit der im Februar 2008 ein US-Satellit aus dem Orbit abgeschossen wurde, um ihre Reichweite zu testen, soll für das neue bodengestützte Raketenabwehrsystem modifiziert werden, das der US-Präsident Barack Obama und Verteidigungsminister Robert Gates am 17. September angekündigt haben (s. http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP_09/LP18609_310809.pdf ). Das vierzehntägige Juniper-Cobra-Manöver dieses Jahres war “die größte gemeinsame Übung, die beide Länder bisher durchgeführt haben”; [2] auch siebzehn US-Kriegsschiffe
waren beteiligt, und “erstmals wurden alle genannten Systeme zusammen in Israel eingesetzt”. [3]
Ein an der Operation teilnehmender Colonel (Oberst) der US-Army stellte fest, es sei “das erste Großmanöver gewesen, bei dem das THAAD-System, Patriot-Boden-Luft-Raketen und das seegestützte Aegis-System integriert waren”, und fügte hinzu: “Das ist das perfekteste Abwehrsystem gegen anfliegende Raketen, das wir jemals irgendwo auf der Welt installiert
haben.” [4]
Eine andere israelische Quelle schrieb: “Eine beispiellose Anzahl amerikanischer Generäle und 1.400 Soldaten der US-Army nehmen zusammen mit führenden Offizieren der Israel Defense Forces / IDF an der hochrangigen Militärübung Juniper-Cobra teil, die nach Aussage eines Commanders (eines Korvettenkapitäns) der US-Navy auf “spezifische Bedrohungen” vorbereiten soll.” [5] (Weitere Infos dazu unter http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP_09/LP25109_131109.pdf )
Das Manöver wurde am letzten Tag auch von Premierminister Benjamin Netanjahu, Verteidigungsminister Ehud Barak, IDF-Generalstabschef Gabi Ashkenazi, James Cunningham, dem US-Botschafter in Israel, und James Stavridis, einem weiteren führenden USAmerikaner, besucht.
Die Übung fand in der Weltpresse wenig Beachtung, und über die Tatsache, dass Admiral Stavridis, der Chef des U.S. European Command (EUCOM in Stuttgart) und Supreme Allied Commander Europe / SACEUR (militärischer Oberkommandierender der NATO) ist, im November in Israel eintraf, um an den Endstadien teilzunehmen, wurde nur in der israelischen Presse berichtet.
Während seines Besuchs traf sich Stavridis “mit Generalleutnant Gabi Ashkenazi, dem Chef des (israelischen) Generalstabs, Major General Benjamin Gantz, dem stellvertretenden Generalstabschef, und mehreren anderen Kommandeuren. Der Admiral wurde von weiteren EUCOM-Befehlshabern begleitet.” [6]
Die BBC zitierte am 2. November unter der Überschrift “Der Schatten hinter den Kriegsspielen der USA und Israels” einen Commodore (Korvettenkapitän) der US Navy, der zum Hauptziel des Manövers Juniper-Cobra gesagt hatte: “Wir sind aus einigen sehr spezifischen Gründen hier, wegen spezifischer Bedrohungen, die gegen die Israelis gerichtet sind, und die uns auch interessieren. Mehr möchte ich dazu nicht sagen.” (s. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8338155.stm )
Im gleichen Bericht wird ein Szenario erwähnt, über das die von der BBC interviewten US-Militärs nicht reden wollten.
“Israel bombardiert iranische Atomanlagen – und der Iran schlägt zurück.
In diesem Fall bräuchte Israel ganz bestimmt einen Raketenabwehrschild – bestehend aus einem hoch empfindlichen Radarsystem großer Reichweite und Antiraketen-Raketen des Typs Patriot – und genau der wurde in den Kriegsspielen dieser Woche getestet.
An der Operation Juniper-Cobra sind etwa 2.000 amerikanische und israelische Soldaten beteiligt. Sie findet regelmäßig alle zwei Jahre statt, aber in diesem Jahr wird heftiger als sonst spekuliert, dass sich Israel darauf vorbereitet, den Iran zu bombardieren, um dessen vermutetes Atomwaffenprogramm zu stoppen.” [7] Kurz vorher und während des Manövers – das eigentlich am 12. Oktober beginnen sollte, aber ohne Erklärung einen Tag vorher verschoben wurde, obwohl im Hafen der Stadt Haifa schon US-Kriegsschiffe lagen – tauchte auch in mehreren anderen Berichten der oben geäußerte Verdacht auf.
Ende Oktober wurde bekannt gegeben, dass die israelische Firma Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. mit der (US-Firma) Raytheon Missile Systems “zwei Verträge im Gesamtwert von über 100 Millionen Dollar” über den Entwurf und die Entwicklung des David’s Sling Weapon Systems / DSWS (des Waffensystem David-Schleuder) abgeschlossen hat.
(s. http://www.defencetalk.com/tag/sling-weapon-system/ )
“Das DSWS ist ein gemeinsames Programm der Missile Defense Agency (der USA) und der Israel Missile Defense Organization. Das System soll ballistische Kurzstreckenraketen, großkalibrige Raketen und Marschflugkörper in der Endphase des Anflugs zerstören.
“Der erste Vertrag sieht die gemeinsame Entwicklung der Stunner Interceptor (des Tollen Fängers), der Raketen-Komponente des DSWS vor. Stunner soll eine hochentwickelte Abfangrakete werden, die sowohl in das DSWS als auch in Raketenabwehrsysteme der Alliierten integriert werden kann.” [8]
Fünf Wochen vorher hat Deutschland vorzeitig zwei U-212 Unterseeboote der Dolphin-Klasse an Israel geliefert, von denen “Marschflugkörper mit Atomsprengköpfen” starten können. Sie sollten ursprünglich erst im Jahr 2010 ankommen.
“Mit den beiden neuen U-Booten verfügt Israel jetzt über insgesamt fünf deutsche Unterseeboote; es sind die teuersten Waffensysteme in Israels Arsenal.
Israelische Medien haben berichtet, den Dolphin-Unterseebooten fiele bei einem Angriff auf die umstrittenen Atomanlagen des Irans eine Schlüsselrolle zu.” [9]
Am 15. Oktober hat die JERUSALEM POST einen Bericht veröffentlicht, der die folgende beunruhigende Information enthielt:
“In einem französischen Magazin war zu lesen, Israel plane, nach dem Dezember (2009) militärische Angriffe auf den Iran durchzuführen. ISRAEL RADIO zitierte einen Bericht aus LE CANARD ENCHAINÉ, in dem es hieß, Jerusalem habe bei einem französischen Nahrungsmittelhersteller bereits Kampfrationen hoher Qualität für Soldaten von Eliteeinheiten bestellt und Reservisten dieser Einheiten, die sich im Ausland aufhalten, aufgefordert, nach Israel zurückzukehren.”
Die französische Zeitschrift wird auch mit der Behauptung zitiert, “Gabi Ashkenazi, der Generalstabschef der Israel Defense Forces / IDF, habe bei seinem jüngsten Besuch in Frankreich dem französischen Generalstabschef Jean-Louis Georgelin mitgeteilt, Israel plane nicht, den Iran zu bombardieren; man werde aber vielleicht Elitetruppen entsenden, um Aktivitäten am Boden zu entfalten. Denkbar seien Sabotageakte gegen Atomanlagen und die Ermordung führender iranischer Atomwissenschaftler.” [10] (s. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1255547721120&pagename=
JPArticle%2FShowFull )
Am 2. November wurde auf arabischsprachigen Websites berichtet: “Das US-Militär hat die Errichtung eines hoch entwickelten Radarsystems im Irak abgeschlossen und kann damit jetzt die Grenzen zum Iran, zu Syrien und zur Türkei überwachen.” [11] Der Iran und seine Nachbarn sind nicht die einzigen Nationen, die in Reichweite des Raketenkillersystems liegen, das in den letzten beiden Wochen in Israel Premiere hatte. Zusätzlich zu den “spezifischen Bedrohungen” die in den Berichten über Juniper-Cobra immer wieder auftauchten, wurde auch ein anderes Thema wiederholt hervorgehoben:
Das Manöver war gleichzeitig ein Probelauf für einen NATO-Raketenabwehrschild, der den ganzen europäischen Kontinent abschirmen soll.
In der amerikanischen und israelischen Presse wurde dieser Plan immer wieder erwähnt.
So hieß es zum Beispiel:
“Das ist eine sehr schnelle und umfangreiche Demonstration der Raketenabwehr-Pläne der neuen (US-)Regierung.” [12] (Der zitierte Artikel ist aufzurufen unter http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP_09/LP23209_231009.pdf .)
“Die große Luftverteidigungsübung, die in dieser Woche zusammen mit Israel gestartet wurde, wird den Vereinigten Staaten helfen, ihren Raketenabwehrschild für Europa durchzusetzen,’ äußerte ein US-Kommandeur. … In dem dreiwöchigen Manöver wird auch Aegis,
ein Raketenabwehrsystem der US-Navy, erprobt, das als erste Komponente eines Raketenabwehrschildes für Europa auch im östlichen Mittelmeer eingesetzt werden soll, wie die Regierung des Präsidenten Barack Obama letzten Monat ankündigte.” [13]
“Ein US-Offizier sagte am Dienstag, die große Raketenabwehrübung der amerikanischen und israelischen Streitkräfte werde bei der Entwicklung des geplanten NATO-Raketenabwehrschildes für Europa sehr hilfreich sein.
Der Offizier ist Tony English, ein Colonel (Oberst) der US-Army; er stellte ausdrücklich fest: ‘Wir werden viele Lehren aus dieser Übung ziehen, die uns für das geplante System sehr nützlich sein werden.” [14]
“Was die Amerikaner aus diesen komplizierten Übungen lernen, wird ihnen perspektivisch helfen, den NATO-Raketenabwehrschild für Europa zu gestalten.” [15]
“Die Erkenntnisse, die den israelischen und amerikanischen Streitkräften aus der Raketenabwehrübung Juniper-Cobra erwachsen, werden dem US-Verteidigungsministerium helfen, einen neuen NATO-Raketenabwehrschild für Europa zu installieren,’ äußerten führende Verteidigungsfachleute. Die Übung ist auch deshalb für eine potenzielle europäische Raketenabwehr wichtig, weil die Amerikaner ihre Systeme unter verschiedenen Wetterbedingungen testen müssen.
Der neue Plan, der gerade erwogen wird, sieht die Entsendung von US-Kriegsschiffen vor, die mit dem Aegis-Raketenabwehrsystem ausgestattet sind; sie könnten im Mittelmeer zusammen mit wenigen landgestützten Systemen einen (schwimmenden) Schutzwall für Europa bilden.
Die Amerikaner überlegen zur Zeit, welches landgestützte System sie einführen sollen. Die NATO-Partner möchten sich für die SM-3, die Rakete des seegestützten Aegis-Systems entscheiden, aber das US-Militär wird wahrscheinlich auch andere Systeme prüfen, auch die israelischen Raketen Arrow (Pfeil) und die Arrow 3, die gerade entwickelt und von der (US-)Regierung finanziert wird.” [16]
Gegen Ende August, wenige Wochen bevor Washington ankündigte, die Pläne zur Stationierung stationärer Abwehrraketen in Polen und einer X-Band-Radaranlage in der Tschechischen Republik aufgeben zu wollen, berichtete die polnische Zeitung GAZETA WYBORCZA:
“Washington sucht jetzt nach alternativen Positionen – auch auf dem Balkan, in Israel und in der Türkei.” [17]
In einem meiner früheren Artikel in dieser Reihe habe ich die Entwicklung vor der Ankündigung am 17. September untersucht. [18]
Mitte Oktober hatte der israelische Verteidigungsminister Ehud Barak Polen besucht, das damals nach den Plänen der USA und der NATO noch eine zentrale Position im Raketenabwehrsystem erhalten sollte – mit landgestützten Patriots und SM-3-Raketen auf Schiffen in der Ostsee. In Warschau begrüßte Barak die “US-Entscheidung, einen seegestützten Raketenabwehrschild zu errichten”, und stellte dazu fest:
“Die neuen Überlegungen erlauben wirklich mehr Flexibilität und schaffen in einer relativ kurzen Zeit eine viel wirksamere und wirtschaftlichere Möglichkeit, effektiv auf die Bedrohung durch iranische Raketen zu reagieren.” [19]
Der polnische Rundfunk berichtete: “Nach einer Erklärung des israelischen Verteidigungsministeriums wird Barak in Polen und in derTschechischen Republik Gespräche über eine gemeinsame Reaktion auf die atomaren Ambitionen des Irans führen und Möglichkeiten zur Entwicklung von Kontakten zwischen Rüstungsfirmen erkunden.” [20]
Zur gleichen Zeit bestätigten israelische Quellen, dass sich die israelische Marine an der NATO-Operation Active Endeavour beteiligen wird. Dieses seit acht Jahren durchgeführte Marineunternehmen ist ein Überwachungs- und Kontrollprogramm, das sich auf die in Artikel 5 des NATO-Vertrags festgeschriebene Verpflichtung zu gegenseitigem Beistand beruft. Es ermöglicht eine Abriegelung des gesamten Mittelmeers und seiner Zugänge – der Meerenge von Gibraltar, des Suezkanals und der Dardanellen. (s. dazu ://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Active_Endeavour )
In westlichen Führungskreisen wird bereits darüber diskutiert, ob der Geltungsbereich des Artikels 5 nicht ausgeweitet werden soll. Darin heißt es jetzt noch: “Die Parteien vereinbaren, dass ein bewaffneter Angriff gegen eine oder mehrere von ihnen in Europa oder Nordamerika als ein Angriff gegen sie alle angesehen werden wird; … ” (zitiert nach http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb5/frieden/themen/NATO/NATO-Vertrag.
html ) Neben den NATO-Partnern sollen auch weitere Länder einbezogen werden, bis zu einer Gesamtzahl von 60 Staaten. (Der NATO gehören zur Zeit 28 Staaten an, s, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO .)
Israel gehört zu den möglichen Kandidaten. Auch die Nachbarn des Irans am Persischen Golf.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, der Generalsekretär der NATO, hat vom 29. – 30. Oktober an einer internationalen Konferenz in den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten / UAE teilgenommen; sie beschäftigte sich mit dem Thema “Die Beziehungen der NATO zu den UAE und die weitere Entwicklung der Istanbul Cooperation Initiative”; zu den Teilnehmern gehörten “die ständigen NATO-Vertreter im Nordatlantikrat, der Stellvertretende Generalsekretär der NATO, der Vorsitzende des NATO-Militärausschusses, andere hochrangige NATO-Offizielle und Regierungsvertreter, Meinungsführer, Akademiker und wichtige Wissenschaftler aus Ländern der Golfregion”. [21]
Die Istanbul Cooperation Initiative wurde 2004 auf dem NATO-Gipfel in der türkischen Stadt Istanbul 2004 gegründet, um die Dialog-Partner der NATO am Mittelmeer – Algerien, Ägypten, Israel, Jordanien, Mauretanien, Marokko und Tunesien – auf ein Niveau anzuheben, das vergleichbar mit der Partnerschaft für den Frieden ist, die im letzten Jahrzehnt dazu diente, zehn neue Nationen als Vollmitglieder (in die NATO) aufzunehmen und ein Militärbündnis mit den sechs Mitgliedern des Gulf Cooperation Council / GCC) zu schmieden – mit Bahrain, wo die 5. US-Flotte ihr Hauptquartier hat, mit Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi-Arabien und den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten.
In einem Artikel einer Zeitung aus den Emiraten wird unter dem Titel “Rasmussen sagt, die NATO werde die UAE bei einem Angriff verteidigen” der NATO-Generalsekretär mit folgender Äußerung zu einer Vereinbarung zwischen der NATO den UAE zitiert:
“Die Vereinbarung wurde geschlossen, um die Zusammenarbeit in Sicherheitsangelegenheiten zu vertiefen….Es gibt noch einen anderen Anlass. … Wir stimmen mit den GCC Staaten in Fragen des Schutzes, der gemeinsamen Sicherheit und einer gedeihlichen Zusammenarbeit überein. Falls etwas geschehen sollte, werden wir sie gemeinsam verteidigen.”
[22]
Während seines Aufenthalts in den UAE sagte Rasmussen unter Berufung auf die Bindungen zu diesem Staat auch: “Wir haben das gemeinsame Interesse, Ländern wie Afghanistan und dem Irak zu helfen, damit sie wieder auf eigenen Füßen stehen können und der Mittlere Osten insgesamt stabiler wird; wir wollen auch verhindern, dass Länder wie Somalia und der Sudan noch tiefer ins Chaos stürzen. … Wir alle sind sehr besorgt über die atomaren Ambitionen des Irans.” [23]
Zusammen mit weiteren Truppenverstärkungen in Afghanistan, im östlichen Nachbarland des Irans, ist die Ausweitung der NATO auf den Persischen Golf ein integaler Bestandteil der Einkreisung des Irans – zur Vorbereitung eines künftigen Angriffs auf diesen Staat.
Eine weitere Initiative in dieser Kampagne, mit der versucht wird, militärische Fähigkeiten des Irans zu neutralisieren, um Vergeltungsschläge im Falle eines Überraschungs-Angriffs zu verhindern, wurde im September 2008 gestartet – ein Jahr bevor die Änderungen in
den Plänen der USA für die europäische Flanke ihres globalen Raketenabwehrschildes bekannt gegeben wurden.
Der US-Senat bewilligte 89 Millionen Dollar für die Aufstellung eines transportablen X-Band-Radarsystems in Israel; es trägt jetzt die Bezeichnung Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance (AN/TPY-2). Eine US-Militärzeitung schrieb damals: “Das Radar kann ein Objekt von der Größe eines Baseballs schon in einer Entfernung von 2.900 Meilen (4.666 km) erkennen … ” [24] (Der übersetzte Artikel ist nachzulesen
unter http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP_08/LP18508_031008.pdf .)
Die Entfernung zwischen Tel Aviv und Teheran beträgt 993 Meilen [1.598 km]; die Reichweite des US-Radars zur Raketenabwehr (das in Israel positioniert wurde) übertrifft diese Distanz um fast 2.000 Meilen (3.218 km). Das reicht aus, um das ganze östliche und den größten Teil des südlichen Russlands abzudecken, wo ein Großteil der strategischen Raketen dieses Landes aufgestellt ist. Moskau ist 2.641 Kilometer von Tel Aviv entfernt. Eine israelische Zeitung schätzte die Reichweite dieses Radars auf 4.800 Kilometer, das wären noch 134 Meilen mehr. (Die überprüften Zahlen weichen vom denen im Originaltext ab.)
Das U.S. European Command (EUCOM), das für das Projekt verantwortlich ist, und dessen Chef Admiral James Stavridis auch Supreme Allied Commander Europe / SACEUR, also NATO-Oberbefehlshaber ist, hat gegen Ende September 2008 die USE inheiten genannt, die damit beauftragt wurden, das Radar aufzustellen und zu betreiben.
Sie kamen aus folgenden Bereichen und Kommandos:
• 357th Air Missile Defense Detachment, U.S. Army (stationiert in Kaiserslautern),
• 21st Theater Sustainment Command, U.S. Army (stationiert in Kaiserslautern),
• Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team, U.S. Marine Corps (wahrscheinlich aus
Neapel),
• 86th Contingency Response Group, U.S. Air Force (von der Air Base Ramstein),
• 31st Logistics Readiness Squadron, U.S. Air Force (stationiert in Aviano, Italien),
• 5th Signal Command, U.S. Army (noch in Mannheim stationiert) und von der
• Missile Defense Agency (im Pentagon)
(Weitere Informationen über das Radar und die genannten Einheiten sind nachzulesen unter
http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP_08/LP18508_031008.pdf )
Insgesamt waren 120 Personen von der US-Army, der Air Force und der Marineinfanterie beteiligt. Ein EUCOM-Sprecher erklärte damals: “Das Radar wird auf Wunsch der israelischen Regierung bereitgestellt und soll deren Verteidigungsmöglichkeiten verbessern,” [26]
Es war die erste längere Stationierung von US-Soldaten oder Soldaten einer anderen Nation in Israel in der 61-jährigen Geschichte dieses Landes. Obwohl keine formelle Vereinbarung über eine dauerhafte Stationierung getroffen wurde, gibt es keinen Grund für die Annahme, das Radarsystem werde jemals wieder zurückgezogen.
Es wurde auf der Nevatim Air Base in der Wüste Negev installiert, wo auch die israelischen Atomwaffen gelagert sein sollen.
Die Radarstation war im Dezember letzten Jahres voll betriebsbereit, und im April 2009 nahmen US-Truppen an der Erprobung das Systems teil. “Israel führte einen Test mit einer verbesserten Arrow-Abwehrrakete durch, bei dem eine anfliegende Rakete abgeschossen wurde. Es war der erste israelische Test, in den auch das US-Radar einbezogen war.” [27]
Das 2.900 – 3.000 Meilen weit reichende Radarsystem wurde in den letzten beiden Wochen im Rahmen des Manövers Juniper-Cobra viel intensiver genutzt; es wurde nicht nur in das Pilotprojekt zur Erprobung einer mehrstufigen land- und seege-stützten Raketenabwehr integriert, es wurde auch als Prototyp für den neuen Raketenabwehrschild der USA und der NATO getestet, der – wie Barack Obama am 17. September (2009) sagte – noch “stärker, intelligenter und schneller” reagieren und nicht nur den ganzen europäischen Kontinent, sondern auch das Schwarze Meer, den Kaukasus, das Östliche Mittelmeer und den Persischen Golf abdecken soll. Seine weitere Ausdehnung nach Süden und Osten zeichnet sich bereits ab.
Der Raketenabwehrschild ist ein System, das potenzielle Opfer eines militärischen Erstschlags unfähig zur Vergeltung machen soll, mit dem man die Fähigkeit zur Abschreckung und zu einer wirksamen Reaktion zerstören will.
Anmerkungen
1) Jerusalem Post, 31. Oktober 2009
2) ebd.
3) United Press International, 30. Oktober 2009
4) The Associated Press, 27. Oktober 2009
5) Arutz Sheva, 3. November 2009
6) Israeli Defense Forces, 3. November 2009
7) BBC News, 2. November 2009
8) Raytheon Company, 27. Oktober 2009
9) Agence France-Presse, 29. September 2009
10) Jerusalem Post, am 15. Oktober 2009
11) Press TV, 2. November 2009
12) Stars and Stripes, am 23. Oktober 2009
13) Reuters, 22. Oktober 2009
14) Associated Press, 27. Oktober 2009
15) United Press International, 30. Oktober 2009
16) Jerusalem Post, 31. Oktober 2009
17) United Press International, 27. August 2009
18) U.S. Expands Global Missile Shield Into Middle East, Balkans
Stop NATO, September 11, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/u-s-expands-global-missile-shield-into-middle-east-balkans
19) Agence France-Presse, 14. Oktober 2009
20) Polish Radio,13. Oktober 2009
21) NATO, 28. Oktober 2009
22) Khaleej Times, 30. Oktober 2009
23) Emirates News Agency, 29. Oktober 2009
24) Stars and Stripes, 30. September 2008
25) Jerusalem Post, 23. November 2008
26) Stars and Stripes, 30. September 2008
27) Stars and Stripes, 13. April 2009
(Wir haben den Artikel komplett übersetzt und zusätzlich mit eigenen Anmerkungen in runden Klammern und Hervorhebungen versehen. Anschließend drucken wir den Originaltext ab.)
