AFRICOM: Pentagon Prepares Direct Military Intervention In Africa

Stop NATO articles

Stop NATO
August 24, 2009

AFRICOM: Pentagon Prepares Direct Military Intervention In Africa
by Rick Rozoff

The 2009 World Population Data Sheet published by the Washington, D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau states that the population of the African continent has surpassed one billion. Africans now account for over a seventh of the human race

Africa’s 54 nations are 28% of the 192 countries in the world.

The size and location of the continent along with its human and natural resources – oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, uranium, cobalt, chromium, platinum, timber, cotton, food products – make it an increasingly important part of a world that is daily becoming more integrated and interdependent.

Africa is also the last continent to free itself from colonial domination. South America broke free of Spanish and Portuguese control in the beginning of the 1800s (leaving only the three Guianas – British, Dutch and French – still colonized) and the post-World War II decolonization of Asia that started with former British East India in 1947 was almost complete by the late 1950s.

Sub-Saharan Africa was not to liberate most of its territory from Belgian, British, French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial masters until the 1960s and 1970s. And the former owners were reluctant to cede newly created African nations any more than nominal independence and the ability to choose their own internal socio-economic orientation and foreign policy alignment.

In the two decades of the African independence struggle the continent was marred by Western-backed coups d’etat and assassinations of liberation leaders which included those against Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo in 1961, Ben Barka in Morocco in 1965, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique in 1969, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973 and Marien Ngouabi in the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) in 1977.

In his latest Anti-Empire Report veteran political analyst William Blum wrote, “the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.” [1]

Some of Blum’s references are to a series of proxy wars supported by the United States and its NATO allies and in some instances apartheid South Africa and the Mobutu Sese Seko regime in Zaire in the mid-1970s and the 1980s, such as arming and training the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the unspeakably brutal Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), and Eritrean and Tigrayan armed separatists in Ethiopia as well as backing the Somali invasion of the Ogaden Desert in that country in 1977.

Over the past five years French troops and bombers have waged deadly attacks inside Cote d’Ivoire, Chad and the Central African Republic either in support of or against rebels, always in furtherance of France’s own geopolitical objectives. In the second application of the so-called Blair Doctrine, in 2000 Britain sent troops to its former colony of Sierra Leone and has de facto recolonized the nation, taking control of its military and internal security forces.

In the post-World War II period direct U.S. military actions have to date been limited to the deadly 1986 air strikes against Libya in April of 1986, Operation El Dorado Canyon, and equally deadly actions in and against Somalia from 1993 to the present day.

While conducting wars, bombings, military interventions and invasions in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East and recently Southeastern Europe over the past half century, the Pentagon has left the African continent comparatively unscathed. That is going to change after the establishment of the United States Africa Command on October 1 of 2007 and its activation a year later.

The U.S. has intensified military involvement in Africa over the past seven years with such projects as the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), launched by the State Department but which deployed American Army Special Forces with the Special Operations Command Europe to Mali and Mauritania among other locations. U.S. military personnel are still engaged in the counterinsurgency wars in Mali and Niger against Tuareg rebels.

The Pan Sahel Initiative was succeeded by the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI) in late 2004 which has American military personnel assigned to eleven African nations: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

The Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative was formally launched in June of 2005 with the deployment of 1,000 American troops, among them Green Berets, in Operation Flintlock 05 in North and West Africa to engage with counterparts from seven nations: Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia.

Until their transfer to the Africa Command (AFRICOM) all 53 nations on the continent except for those in the Horn of Africa (assigned to Central Command) and the island nations of Madagascar and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean (handled by Pacific Command) were within the area of responsibility of the European Command (EUCOM), whose top commander is simultaneously the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

As such the past two EUCOM and NATO commanders, Marine General James Jones (2003-2006) and Army General Bantz John Craddock (2006-June, 2009), were the most instrumental in setting up AFRICOM.

Jones is now U.S. National Security Advisor and at this February’s Munich Security Conference opened his speech with “As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. [Henry] Kissinger.” [2]

In 2008, while serving as State Department special envoy for Middle East security and chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States, Jones said, “[A]s commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea.” [3]

Shortly before stepping down from his military posts with NATO and the Pentagon “NATO’s top commander of operations, U.S. General James Jones, has said he sees a potential role for the alliance in protecting key shipping lanes such as those around the Black Sea and oil supply routes from Africa to Europe.” [4]

Three years ago a Pentagon website documented that “Officials at U.S. European Command spend between 65 to 70 percent of their time on African issues, [James] Jones said….Establishing such a group [military task force in West Africa] could also send a message to U.S. companies ‘that investing in many parts of Africa is a good idea,’ the general said.” [5)

During the final months of his dual tenure as NATO’s and EUCOM’s top military commander, Jones transitioned Africa from EUCOM’s to AFRICOM’s control while also expanding the role of NATO on the continent.

In June of 2006 the Alliance launched its global Rapid Response Force with its first large-scale military exercises off the coast of the former Portuguese possession of Cape Verde, in the Atlantic Ocean west of Senegal.

U.S press reports of the time offered these details:

“Hundreds of elite North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) troops backed by fighter planes and warships will storm a tiny volcanic island off Africa’s Atlantic coast this week in what the Western alliance hopes will prove a potent demonstration of its ability to project power around the world.” [6]

“Seven thousand NATO troops conducted war games on the Atlantic Ocean island of Cape Verde on Thursday in the latest sign of the alliance’s growing interest in playing a role in Africa.

“The land, air and sea exercises were NATO’s first major deployment in Africa and designed to show the former Cold War giant can launch far-flung military operations at short notice.

“‘You are seeing the new NATO, the one that has the ability to project stability,’ said NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a news conference after NATO troops stormed a beach on one of the islands on the archipelago in a mock assault on a fictitious terrorist camp.

“NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Jones, the alliance soldier in charge of NATO operations, said he hoped the two-week Cape Verde exercises would help break down negative images about NATO in Africa and elsewhere.” [7]

NATO’s first operation in Africa had occurred a year earlier in May of 2005 when the bloc transported African Union troops to the Darfur region of Sudan, at the crossroads of a war-riven region composed of the Central African Republic, Chad and Sudan.

The Alliance has since deployed warships to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, last year with Operation Allied Protector, and this August 17 NATO announced that it was dispatching British, Greek, Italian, Turkish and U.S. warships to the area for a new mission, Operation Ocean Shield. These operations don’t consist of mere surveillance and escort roles but include regular forced boardings, sniper attacks and other uses of armed and often lethal force.

On August 22 a Netherlands contingent of the complementary European Union naval force off Somalia used an attack helicopter against a vessel in the area which subsequently was taken over by troops from a Norwegian warship.

Over three years before, now U.S. National Security Adviser and then NATO chief military commander James Jones addressing what was his major “national security” concern at the time, “raised the prospect of NATO taking a role to counter piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, especially when it threatens energy supply routes to Western nations.” [8]

A month later both he and NATO’s then top civilian leader, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, reiterated the above commitment.

“NATOs’ [commanders] are ready to use warships to ensure the security of offshore oil and gas transportation routes from Western Africa, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s Secretary General, reportedly said speaking at a session of the foreign committee of PACE [Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe].

“On April 30 General James Jones, commander-in-chief of NATO in Europe, reportedly said NATO was going to draw up a plan for ensuring the security of oil and gas industry facilities.

“In this respect the bloc is willing to ensure security in unstable regions where oil and gas are produced and transported.” [9]

Two months earlier a U.S. Defense Department news source reported this from Jones:

“U.S. Naval Forces Europe, (the command’s) lead component in this initiative, has developed a robust maritime security strategy and regional 10-year campaign plan for the Gulf of Guinea region.

“Africa’s vast potential makes African stability a near-term global strategic imperative.” [10]

Jones “raised the prospect of NATO taking a role to counter piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, especially when it threatens energy supply routes to Western nations” in April of 2006 and the Pentagon and NATO have followed through on his pledge and exactly in those two opposite ends of Africa.

At article a few days ago by Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, called “Africa: U.S. Military Holds War Games on Nigeria, Somalia” provided details on how far plans by James Jones and the Pentagon have progressed over the past three years.

Working with what sketchy information that had been made public about Unified Quest 2008, last year’s rendition of what the U.S. Army website described in an article of this year under the title of and as “Army war games for future conflicts” [11], conducted by the United States Army War College, Volman’s article included this information:

“In addition to U.S. military officers and intelligence officers, Unified Quest 2008 brought together participants from the State Department and other U.S. government agencies, academics, journalists, and foreign military officers (including military representatives from several NATO countries, Australia, and Israel), along with the private military contractors who helped run the war games: the Rand Corporation and Booz-Allen.

“The list of options for the Nigeria scenario ranged from diplomatic pressure to military action, with or without the aid of European and African nations. One participant, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stanovich, drew up a plan that called for the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops within 60 days….

“Among scenarios examined during the game were the possibility of direct American military intervention involving some 20,000 U.S. troops in order to ’secure the oil,’ and the question of how to handle possible splits between factions within the Nigerian government. The game ended without military intervention because one of the rival factions executed a successful coup and formed a new government that sought stability.

“[W]hen General Ward [AFRICOM commander] appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, he cited America’s growing dependence on African oil as a priority issue for Africom and went on to proclaim that combating terrorism would be ‘Africom’s number one theater-wide goal.’ He barely mentioned development, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping or conflict resolution. [12]

In addition to nations already shelled, targeted and threatened like Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Eritrea, even long-time and staunch U.S. military allies like Nigeria are not beyond the reach of hostile Pentagon actions. Nigeria is the main power in the fifteen-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which over the past nine years has deployed troops to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire on the request of the West, but that loyalty will not protect it when its own moment arrives.

The U.S. has employed other countries as regional military proxies – Ethiopia and Djibouti in Northeast Africa, Rwanda in Central Africa, Kenya in both – and has designs on South Africa, Senegal and Liberia for similar purposes.

Since its establishment in October of 2007 AFRICOM has lost little time in marking out the Pentagon’s new continent.

Even prior to its formal activation the Pentagon conducted the Africa Endeavor 2008 23-nation military exercise with forces from Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Uganda, the U.S. and Zambia as well as representatives from ECOWAS and the African Union. [13]

The operation was held under the auspices of the U.S. European Command at the time as AFRICOM wasn’t activated until October of that year but it included the participation of the then fledgling AFRICOM and U.S. Marine Forces Europe (MARFOREUR), U.S. Air Forces in Europe and the Marine Headquarters, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa [14], but “Next year’s exercise will be sponsored by U.S. Africa Command.” [15]

This January the U.S. Department of Defense announced that “The U.S. Army Southern European Task Force [SETAF] officially has assumed its new role as the Army component for U.S. Africa Command.”

The Pentagon web site from which the above quote is taken also provided this background information and portents of the future:

“Since the 1990s, SETAF has worked with African nations to conduct military training and provide humanitarian relief in countries such as Liberia, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and the former Zaire. [Congo is the former Zaire, as Zaire was the former Belgian Congo]

“In the coming years, SETAF, operating as U.S. Army Africa, will continue to grow and build capacity to meet the requirements needed to coordinate all U.S. Army activities in Africa.

“[U.S. Army Africa] is not an episodic, flash in the pan, noncombative evacuation operation.” [16]

In the same month, demonstrating another new AFRICOM component and the continent-wide reach of the American military and its recently acquired client states, it was reported that “Air Force C-17s will soon begin airlifting special equipment for Rwandan Peacekeepers in the Darfur region of Sudan, marking the kickoff of the first major operation engineered by U.S. Africa Command’s air component, Seventeenth Air Force, also known as U.S. Air Forces Africa.” [17]

This May the newspaper of the American Armed Forces, Stars and Stripes, carried a feature on joint U.S.-British training of the Rwandan army, one which bears a large part of the blame for the deaths of over five million Congolese since 1998: The biggest loss of life in a nation related to armed conflict since tens of millions of Chinese and Soviets were killed during World War II.

Rwandan and Ugandan troops invaded Congo in 1998 and triggered ongoing cross-border fighting which persists to this day. Rwanda and Uganda are both U.S. and British military client states.

The Stars and Stripes feature detailed that American instructors “are currently working with a team from the British army to train instructors with the Rwandan army. Those instructors will then train their own troops — many of whom will serve as peacekeepers in places such as Sudan.” [18]

It quoted a British officer, Maj. Charles Malet, who “leads a contingent of British forces based in Kenya,” as saying “We’ve been producing short-term training in this part of the world for a long, long time. [U.S. Africa Command] has stood [up]. It’s great to link up and provide a sort of introduction.” [19]

The training of the Rwandan armed forces by the United States and its NATO allies has less to do with Darfur than it does with devastated Congo.

In November of 2008 the United Nations reported that “Rwandan forces fired tank shells and other heavy artillery across the border at Congolese troops during fighting” [20] which began when former Congolese general Laurent Nkunda staged an armed rebellion in the east of the country which led to the displacement of 200,000 civilians.

The BBC revealed at the time that “journalists report that some of Laurent Nkunda’s rebel fighters are in the pay of the Rwandan army.

“This has renewed fears that the fighting will see a re-run of the five-year Congolese war, which involved nine nations, before it ended in 2003.” [21]

The British Financial Times conducted interviews with “former rebels and observers on the ground” who said that “the uprising – led by Laurent Nkunda, the renegade former Congolese general – relies heavily on recruitment in Rwanda and former or even active Rwandan soldiers.”

Referring to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the report added, “Mr Nkunda and Rwanda’s government, military and business elite share a history….Mr Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi, was an intelligence officer in the guerrilla army that Mr Kagame, a Rwandan Tutsi, used to…seize power.

“Mr Kagame launched invasions of Congo in 1996 and 1998 and supported uprisings….” [22]

The following month a U.S. congressional delegation “traveled to Rwanda and Ethiopia to meet with U.S. ambassadors, AFRICOM officials and various ministers of each country, including Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Rwanda Foreign Minister Charles Murigande.” [23]

Ethiopia invaded Somalia on America’s behest three years ago and Rwanda’s repeated incursions into Congo could not have occurred without a green light from Washington.

As a Ugandan commentary at the time of the latest attack on Congo from Rwanda stated, “London, New York and Paris are among the top consumers of minerals from Congo. They lecture humanity on the need to uphold human rights and the sanctity of property rights whilst their thirst for strategic minerals unleashes terror on innocent women and children in Eastern Congo.” [24]

Last week an AFRICOM spokesman announced that “The United States military will be sending experts to the war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo this week.” The initial deployment will be small, he added, but “more may follow….” [25] AFRICOM would be better advised to monitor the activities of the Rwandan military it trains and arms.

Also last week the Pentagon stated it was deploying “unmanned reconnaissance aircraft in the skies above the Seychelles archipelago” in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar and AFRICOM commander General William Ward said, “We have the recent arrival of our P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft that will aid in conducting the surveillance of Seychelles territorial waters and as we look into the future, (we will) bring unmanned surveillance vehicles.” [26]

Two days later Ward said “that the rise of radical Islamist militant group al-Shabab in Somalia makes East Africa a central focus of the U.S. military on the continent.”

Voice of America added:

“General William Ward has pledged continued support to Somalia’s transitional federal government….He made his remarks during a visit to Nairobi, Kenya, which is a key U.S. ally in region.” [27]

Until last October Africa was the only continent other than Australia and Antarctica without a U.S. military command. The fact that one has now been established indicates that Africa has achieved heightened importance for the Pentagon and its Western military allies.

An analysis of why Africa is a major focus of attention and why now rather than earlier was provided by U.S.-based writer Paul I. Adujie in the New Liberian on August 21:

“America’s Africa Command, in conceptual terms and actual implementation, is not intended to serve Africa’s best interests. It just happens that Africa has grown in geopolitical and geo-economic importance to America and her allies. Africa has been there all along.

“There were, for instance, reports of how the American military, acting supposedly in partnership or cooperation with the Nigerian military, literally took over Nigerian Defense Headquarters….

“It is probably important to mention that the United States already operates at least three other commands, namely, the European Command (EUCOM), Central Command (CENTCOM) and Pacific Command (PACOM), therefore the Africa Command or (AFRICOM) will be the fourth leg of US military global spread.

“America’s Africa Command is…machinery for Western governments to pursue their vaunted economic, political and hegemonic hemispheric influence at the expense of Africans as well as a backdoor through which Westerners can outmaneuver rivals such as China and perhaps Russia in addition.” [28]

1) The Anti-Empire Report, August 4th, 2009
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer72.html
2) Real Clear Politics, February 8, 2009
3) Agence France-Presse, November 30, 2008
4) Reuters, November 27, 2006
5) U.S. Department of Defense, August 18, 2006
6) Associated Press, June 21, 2006
7) Reuters, June 22, 2006
8) Associated Press, April 24, 2006
9) Trend News Agency, May 3, 2006
10) U.S. Department of Defense, March 8, 2006
11) http://www.army.mil, May 6, 2009
12) AllAfrica.com, August 14, 2009
13) United States European Command, July 29, 2008
14) United States European Command, July 16, 2008
15) United States European Command, July 29, 2008
16) U.S. Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service, January 28, 2009
17) U.S. Air Forces in Europe, January 9, 2009
18) Stars And Stripes, May 24, 2009
19) Ibid
20) Associated Press, November 3, 2008
21) BBC News, November 13, 2008
22) Financial Times, November 11, 2008
23) Times-Journal, December 8, 2008
24) Sunday Monitor (Uganda), November 9, 2008
25) Daily Nation (Kenya), August 18, 2009
26) Reuters, August 19, 2009
27) Voice of America News, August 21, 2009
28) New Liberian, August 21, 2009

Pentagon Intensifies Plans For Global Military Supremacy: U.S., NATO Could Deploy Mobile Missiles Launchers To Europe

Stop NATO articles

Stop NATO
August 22, 2009

Pentagon Intensifies Plans For Global Military Supremacy:
U.S., NATO Could Deploy Mobile Missiles Launchers To Europe
Rick Rozoff

From August 17-20 the annual U.S. Space and Missile Defense Conference was conducted in Huntsville, Alabama, which hosts the headquarters of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA).

Among the over 2,000 participants were the Missile Defense Agency’s new director, Army Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General James Cartwright, commander of the Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command Army Lieutenant General Kevin Campbell and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Administrator Charles Bolden Jr.

There were also 230 exhibitors present, among them the nation’s major arms manufacturers with an emphasis on those weapons companies specializing in global missile shield and space war projects. The presence of the head of NASA indicated that the distinction between the military and civilian uses of space is rapidly disappearing. As the Bloomberg news agency reported on the second day of this year, “President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China” and “Obama’s transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration….” [1] The recently appointed NASA chief, Bolden, is a retired Marine Corps general.

47,500-Pound Missile Launcher Headed To NATO Bases In Europe?

A Reuters dispatch of August 20 on the Huntsville Space and Missile Defense Conference reported that the Boeing Company’s vice president and general manager for missile defense, Greg Hyslop, announced to the conference that his company “is eyeing a 47,500-pound interceptor that could be flown to NATO bases as needed on Boeing-built C-17 cargo planes, erected quickly on a 60-foot trailer stand and taken home when judged safe to do so.”

Boeing displayed a scale-model version of a mobile “two-stage interceptor designed to be globally deployable within 24 hours….” [2]

The company executive made an allusion to the fixed-site ground-based interceptor deployment planned for Poland as being politically risky – the majority of Poles oppose it if their government doesn’t and Russian officials have persistently pledged to take countermeasures if the U.S. goes ahead with the project – and the above-cited Reuters report endorses the mobile interceptor proposal by claiming it could “blunt Russian fears of possible U.S. fixed missile-defense sites in Europe.” [3]

How substituting a mobile missile launcher “globally deployable within 24 hours” for ten missiles permanently stationed in Poland at a location known to Russia would assuage the latter’s concerns over its deterrence and retaliation capabilities being neutralized in the event of a U.S. and NATO first strike was not explained by either the Boeing official or Reuters.

Later in the same day the First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic Tomas Pojar gave the lie to the Boeing subterfuge by insisting that a “possible U.S. mobile anti-missile shield does not threaten the U.S. plans to build a radar base on Czech soil because the system is to be a combination of fixed and mobile elements” and that “The whole system will always function based on the combination of fixed and mobile elements (including many radars) that will complement one another. It is not possible otherwise.” [4]

Missile Defense: Ruse And Reality

As regards the incontestable fact that American and NATO plans for the deployment of interceptor missiles and complementary radar facilities in Europe are not and could not be designed to protect the United States and Western Europe from imaginary Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles and equally non-existent nuclear warheads, even the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright was forced to concede the point at the space and missile defense conference this week.

In relation to the U.S.’s “capability to take on 15 inbound intercontinental ballistic missiles simultaneously using the 30 GBI’s [ground-based interceptors] being placed in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California,” Cartwright in a moment of rare candor stated, “That’s a heck of a lot more than a rogue nation could fire.” [5]

To demonstrate that interceptor missiles and associated radar components of a worldwide Star Wars system – the current U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is an outgrowth of the Ronald Reagan administration’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative and since 2002 has been the successor organization to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization launched in 1993 – are intended for incorporation into a far wider-ranging project than what they are publicly acknowledged to be used for, at this week’s conference in Alabama MDA’s director Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly addressed one of the space facets of his agency’s plans and spoke of the inauguration of the Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) which will include two demonstration satellites to be launched next month. [6]

And in respect to the ground-based components of U.S. and NATO missile shield deployments in Eastern Europe, plans for their stationing have never been disavowed by American officials, neither President Barack Obama nor Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The only reservations expressed in Washington about positioning missiles and missile radar precariously close to Russia’s borders are the proven viability and cost effectiveness of such deployments.

Broadening The Scope Of U.S.-NATO Missile Shield Plans

On July 30th Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow told U.S. congressmen “The site in Poland and the radar in the Czech Republic are among the options that are being considered, together with other options that might be able to perform the mission as well” and Associated Press on that date wrote that “Vershbow said the missile defense review will look at a range of options, but will not take Russia’s objection into account.” [7]

The “other options” all along have been a broader and not narrower undertaking, that of integrating American missile shield sites into a continent-wide system with NATO.

The recent recommendation of a mobile, rapid deployable interceptor missile model may well be what is intended, again to reinforce rather than supplant bilateral arrangements between the U.S. and Poland and the Czech Republic.

Almost thirty years ago to the day Washington first proposed a mobile missile initiative that if implemented might have proven to be one of the most dangerous moves in the 45-year Cold War.

MX: Washington’s First Project For Mobile Missile Launchers

In a speech on September 7, 1979 U.S. President Jimmy Carter, indicating a qualitative escalation of strategic deployments in the second half of his term that would pave the way for further aggressive actions by his successor Ronald Reagan, announced that:

“My administration is now embarked on a program to modernize and to improve the ability of our entire strategic triad, all three systems, to survive any attack. Our bomber force is being strengthened with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Our strategic submarine force is being upgraded by Trident submarines and Trident missiles. However, as a result of increasing accuracy of strategic systems, fixed land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBM’s located in silos, such as our Minuteman, are becoming vulnerable to attack. A mobile ICBM system will greatly reduce this vulnerability.”

He was referring to the MX missile system and described it in outline as one that would “consist of 200 missile transporters or launchers, each capable of rapid movement on a special roadway connecting approximately 23 horizontal shelters.”

The full scale of the project was to have included a circular railroad track on which more than 200 missiles would be rotated into 4,600 shelters along the circumference in Utah and Nevada.

During the delicate and often hair-trigger days of the Cold War when peace and the survival of the planet and its inhabitants depended not only on mutual trust but on each side – the U.S. and the Soviet Union – being able to know what the other possessed and where it possessed it, especially launchers for intercontinental ballistic missiles equipped with nuclear warheads, Carter’s MX missile adventurism, had it implemented, may have brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than it had ever been before.

For although Carter and his grey eminence, the ruthless geopolitician and pathological Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski, employed the artifice of defending the U.S. against an alleged Soviet first strike threat, in fact they intended to confront the USSR. with almost 5,000 new sites to target. The current total Russian strategic arsenal is exactly that number.

The 1979 SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) called for both sides to reduce their delivery vehicles (ICBM silos, submarine missile-launch tubes and strategic bombers) to 2,250. That number is less than half of the missile shelters the MX project would have constructed.

The MX system and complementary nuclear weapons initiatives with NATO in Europe were intended to accomplish one or both of two objectives: To be able to win (whatever that verb could mean in the most horrifying of all contexts) a nuclear war and to force the Soviet Union to spend itself into bankruptcy, the dual goal that was pursued even more assertively by Carter’s replacement Ronald Reagan and his Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) project begun in 1983. (Reagan would transform the MX project into what only his administration could call the Peacekeeper fixed-site missile, each carrying 10 re-entry vehicles armed with 300-kiloton warheads.)

1979: NATO’s Expanded Nuclear Deployments In Europe

The month after Carter announced his commitment to the MX missile program, in October of 1979 NATO adopted a resolution that recommended modernization of NATO’s long-range theater-nuclear forces. 108 Pershing II missile and 464 ground-launched cruise missile launchers were to be deployed in Western Europe “To enhance the deterrence posture of NATO and to provide for a contingency in which the actual use of NATO’s nuclear-capable systems might become necessary….” [8]

The beginning of the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 medium-range missiles was the justification for the stationing of an additional 572 nuclear warheads in Europe. How serious a threat Soviet missile attacks on Western Europe, much less the United States, were was demonstrated twelve years later when the nation unilaterally dissolved itself.

In December a meeting of NATO defense and foreign ministers formalized the plans and NATO Secretary General Joseph Luns revealed that the Pershing IIs and nuclear cruise missiles would be based in the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Britain and possibly Belgium and the Netherlands.

In June of 1980 the NATO Nuclear Planning Group met in Norway and “Following a briefing by the United States Secretary of Defence [Harold Brown], Ministers discussed strategic policy and planning concerning central strategic and theatre nuclear forces in support of the Alliance. Against this background, Ministers noted the continuing importance of improving the effectiveness of the full spectrum of Alliance forces, i.e. conventional, theatre nuclear and strategic nuclear forces, and of maintaining the essential linkage between these elements of the NATO triad.” [9]

One of the chief purposes of the founding of NATO in April of 1949 – months before the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August of that year – was to allow the U.S. to station some of the nuclear weapons of which it had a monopoly in Europe. Although Washington’s arsenal of nuclear warheads in Europe was drastically reduced after the end of the Cold War, American nuclear weapons remain on the continent, by some estimates several hundred.

NATO’s Supreme Guarantee: Strategic Nuclear Forces

NATO’s Strategic Concept adopted in 1999 states that “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….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.”

A new version is being crafted currently, with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright heading up the group preparing it. In announcing the launching of that initiative, NATO reiterated that “The Strategic Concept is the authoritative statement of the Alliance’s objectives and provides the highest level of guidance on the political and military means to be used in achieving them.” [10]

Each summit and several ministerial and Military Committee meetings over the past decade have reaffirmed the Alliance’s dedication to the deployment and use of nuclear weapons in Europe.

As one of Turkey’s main daily newspapers, Zaman, said this July 31, “NATO rules allow for the possible use of nuclear weapons against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran….” [11]

A Time magazine report last year claimed that “The U.S. keeps an estimated 350 thermonuclear bombs in six NATO countries. In four of those — Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands — the weapons are stored at the host nation’s air bases, where they are guarded by specially trained U.S. military personnel.” [12]

When Boeing announced that it is prepared to assist in moving a nearly 50,000-pound mobile missile launcher – deployable internationally within 24 hours – to various NATO bases in Europe, it’s important to recall that many of those bases house nuclear warheads.

Pentagon’s, NATO’s New Bases In Eastern Europe: Threat To Russia

Were an interceptor missile – launched from a fixed site in Poland or from a proposed mobile missile launcher most anywhere in Europe – to approach Russia’s border by accident or design, the effect would be the same as that warned of by Russian military officials when the George W. Bush administration announced plans to equip ICBMs with conventional warheads.

No one in Moscow would have the luxury of waiting to see if a mushroom cloud blossomed over the Russian capital. The nation’s political and military leaders would do what their counterparts in any other nation, the U.S. most assuredly, would do. They would assume the worst and respond accordingly. That is, they would retaliate with strategic forces.

There are no NATO bases per se although there are bases in several European nations from Britain to Turkey that have been used by the bloc over for decades, and nowadays military bases in most every part of Europe are at the disposal of NATO collectively and the U.S. individually. Over the past ten years numerous new ones have become available in Eastern Europe, particularly in nations that border the Baltic and Black Seas, as does Russia in both cases.

American and NATO missile shield plans for Europe, inextricably connected as they are with a global interceptor missile network and the militarization of space, don’t exist in a strategic vacuum.

Verification Safeguards, Weapons Limitations: U.S. To Let START Die Russia Fears Nuclear First Strike

This year has marked several parallel moves by the West to achieve worldwide military – including nuclear – supremacy, especially ahead of the expiration of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) this December 5.

Two years ago Reuters reported that “The United States plans to let a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia expire in 2009 and replace it with a less formal agreement that eliminates strict verification requirements and weapons limits, a senior US official says.”

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Paula DeSutter is quoted as asserting that the major provisions of the treaty “are no longer necessary. We don’t believe we’re in a place where we need have to have the detailed lists (of weapons) and verification measures.” [13]

A Russian commentary of last December made the connection between the lack of a replacement for the START agreement and Washington’s missile shield designs and warned that “Lack of such agreement and deployment of a U.S. missile defense system may undermine strategic parity between the Russian Federation and the U.S. The potential enemy’s considerable superiority in the number of warheads is greatly increasing the risk of a disarming first strike, and the surviving missiles may not be enough to penetrate missile defenses and inflict unacceptable damage on the aggressor.” [14]

This March the Council on Foreign Relations conducted an interview with Russian defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer (who is of a decidedly pro-Western bent) in which he said that Russia believes “that nuclear missiles will be deployed in Poland near Russia and these nuclear missiles will have also a first-strike capability and could hit Moscow before [Russia’s response] could get airborne, so this is going to actually be seen not so much as missile defense as a deployment of first-strike capability.

“The Russian military has been telling its political leaders that this missile plan is actually not what the Americans say it is. The Russian military says that these missiles will be nuclear armed because the Russian military doesn’t believe that non-nuclear defensive missiles are possible.” [15]

Prompt Global Strike: Missiles To Strike Anywhere On Earth In 35 Minutes

Regarding another U.S. plan to upset global military parity and further endanger world peace – the Prompt Global Strike initiative approved by Congress two years ago – it has been characterized as being able to “provide the US with the capability to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the earth within 60 minutes.

“Experts warn this could unleash a new spiral of the arms race and [is] fraught with unpredictable consequences.

“The Americans’ action is seen as a threat to everyone.

“They can take any potential enemy, Russia included, in their crosshairs and if treaties like START 1 and others are not extended, there will be no more curbs left…to prevent the development of new deadly weapons all leading to a new round of the arms race.” [16]

Another warning concerning Prompt Global Strike was issued by a Russian source two years ago: “The programme has been prompted by a US new strategy in the making, a strategy that proceeds from building a potential for delivering a first strike involving non-nuclear arms anywhere in the world within just one hour’s time.

“Two projects are due to be carried out within the programme.

“The first has to do with arming Trident sea-based missiles with conventional charges, while the second is about building a new super speed cruise missile.” [17]

Shortly afterward a major British newspaper in an article titled “US plans new space weapons against China” revealed that “Congress awarded $150 million for the Falcon project [hypersonic technology vehicle] and its associated prompt global strike programme. A defence industry source said it was likely that hundreds of millions more were being spent on space warfare ‘away from the public view.’

“The ‘global strike’ platform would give America the ‘forward presence it requires around the world without the need for bases outside the US.

“The Pentagon is spending billions of dollars on new forms of space warfare to counter the growing risk of missile attack from rogue states and the ‘satellite killer’ capabilities of China.” [18]

Prompt Global Strike includes two main weapons, a conventional strike missile and an advanced hypersonic weapon, “a high-speed, missile-launched vehicle that could hit targets anywhere on Earth within 35 minutes.” [19]

Another Russian alarm was sounded at about the same time, one whose operative word is orbital: “Despite the obvious threat to civilization the United States may soon acquire orbital weapons under the Prompt Global Strike plan. They will give it the capacity to deal a conventional strike virtually anywhere in the world within an hour.” [20]

This year has been a portentous one so far in several other regards when it comes to the Pentagon’s plans for uncontested global military domination.

U.S. Navy Launches Missile Defense Command, Air Force Consolidates Nuclear Global Strike Command, Air Force Space Command Establishes Cyberwarfare Unit, MDA Boosts Laser Warfare Capacity

On April 30 the U.S. Navy established an Air and Missile Defense Command. Speaking on the occasion at the Naval Support Facility in Dahlgren, Virginia, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Adm. Robert F. Willard said, “We’re on a quest to field a naval capability that is equally adept servicing national missile defense of the United States, regional missile defense for our allies and friends abroad and theater defense for our forward fighting forces.” [21]

The Aegis combat system which has equipped the U.S. and its allies (to date Norway, Spain, Australia, Japan and South Korea) with sea-based interceptor radar and missiles is administered by the U.S. Navy.

On August 7 the U.S. Air Force launched a Global Strike Command which combines all American ICBMs and nuclear-capable bombers, which includes new generation super-stealth warplanes capable of evading the radar and penetrating the air defenses of countries targeted for devastating first strikes.

Eleven days later, August 18, the U.S. Air Force Space Command “activated a new unit…to better organize space and cyberspace capabilities”

To illustrate what purposes space and cyberspace are to play in future warfighting plans, the Space Command’s top military officer, Gen. C. Robert Kehler, said of his command that it “is committed to organizing and equipping the 24th Air Force so it can be a premiere organization dedicated to supporting combatant commanders.” [22]

The United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command has boosted activity on its High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and on August 10 the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency employed a modified Boeing 747 passenger airliner to conduct the most advanced test yet of its Airborne Laser missile defense system and the Missile Defense Agency announced plans to next use the weapon against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) during their boost phase.

MEADS: NATO And Pentagon To Cover Europe With Layered Missile Shield

Returning to Europe and so-called missile defense, the Obama administration has requested almost $600 million in funding for the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) for next year and “Congress is on track to support the Administration’s request.” [23] MEADS is a joint U.S.-German-Italian-NATO theater interceptor missile program to upgrade current Patriot and Nike Hercules systems in Europe under NATO management and “will provide capabilities beyond any other fielded or planned air and missile defense system. It will be easily deployed to a theater of operation.” [24]

“The U.S. provides 58 percent of funding with Germany offering 25 percent and Italy and other NATO members contributing 17 percent. MEADS is designed to provide air defense from ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and aircraft.” [25]

MEADS is to consist of:

•A sophisticated X-band radar;
•A surveillance radar with 360 degree coverage;
•A tactical operations center;
•Launchers; and
•The next-generation Patriot interceptor. [26]

The upgraded Patriot is the new Lockheed Martin “hit-to-kill” PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor, one which exceeds the range and accuracy of the PAC-3 which itself covers seven times the area of the original Patriot and has double the striking distance.

An advocate of MEADS, the U.S. Heritage Foundation think tank, offered this evaluation of its geopolitical as well as technical aspects.

“MEADS International, the joint venture executing the contract, announced on August 5 that the system had completed is component-level critical design reviews and that MEADS will begin system-level reviews.

“If the U.S. moves forward with the systems for the Czech Republic and Poland, however, it is reasonable to demand that the Germans and Italians express support for the fielding of the long-range missile defenses for U.S. and Europe….MEADS will provide a transportable missile and air defense capability. This means the system will be able to accompany expeditionary ground forces to wherever they are deployed and protect these forces against air and missile attacks. Thus, MEADS will be a critical element of alliance force projection capabilities.

“MEADS is interoperable with other defense systems. MEADS is not a standalone system. It can work in association with other missile defense systems, including the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and the Aegis sea-based missile defense systems….MEADS, as with the longer-range defenses that should be fielded in the Czech Republic and Poland, may be able to make a material contribution the Active Layered Theater Ballistic Missile Defense system that NATO planners are currently designing.” [27]

Any hopes that a new post-Cold War order, a new century or a new American administration would herald a more peaceful and less dangerous world are being gravely challenged.

Notes

1) Bloomberg News, January 2, 2009
2) Reuters, August 20, 2009
3) Ibid
4) Czech News Agency, August 20, 2009
5) Reuters, August 20, 2009
6) Aviation Week, August 20, 2009
7) Associated Press, July 30, 2009
8) Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 457,
No. 1, 78-87 (1981)
9) NATO Nuclear Planning Group, June 3-4, 1980
10) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, July 8, 2009
11) Zaman, July 31, 2009
12) Time, June 19, 2008
13) Reuters, May 23, 2007
14) Russian Information Agency Novosti, December 12, 2008
15) Council on Foreign Relations, March 18, 2009
16) Voice of Russia, September 12, 2007
17) Voice of Russia, August 7, 2007
18) Daily Telegraph, November 14, 2007
19) Washington Times, November 27, 2009
20) Russian Information Agency Novosti,
November 20, 2007
21) United States Navy, April 30, 2009
22) U.S. Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service, August 19, 2009
23) Heritage Foundation, August 17, 2009
24) Wikipedia
25) Aviation Week, August 20, 2009
26) Heritage Foundation, August 17, 2009
27) Ibid

U.S. Accelerates First Strike Global Missile Shield System

Stop NATO
August 19, 2009

U.S. Accelerates First Strike Global Missile Shield System
Rick Rozoff

On August 13th the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and Chicago-based Boeing International announced a test of their joint Airborne Laser (ABL) missile defense system, which “successfully tracked and hit the mark earlier this month during its first in-flight test against an instrumented target missile.” [1]

Employing a modified Boeing 747-400F prototype airplane, on August 10 the Missile Defense Agency had the adapted commercial airliner use infrared sensors against a missile launched from San Nicolas Island, California and “found, tracked, engaged and simulated an intercept with a missile seconds after liftoff. It was the first time the Agency used an ‘instrumented’ missile to confirm the laser works as expected. Next up this fall will be the first live attempt to bring down a ballistic missile….” [2]

A newspaper from Alabama, the state where the MDA headquarters is based, mentioned that “The news came today [August 13], just a few days before the 12th annual Space and Missile Defense Conference opens next week in Huntsville.” [3]

The Wall Street Journal waxed enthusiastic about the advanced missile interceptor test, stating that “Along with space-based weapons, the Airborne Laser is the next defense frontier. The modified Boeing 747 is supposed to send an intense beam of light over hundreds of miles to destroy missiles in the ‘boost phase,’ before they can release decoys and at a point in their trajectory when they would fall back down on enemy territory….The laser complements the sea- and ground-based missile defenses that keep proving themselves in tests.

“Never has Ronald Reagan’s dream of layered missile defenses – Star Wars, for short – been as….close, at least technologically, to becoming realized.” [4]

The Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet was launched as a civilian airliner in 1970 and versions of the plane are in use throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. There is no technical reason why 747 commercial airliners cannot be similarly configured to carry Airborne Laser weapons and track and destroy ballistic missiles while camouflaged as strictly civilian passenger planes.

The MDA has revealed that it plans to upgrade Airborne Laser weapons for use against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) during their boost phase, thereby giving them a strategic character.

As an increasingly vital component of U.S. and allied worldwide, integrated missile interceptor systems, which as will be seen may advance to more than intercepting other nation’s missiles and be capable of destroying them in their silos and launching pads before being fired, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said of its latest Airborne Laser operation that “this test marks the third successful ABL missile engagement in just over two months and the first time laser performance data was collected at the target missile. Plans call for ABL to engage progressively more difficult targets in coming months, culminating with a lethal demonstration against a boosting threat-representative ballistic missile target later this year.” [5]

The ABL is slated to play a progressively more important role in an expanding network of international 21st century Star Wars and space war projects and deployments which includes short- to medium-range theater missile defense of the Patriot variety, with the latter recently upgraded to the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3) Missile.

Last October the German Air Force conducted a PAC-3 Missile test at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and a news report at the time contained this description of the low-end range of U.S. and allied nations’ layered interceptor missile plans: “The Patriot air defence system is a long-range, high to medium altitude missile system and Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor on the PAC-3 Missile Segment upgrade. The PAC-3 Missile will increase the Patriot’s firepower from an output of four to 16.” [6]

This February U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed Washington’s plans to deploy a Patriot missile battery in Poland, not far from Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave, with a garrison of at least 100 troops to man it in addition to plans to base 10 interceptor missiles in the country.

On August 17 Japan announced that it was going to station American Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) surface-to-air interceptor missiles at all six of its anti-aircraft facilities. Patriots were deployed to Israel on the eve of the Operation Desert Storm war against Iraq in 1991 and again, with NATO invoking its Article 5 military assistance provision, to Turkey in 2003 before the Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion. They are intended to prevent retaliation against aggressive military operations.

The global and more than global – exoatmospheric, space – system also includes Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI), Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV), Aegis combat system (destroyers carrying interceptor radar and missiles) and Forward Based X-Band Radars (FBXB) components.

Disarmament advocates and top Russian officials alike have warned for years that the missile interceptor and related space war programs are not, as claimed by the Pentagon and its military allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, aimed at so-called rogue states but have a far more dangerous purpose.

In June Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao announced that their two nations were drafting a joint treaty to ban the deployment of weapons in outer space and to present it to the United Nations General Assembly.

Regarding the true intent of missile interceptor plans both on earth and in space, a recent news item detailed that “The White House says the plan is aimed at countering what it terms as ‘threats’ from countries such as Iran, which has no existing or planned missiles which can reach the US. The Kremlin, meanwhile, believes that the real aim of the system is to neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and therefore sees it as a threat to Russia’s national security.” [7]

An influential Russian news source stated: “[T]he strategic importance of these interceptor missiles would increase were the U.S. to deliver a first nuclear strike against Russia.

“In this scenario, interceptor missiles would have to take on the limited number of missiles surviving the first strike, which would allow the U.S. to hope for success and, for the first time since the 1950s, for a victory in a nuclear war.” [8]

Lest this perspective be seen as a uniquely Russia concern, in the March/April 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, authors Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press contributed a study called “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy” which stated, inter alia, that “It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.

“The U.S. Air Force has finished equipping its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are probably invisible to Russian and Chinese air-defense radar. And the air force has also enhanced the avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar.” [9]

Deploying short-, medium- and long-range interceptor missile batteries, sophisticated and mobile missile radar stations, long-range super-stealth nuclear bombers, Aegis class destroyers equipped to sail the world’s seas to hunt down and neutralize conventional and nuclear missiles, and surveillance satellites and weapons in space is hardly designed to target non-existent intercontinental ballistic missile threats from Iran or Syria, or even from North Korea, but to blackmail Russia and China and prepare the groundwork for surviving and “triumphing” in a first strike nuclear war.

On August 11 the commander of the Russian Air Force, Colonel General Alexander Zelin, warned that “By 2030…foreign countries, particularly the United States, will be able to deliver coordinated high-precision strikes from air and space against any target on the whole territory of Russia,” adding “That is why the main goal of the development of the Russian Air Force until 2020 is to create a new branch of the Armed Forces, which would form the core of the country’s air and space defenses to provide a reliable deterrent during peacetime, and repel any military aggression with the use of conventional and nuclear arsenals in a time of war” [10] and “We are building new missiles that will be capable of defending not only against air-defense systems but space-based systems.” [11]

The following day Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva “Outer space is now facing the looming danger of weaponization. Credible and effective multilateral measures must be taken to forestall the weaponization and arms race in outer space.”

Yang demanded that “Countries should neither develop missile defense systems that undermine global strategic stability nor deploy weapons in outer space.” [12]

The Western news report in which the quotes appeared added “China and Russia have been vocal advocates of a global treaty against space-based weapons and argue for this to be included in future Conference of Disarmament negotiations,” but that “United States has dismissed the criticism as designed to block its plans for a missile interceptor system….” [13]

Undeterred by Chinese and Russian concerns, the U. S. is forging ahead with expanding its Star Wars and space wars dyad in both depth and breadth.

Two days ago the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency commenced its 12th annual Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Alabama where its headquarters is situated, and which includes a new Von Braun Center named after the father of Nazi Germany’s missile project and one of the creators of the U.S. ICBM program who with several German colleagues was sent to Huntsville in 1950 (Operation Paperclip) to work on the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the Pentagon.

This year the Von Braun Center hosts over 2,000 participants and 230 exhibitors and speakers including Marine General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., Army Lieutenant General Kevin Campbell, commanding general of the Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command, and Missile Defense Agency Director Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly.

“The conference also includes receptions and special events sponsored by a number of the exhibitors, which include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman….” [14]

As was seen earlier, the Pentagon’s most advanced Airborne Laser missile interception test to date was conducted in advance of the conference.

The MDA is also accelerating the pace of full spectrum air, sea, land, cyber and space missile shield developments in addition to laser weapons.

On August 1 it announced it had completed a successful sea-based missile interception from Hawaii. A ballistic missile was fired from the island of Kauai and “shot down by a three-stage interceptor missile from the USS Hopper.” [15]

A report that appeared before the interception quoted the MDA as saying that “The test, conducted by the Navy and the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency, will mark the 23rd firing by ships equipped with the Aegis ballistic missile defense system. There have been 18 successes, including the shooting down of a dead U.S. spy satellite from space last year.

“While the Hopper fires and guides an SM-3 Block IA missile to intercept the target missile in the upper atmosphere, the USS O’Kane will simulate engagement and the USS Lake Erie will detect and track the target….” [16]

“USS Lake Erie’s recently installed Aegis upgrade will enable it to engage increasingly longer range, more sophisticated ballistic missiles, according to the Missile Defense Agency.” [17]

The disabled satellite mentioned above, the USA-193 spy satellite, was shot down in space in February of 2008 by the same USS Lake Erie, an Aegis class Guided Missile Cruiser, that participated in the above-described test.

At the time of the satellite’s destruction China registered a complaint and “Russia’s Defense Ministry said the U.S. plan could be used as a cover to test a new space weapon.” [18]

In fact Russian State Duma deputy Andrei Kokoshin, former Secretary of the Russian Security Council, said at the time that “The US-193 spy satellite shooting by a U.S. missile may result in a new stage in space
militarization.”

“[T]he satellite was shot down as an act of political demonstration of America’s capacities and confirmation of the American ‘free hand’ policy of the use of force in outer-space and the development of anti-satellite weaponry.” [19]

Last month the Pentagon announced plans to integrate its latest generation drone, the Reaper – “one of several projects aimed at monitoring enemy missiles just after launch” [20] – into the global missile shield system.

In the words of a Defense Department official, “It gives you a great capability from hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away to be able to view a missile launch and actually track it and provide data to our shooters to intercept.”

According to the new head of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, “By studying the missile in its early stage of flight, the drones could provide data that would allow the incoming weapon to be destroyed.” [21]

Also in July it was reported in a news story called “Tomahawk Being Re-tooled as Ship-killer” that “Raytheon Missile Systems wants to turn its land-attack Tomahawk missile into a ship killer that can do something never done before: Hit a cruising warship from a thousand miles away,” with one of the intended targets being China.

“The Chinese…began producing a lot of mobile ballistic missile launchers about a decade ago….[T]hese tactical missiles are deployed in bunkers close enough to the coast to be destroyed by a longer-range, more powerful Tomahawk. U.S. Navy missile that cruises hundreds of miles over land to blow up buildings is being redesigned in Tucson to chase down moving targets.” [22]

On July 22 Israel tested its Arrow II interceptor missile, jointly developed with the U.S., off the coast of California and “In a test involving three U.S. missile interceptors, Arrow tracked a target missile dropped from a C-17 aircraft.” [23]

The various stages of the layered interceptor missile system depend upon radar and surveillance facilities and satellites on earth and in space. Missile shield deployments – missiles and radar – already exist in Alaska and its Aleutian Islands, Greenland, Britain, Norway, Japan, South Korea and Australia and are planned for Poland (missiles) and the Czech Republic (radar).

But those sites only represent the beginning phases of a far most ambitious grid around the world as well as in space.

Last September the U.S. Senate allocated $89 million for “the activation and deployment of the AN/TPY-2 forward-based X-band radar [the same type to be deployed in the Czech Republic] to a classified location.”

A Russian news source commented on this move:

“The ‘classified location’ is not a complete secret.

“Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, [then] director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), has said more than once that Turkey, Georgia and even Ukraine could be future locations for ballistic missile defense systems.

“[T]he Pentagon will most likely choose Turkey or, some Western analysts say, Israel or Japan.

“Russia has told Washington more than once that no fence of antimissiles near its border would save the United States from a retaliatory strike by missiles capable of evading ABM as well as by air and naval systems.” [24]

Washington has in fact chosen all of the above-named nations and others as well.

Last March Pentagon chief Robert Gates visited Turkey to hold consultations on missile shield plans. A Turkish report on the meeting stated “A powerful, ‘forward based’ X-band radar station could go in southeastern Europe, possibly in Turkey, the Caucasus or the Caspian Sea region, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, head of Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, told a defense conference in Washington on Feb. 12.” [25]

Two months later it was revealed that “the United States may deploy a high-frequency X-band radar in Georgia.” [26]

In 2008 the U.S. also substantially boosted its interceptor plans for Japan and it was announced that “Japan and the United States are erecting the world’s most complex ballistic missile defense shield, a project that is changing the security balance in Asia and has deep implications for Washington’s efforts to pursue a similar strategy in Europe….” [27]

The Pentagon and the Japanese military are working on an early warning system “of the kind provided by the Joint Tactical Ground Station, or JTAG [which the U.S. also operates in Germany, Qatar and South Korea], and another state-of-the-art X-band radar station recently deployed” to Japan. [28]

The preceding month, December of 2007, Japan became the first nation after the U.S. to shoot a missile out of the air with an Aegis-linked Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) in a test off Hawaii.

In June of 2008 the U.S. Strategic Command completed a study on the deployment of Forward-Based X-Band Radars.

A U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command spokesman said of the study that it would “coordinate and recommend to [Office of the Secretary of Defense-policy] a strategy for AN/TPY-2 radar employment, supporting worldwide ballistic missile defense capabilities in the period 2008-2012.” [29]

In 2006 the U.S. deployed Forward-Based X-Band [FBX] radar to a Japanese Air Self-Defense Force base northeast of Tokyo and as of last year additionally planned to “deploy an FBX radar to Europe” and Juneau, Alaska and is “working to integrate tracks from the FBX radar into the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system….”

“All Ballistic Missile Defense System radars – including the upgraded early warning radars at Beale Air Force Base, CA, Fylingdales Royal Air Base in the United Kingdom, Thule Air Base in Greenland and the Cobra Dane radars in Alaska – the Sea-Based X-band radar, and all AN/TPY-2 radars (both forward-based and THAAD Fire Units) will now be managed under one program office.” [30]

The Pentagon is also still planning to modify its X-band radar on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific and relocate it to the Czech Republic in conjunction with the deployment of ten interceptor missiles in Poland.

An Israeli daily newspaper recently reported that the U.S. and the Israel Defense Forces will hold a joint missile defense exercise in October, Juniper Cobra, “during which the American-made Aegis and THAAD defense systems will deploy in Israel for the first time.” [31]

Earlier exercises were held at the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.

“Israel received the advanced X-Band radar in October as a farewell gift from the Bush administration to beef up Israeli defenses….The radar is deployed in southern Israel near the Nevatim Air Force Base and is reportedly capable of tracking small targets from thousands of kilometers away.” [32]

Thousands of kilometers away means surveillance of not only Syria and Iran but a large swathe of southern Russia.

This January the U.S. Air Force established a provisional Global Strike Command which was fully activated on August 7. It has subsumed the Air Combat Command and the Air Force Space Command and in the words of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz it will “organize, train and equip America’s ICBMs and nuclear-capable bombers….”

Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said the new command will “bring together the Air Force bomber force and intercontinental ballistic missiles under a single commander.” [33]

Reacting to this consolidation, streamlining and upgrading of American global nuclear strike potential, on August 11 the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force, the same Alexander Zelin cited earlier on the threat of U.S. strikes from space on all of his nation, said that the “Russian Air Force is preparing to meet the threats resulting from the creation of the Global Strike Command in the U.S. Air Force” and that Russia is developing “appropriate systems to meet the threats that may arise.” [34]

A change in the American White House, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the mounting costs in both dollars and lives of the war in Afghanistan have not slowed down the U.S.’s plans for military domination of the planet and in outer space; nor have they lessened the threat of an unprecedented catastrophe resulting from the designs by the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia to establish an impenetrable international missile shield that would leave two of the world’s nuclear powers, Russia and China, targets for coercion and first strike conventional and nuclear attacks.

1) Alabama.com, August 13, 2009
2) Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2009
3) Alabama.com, August 13, 2009
4) Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2009
5) Ibid
6) The Engineer (Britain), October 17, 2008
7) Press TV, August 15, 2009
8) Russian Information Agency Novosti, November 10, 2008
9) Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006
10) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 11, 2009
11) Agence France-Presse, August 11, 2009
12) Associated Press, August 12, 2009
13) Ibid
14) Huntsville Times, August 17, 2009
15) Associated Press, July 30, 2009
16) Ibid
17) Honolulu Advertiser, July 29, 2009
18) Reuters, February 17, 2008
19) Interfax, February 21, 2008
20) Global Security Network, July 17, 2009
21) Ibid
22) Arizona Daily Star, July 17, 2009
23) Reuters, July 22, 2009
24) Russian Information Agency Novosti, September 12, 2008
25) Turkish Daily News, March 12, 2008
26) Nezavisimaya Gazeta, May 14, 2008
27) Associated Press, January 28, 2008
28) Ibid
29) Inside Defense, June 18, 2008
30) Ibid
31) Jerusalem Post, July 23, 2009
32) Ibid
33) U.S. Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service,
August 7, 2009
34) Interfax-Military, August 11, 2009

Politicizing Ethnicity: U.S. Plan To Repeat Yugoslav Scenario In Caucasus Could Cause World War

Stop NATO articles

Stop NATO
August 14, 2009

Politicizing Ethnicity: U.S. Plan To Repeat Yugoslav Scenario In Caucasus Could Cause World War
By Rick Rozoff

Matthew Bryza has been one of the U.S.’s main point men in the South Caucasus, the Caspian Sea Basin and Central Asia for the past twelve years.

From 1997-1998 he was an adviser to Ambassador Richard Morningstar, coordinating U.S. efforts in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as in Southeastern Europe, particularly Greece and Turkey. Morningstar was appointed by the Clinton administration as the first Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Assistance to the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union in 1995, then Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State for Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy in 1998, and was one of the chief architects of U.S. trans-Caspian strategic energy plans running from the Caspian Sea through the South Caucasus to Europe. Among the projects he helped engineer in that capacity was the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan [BTC] oil pipeline – “the world’s most political pipeline” – running from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean Sea.

Trans-Caspian, Trans-Eurasian Energy Strategy Crafted In The 1990s

In 1998 Bryza was Morningstar’s chief lieutenant in managing American Caspian Sea energy interests as Deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy, where he remained until March of 2001, and he worked on developing what are now U.S. and Western plans to circumvent Russia and Iran and achieve dominance over the delivery of energy supplies to Europe.

Morningstar later became United States Ambassador to the European Union from 1999-2001 and this April was appointed the Special Envoy of the United States Secretary of State for Eurasian Energy, a position comparable to that he had occupied eleven years earlier.

In 2005 the George W. Bush administration appointed Bryza Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Condoleezza Rice, a post he holds to this day although he will soon be stepping down, presumably to become the U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan, the nation that most vitally connects American geostrategic interests in an arc that begins in the Balkans, runs through the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea and then to Central and South Asia.

Last June Bryza delivered a speech called Invigorating the U.S.-Turkey Strategic Partnership in Washington, DC and reflected on his then more than a decade of work in advancing American energy, political and military objectives along the southern flank of the former Soviet Union. His address included the following revelations, the first in reference to events in the 1990s:

“Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev welcomed international investors to help develop the Caspian Basin’s mammoth oil and gas reserves. Then-Turkish President Suleyman Demirel worked with these leaders, and with Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, to develop a revitalized concept of the Great Silk Road in the version of an East-West Corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines.

“Our goal was to help the young independent states of these regions [the Caucasus and Central Asia] secure their sovereignty and liberty by linking them to Europe, world markets, and Euro-Atlantic institutions via the corridor being established by the BTC and SCP [South Caucasus Pipeline natural gas] pipelines….The Caucasus and Central Asia were grouped with Turkey, which the Administration viewed as these countries’ crucial partner in connecting with European and global markets, and with Euro-Atlantic security institutions.

“[C]ooperation on energy in the late 1990’s formed a cornerstone of the U.S.-Turkey strategic partnership, resulting in a successful ‘first phase’ of Caspian development anchored by BTC for oil and SCP for gas.

Iraq War Part Of Previous Geopolitical Plans

“Today, we are focusing on the next phase of Caspian development, looking to the Caspian Basin and Iraq to help reduce Europe’s dependence on a single Russian company, Gazprom, which provides 25 percent of all gas consumed in Europe.

“Our goal is to develop a ‘Southern Corridor’ of energy infrastructure to transport Caspian and Iraqi oil and gas to Turkey and Europe. The Turkey-Greece-Italy (TGI) and Nabucco natural gas pipelines are key elements of the Southern Corridor.

“Potential gas supplies in Turkmenistan and Iraq can provide the crucial additional volumes beyond those in Azerbaijan to realize the Southern Corridor. Washington and Ankara are working together with Baghdad to help Iraq develop its own large natural gas reserves for both domestic consumption and for export to Turkey and the EU.” [1]

Bryza took no little personal credit for accomplishing the above objectives, which as he indicated weren’t limited to a comprehensive project of controlling if not monopolizing oil and natural gas flows to Europe but also in the opposite direction to three of the world’s four major energy consumers: China, India and Japan. Since the delivery of the presentation from which the above is quoted the U.S. and its Western European NATO allies have also launched the Nabucco natural gas pipeline which intends to bring gas from, as Bryza mentioned, Iraq and also eventually Egypt and possibly Algeria to Turkey where Caspian oil and gas will arrive via Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Energy Transit Routes Used For Military Penetration Of Caucasus, Central And South Asia

Previous articles in this series [2] have examined the joint energy-geopolitical-military strategies the West is pursuing from and through the sites of its three major wars over the past decade: The Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bryza himself made the connection in the above-cited speech of last year:

“The East-West Corridor we had been building from Turkey and the Black Sea through Georgia and Azerbaijan and across the Caspian became the strategic air corridor, and the lifeline, into Afghanistan allowing the United States and our coalition partners to conduct Operation Enduring Freedom.” [3]

His work and his political trajectory – paralleling closely that of his fellow American Robert Simmons [4], former Senior Advisor to the United States Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs on NATO and current NATO Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia and Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO for Security Cooperation and Partnership – has continued through four successive U.S. administrations, those of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama, and has taken him from the American embassy in Poland in 1989-1991 to that in Russia in 1995-1997 to positions in the National Security Council, the White House and the State Department.

While in his current State Department role Bryza has not only overseen trans-Eurasian, tri-continental energy projects but has also been the main liaison for building political and military ties with the South Caucasus nations of Georgia and Azerbaijan, and he remains the U.S. co-chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group monitoring the uneasy peace around Nagorno Karabakh, one of four so-called frozen conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

Although Azerbaijan is one of the interested parties in the conflict and the nation’s president, Ilham Aliyev, routinely threatens war to conquer Karabakh, often in the presence of top American military commanders, aside from being a supposed impartial mediator with the Minsk Group Bryza in his State Department role secured the use of an Azerbaijani air base for the war in Afghanistan. In 2007 he stated, “There are plenty of planes flying above Georgia and Azerbaijan towards Afghanistan. Under such circumstances we want to have the possibility of using the Azeri airfield.” [5]

Bryza also recently announced that U.S. Marines were heading to Georgia to train its troops for deployment to Afghanistan where in the words of a Georgian official “First of all, our servicemen will gain combat experience because they will be in the middle of combat action, and that is a really invaluable experience.

“Secondly, it will be a heavy argument to support Georgia’s NATO aspirations.” [6]

Oil For War: US, NATO Caucasus Clients Register World’s Largest Arms Buildups

During his four-year stint as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs he has focused on the South Caucasus, and during that period Georgia’s war budget has ballooned from $30 million a year when U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili took power after the nation’s “Rose Revolution” in 2004 to $1 billion last year, a more than thirty fold increase.

In the same year, 2008, Azerbaijan’s military spending had grown from $163 million the preceding year to $1,850,000,000, more than a 1000% increase. In the words of the nation’s president last year, “And it will increase in the years to come. The amount envisaged in the 2009 state budget will be even greater.” [7]

Much of the money expended for both unprecedented buildups came from revenues derived from oil sales and transit fees connected with the BTC pipeline Bryza was instrumental in setting up.

Pentagon’s Role In Last August’s Caucasus War

Regarding neighboring Georgia, a German news report on the second day of last August’s war between that nation and Russia stated that “US Special Forces troops, and later US Marines replacing them, have for the last half decade been systematically training selected Georgian units to NATO standards” and “First-line Georgian soldiers wear NATO uniforms, kevlar helmets and body armour matching US issue, and carry the US-manufactured M-16 automatic rifle….” [8]

On the first day of the war the Chairman of the Russia’s State Duma Security Committee, Vladimir Vasilyev, denounced the fact that the Georgian President Saakashvili “undertook consistent steps to increase [Georgia’s] military budget from $US 30 million to $US 1 billion – Georgia was preparing for a military action.” [9]

An Armenian news source the same day detailed that “Most of Georgia’s officers were trained in the U.S. or Turkey. The country’s military expenses increased by 30 times during past four years, making up 9-10 per cent of the GDP. The defense budget has reached $1 billion.

“U.S. military grants to Georgia total $40.6 million. NATO member states, including Turkey and Bulgaria, supplied Georgia with 175 tanks, 126 armored carriers, 67 artillery pieces, 4 warplanes, 12 helicopters, 8 ships and boats. 100 armored carriers, 14 jets (including 4 Mirazh-2000) fighters, 15 Black Hawk helicopters and 10 various ships are expected to be conveyed soon.” [10]

“The procurement in recent years of new military hardware and modern weapons systems was indeed in line with Georgia’s single-minded commitment to joining NATO.” [11]

In addition to the country’s standing army the Saakashvili regime has introduced a 100,000-troop reserve force, also trained in part by NATO.

In 2006 Saakashvili mandated a system of universal conscription in which “every man under 40 must pass military trainings” [12] and every citizen should “know to handle arms and if necessary should be ready to repel aggression.” [13]

Ten months later the government announced “a doctrine on total and unconditional defense” and that “service in the reserve troops would be compulsory for every male between the ages of 27 to 50.” [14]

Matthew Bryza and his colleagues in the State Department and the Pentagon have served American and NATO interests in the South Caucasus and adjoining areas well over the past decade.

First US-Backed War In The South Caucasus: Adjaria

On August 10 Bryza, “who, as he himself put it, was a more frequent guest to Georgia than any other U.S. official,” [15] was awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece by Georgia’s Saakashvili in Tbilisi.

“Saakashvili thanked Bryza for assistance rendered in 2004 while solving problems in Adjaria.” [16]. The allusion is to events early in that year when Saakashvili, flanked by then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, was inaugurated president after the putsch that was called the Rose Revolution and introduced his party flag as that of the nation, which as British journalist John Laughlin remarked at the time had not been done since Hitler did the same with the swastika in 1933.

Less than two months later Saakashvili threatened to invade the Autonomous Republic of Adjaria (Adjara/Ajara), which had been de facto an independent country, and to “shoot down my plane” as Adjarian president Aslan Abashidze reported.

An Agence France-Presse report in March of 2004 said, “The situation was made all the more explosive because Russia has a military base in Adjara….Saakashvili warned in televised comments that ‘not a single tank can leave the territory of the base. Any movement of Russia’s military equipment could provoke bloodshed.'” [17]

An all-out war was only avoided because Russia capitulated and even flew Abashidze to Moscow, after which it withdrew from the Adjarian base.

Bryza’s assistance to the Saakashvili government has also extended to backing it in its armed conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which in the second case escalated into all-out war a year ago.

State Department Passes The Baton To Veteran Balkans Hand

Now Bryza, the nominal mediator, is going to pass his role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs to Tina Kaidanow.

But he will continue until next month as the U.S. co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group on Nagorno Karabakh, where as recently as August 12 he met with Azerbaijani President Aliyev and either arbitrarily expanding the format of discussions or combining his dual functions he also discussed the “bilateral relationship between Azerbaijan and the United States, energy cooperation and regional and international issues.” [18]

Bryza also, as was mentioned above, recently announced that U.S. Marines were headed to Georgia to train troops for the war in Afghanistan. “Matt Bryza, the outgoing US deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, said the US would provide training and equipment for Georgian servicemen bound for Afghanistan.” [19]

As seen earlier, a Georgian official said of the development that “First of all, our servicemen will gain combat experience because they will be in the middle of combat action, and that is a really invaluable experience,” [20] which training under fire could only be intended for future combat operations against Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Russia.

Bryza has also played a role in attempting to insinuate European Union and American observers into the South Caucasus conflict zones.

His successor in the State Department position, Kaidanow, possesses a political curriculum vitae which provides insight into what can be expected from her.

This April, before getting the nod to replace Bryza, Kaidanow said “I worked in Serbia, in Belgrade and in Sarajevo, then in Washington, and I went back to Sarajevo and am now in Kosovo. I don’t know where my next challenge will be. It is under discussion.” [21]

Ms. Kaidanow is a veteran Balkans hand. She “served extensively in the region, as Special Assistant to U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill in Skopje [Macedonia] 1998-1999, with specific responsibilities focused on the crisis in Kosovo….” [22] Before that she served in Bosnia from 1997-1998.

Prior to that her first major post in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus began under President Bill Clinton, where she served as director for Southeast European Affairs at the National Security Council.

Kaidanow: From Rambouillet To Ambassador To Kosovo

After transitioning from advising the National Security Council on the Balkans to implementing the U.S. agenda there, Kaidanow attended the Rambouillet conference in February of 1999 where the American delegation headed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright threw down the gauntlet to Yugoslavia with the infamous Appendix B ultimatum and set the stage for the 78-day war that began on March 24.

From 2003-2006 she was back in Bosnia, this time as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, from where she departed to become the Chief of Mission and Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Office in Kosovo from July 2006 to July 2008; that is, while the Bush administration put the finishing touches to the secession of the Serbian province which resulted in the unilateral independence of Kosovo in February of 2008. Despite concerted pressure from Washington and its allies, a year and a half later 130 of 192 nations in the world refuse to recognize its independence and those who do include statelets like Palau, the Maldives, the Federated States of Micronesia, Samoa, San Marino, Monaco, Nauru, Liechtenstein and the Marshall Islands, presumably all paid handsomely for their cooperation.

Last year the Bush administration appointed Kaidanow the first U.S. ambassador to Kosovo, a post she took up on July 18, 2008.

Reproducing Kosovo In Russia’s Southern Republics

On August 12 Russian political analyst Andrei Areshev spoke about her new appointment in reference to the lingering tensions over Nagorno Karabakh which pit Azerbaijan against Armenia and warned that “it is an attempt to sacrifice [Nagorno Karabakh’s] interests to Azerbaijan’s benefit and in regard to Moscow to give a second wind to the politicization of ethnicity in the North Caucasus with the possibility of repeating the ‘Kosovo scenario,'” [23] adding that the same threat would also target Iran.

By the North Caucasus Areshev was referring to the Russian republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia where extremist secessionist violence has cost scores of lives in recent months, including those of leading officials. The writer’s message was not that the U.S. would simply continue its double standard of recognizing Kosovo’s secession while arming Georgia and Azerbaijan to suppress the independence of Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh and South Ossetia – none of which “seceded” from anything other than new post-Soviet nations they has never belonged to – but that a veteran of the U.S. campaign to fragment and ultimately destroy Yugoslavia may be planning to do the same thing with Russia. As the author added, “the existing realities in the Caucasus, including the existence of three de facto states, two of which are officially recognized by Russia, still create plenty of opportunities to build different combinations, which would ultimately result in a long-term military and political consolidation of the United States in the region.” [24]

With reference to Areshev including Iran along with Russia as an intended target of such an application of the Yugoslav model, the clear implication is that the West could attempt to instigate separatist uprisings among the nation’s Azeri, Arab, Baloch and Kurdish ethnic minorities in an effort to tear that nation apart also.

It is the politicizing of ethnic, linguistic and confessional differences that was exploited by the West to bring about or at any rate contribute to the dissolution of Yugoslavia into its federal republics and then yet further on a sub-republic level with Kosovo and Macedonia (still in progress).

Having worked under the likes of Christopher Hill and later Richard Armitage in the Rice State Department, Kaidanow surely knows how the strategy is put into effect. Much as does her former Balkans colleague Philip Goldberg, U.S. ambassador to Bolivia until that nation expelled him last September for fomenting subversion and fragmentation there based on the Balkans precedent.

Only a week before the announcement of Kaidanow’s transfer from supervising the “world’s first NATO state” (as a former Serbian president called it) in Kosovo, where the U.S. has built its largest overseas military base since the Vietnam War, Camp Bondsteel, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again warned of the precedent Kosovo presented and admonished nations considering legitimizing it through diplomatic recognition to “think very carefully before making this very dangerous decision that has an unforeseeable outcome and is not good for stability in Europe.” [25]

The situation Kaidanow will enter into is one in which a year ago a war had just ended and currently others threaten.

A Year Later: Resumption Of Caucasus War Threats

A year after the beginning of the hostilities of 2008, August 8, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned:

“Georgia’s actions in the Trans-Caucasian region continue to cause serious anxieties. Georgia does not stop threatening to restore its ‘territorial integrity’ by force.

“Armed forces are concentrated at the borders near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and provocations are committed.” [26]

On August 1 the Russian Defense Ministry expressed alarm over renewed Georgian shelling of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali and stated: “Events in August 2008 developed in line with a similar scenario, which led to Georgia unfolding military aggression against South Ossetia and attacking the Russian peacekeeping contingent.” [27]

Two days later South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity announced that “Russian troops will hold drills in the republic. These will be preventive measures, everything will be done in order to ensure security and keep the situation under control.” [28]

The following day Andrei Nesterenko, spokesman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said that “Provocations from the Georgian side ahead of the anniversary of the August events last year are not stopping. In connection with this, we have stepped up the combat readiness of Russian troops and border guards.” [29]

On August 5 Russian Duma Deputy Sergei Markov wrote:

“Western countries’ accountability for the war in South Ossetia is not recognized altogether. Politically, the West, primarily NATO, supports Saakashvili, and this support made him confident in the success of his military venture. Moreover, during the war preparations and onset of combat, high-ranking officials in Washington did not answer their telephone calls although they must have been in the office at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. Moscow time….

“The U.S. Congress did not make any inquiry into the conduct of Vice President Dick Cheney or presidential nominee John McCain during the start of the war. Georgian troops were equipped with NATO weapons, and trained in line with NATO standards.” [30]

At the same time the above-mentioned Andrei Nesterenko also said that “Georgia continues to receive Western arms and help in modernizing its army….Lasting peace…is way, way off. Over the past 12 months, the Georgians were responsible for about 120 firing incidents. Over the past seven days alone, South Ossetian villages came under Georgian mortar attacks multiple times.” [31]

As a reflection of how thoroughly Georgian leader Saakashvili is an American creature and how inextricably involved Washington has been and remains with all his actions, a commentary of early this month reminded readers that:

“Under George Bush, Washington already committed itself to put all Georgian bureaucrats on its payroll, having paid a little more than $1 billion as a compensation for Saakashvili’s small war. The first tranche of $250 million has already been transferred….[A] considerable part of these funds will be allocated for compensation and salaries of government officials of all ministries…. In other words, all of Georgia’s government officials are already on the U.S. payroll, a fact which nobody even tried to conceal during the last few years of Bush’s term.” [32]

Russia wasn’t alone in attending to the anniversary of the war. A U.S. armed forces publication reported a year to the day after its start that “U.S. European Command has its eyes firmly focused on the volatile Caucasus region, where tensions between Georgia and Russia continue to mount on the anniversary of last year’s five-day war….[C]ommanders are on guard for any sign of a repeat.

“[W]ith Georgia prepared to commit troops to the effort in Afghanistan as early as 2010, pre-deployment counterinsurgency training will be taking place. EUCOM also will be working with the Georgians to develop the Krtsanisi National Training Center outside of Tbilisi into a modern pre-deployment combat training center….Following the war, EUCOM conducted an assessment of Georgian forces, which uncovered numerous shortcomings related to doctrine and decision-making.” [33]

Last year’s war began immediately after the completion of the NATO Immediate Response 2008 military exercise which included over 1,000 American troops, the largest amount ever deployed to Georgia. The day after the drills ended Georgia shelled the South Ossetian capital and killed several people, including a Russian peacekeeper.

The War That Was, The World War That Might Have Been

What a resumption of fighting between Georgia and South Ossetia will entail is indicated by an examination of the scale of the catastrophe that was narrowly averted a year ago.

A few days ago the government of Abkhazia shared information on what Georgia planned had its invasion of South Ossetia proven successful. The plan was to, having launched the war on the day of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing while world attention was diverted, have Georgian troops and armor rapidly advance to the Roki Tunnel which connects South Ossetia with the Russian Republic of North Ossetia and prevent Russia from bringing reinforcements into the war zone.

Then a parallel assault on Abkhazia was to be launched. The government of Abkhazia documented Georgia’s battle plans earlier this week, stating “the attack could have been carried out from the sea and from the Kodori Gorge, where Georgian special forces were building their heavily fortified lines of defense.

“Most people in Abkhazia were almost certain that if Georgia succeeded in
conquering Tskhinvali, their republic would have been next….Military intelligence issued a warning that the Georgian army was planning to invade Abkhazia from the sea. Another possibility was that the enemy would come from the Kodori Gorge, an area that Georgian special forces entered in 2006, violating international peace agreements.

“On August 9 last year, the Abkhazian army launched a preventive attack against Georgian troops in the Kodori Gorge.” [34]

Last week Abkhazian Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba demonstrated that Georgia was not alone in the planned attack on and destruction of his nation when he said “[W]e have always emphasized that the U.S. bears considerable responsibility for the events that took place in August 2008 in South Ossetia.

“Therefore, we do not trust the Americans. All these years the U.S. has been arming, equipping and training Georgian troops and continues to do so, again restoring military infrastructure, and again preparing the Georgian army for new acts of aggression.

“What were the American instructors training the Georgian army for here, on Abkhazia’s territory, at the upper end of the Kodori Gorge? For an attack on Abkhazia.” [35]

An August 7 report from an Armenian news source substantiated that the plans for last August’s war were on a far larger scale than merely Georgia’s brutal onslaught against South Ossetia in an attempt to conquer and subjugate it and later Abkhazia. Stating that neighboring Azerbaijan was simultaneously planning for a war against Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh, a political analyst was quoted as saying, “Armenia would be in a state of war should Georgia’s plan not have failed in 2008,” adding that “last year Azerbaijan thrice attempted attacks on the NKR [the Nagorno Karabakh Republic], yet the attempts were frustrated thanks to NKR forces.” [36]

A coordinated attack by Georgia on South Ossetia and Abkhazia and by Azerbaijan on Nagorno Karabakh would have led to a regional conflagration and possibly a world war. As indicated above, Armenia would have been pulled into the fighting and the nation is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) along with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

A week ago the secretary general of the CSTO, Nikolai Bordyuzha, was quoted as asserting:

“How will the CSTO react if Azerbaijan wants to get back Nagorno Karabakh in a military way and war begins between Azerbaijan and Armenia?”

“The 4th term of the Collective Security Treaty says that aggression against one member of Collective Security Treaty Organization will be regarded as aggression against all members.” [37]

Even if the CSTO had not responded to an Azerbaijani assault on Karabakh which would have ineluctably dragged member state Armenia into the fighting as it was obligated to do, Turkey would have intervened at that point on behalf of Azerbaijan and being a NATO member could have asked the Alliance to invoke its Article 5 military assistance clause and enter the fray. Russia would not have stood by idly and a war could have ensued that would also have pulled in Ukraine to the north and Iran to the south. In fact the U.S. client regime in Ukraine had provided advanced arms to Georgia for last year’s conflict and threatened to block the return of Russian Black Sea fleet ships to Sevastopol in the Crimea during the fighting.

Along with synchronized attacks on South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh, Ukraine may well have been ordered to move its military into the site of the fourth so-called frozen conflict, neighboring Transdniester, either in conjunction with Moldova or independently.

A year ago Russia maintained (and still has) peacekeepers in Transdniester, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and, while not in Karabakh, also in Armenia. Over 200 Russian soldiers were killed and wounded in the fighting in South Ossetia and if those numbers had been matched or exceeded in three other battle zones Russian forbearance might have reached its limits quickly.

After Yugoslavia, Afghanistan And Iraq: Pentagon Turns Attention To Former Soviet Space

In June of 2008 the earlier quoted Russian analyst Andrei Areshev wrote in article titled “The West and Abkhazia: A New Game” that “The prevention of a military conflict is Russia’s priority, but it is not a priority for our ‘partners.’

“This should not be forgotten….As for experiments undertaken by the United States that acted so ‘perfectly’ in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, they do not spell any good.” [38]

Two months before he had written “The U.S., the ground having slipped from under its feet in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now preoccupied with
gaining control over the most important geopolitical regions in the post-Soviet territory – Ukraine, Transcaucasia and Central Asia….

“The regions of Transcaucasia, integrated in NATO, Georgia in the first place (especially in case of the successful annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia), will serve U.S. interests aimed at destabilization of the North Caucasus.” [39]

Last week a group of opposition Georgian scholars held a round table discussion in the nation’s capital and among other matters asserted:

“The whole August war itself…served the interests of the US. The Americans tested Russia’s readiness to react to military intervention, while at the same time ridding Georgia of its conflict-ridden territories so it could continue its pursuit of NATO membership.

“[H]ad Russia refrained from engaging its forces in the conflict, the nations [republics] of the Northern Caucasus would have serious doubts about its ability to protect them. This would in turn lead to an array of separatist movements in the Northern Caucasus, which would have the potential to start not only a full-scale Caucasian war, but a new world war.” [40]

What the West’s probing of Russia’s defenses in the Caucasus may be intended to achieve and what the full-scale application of the Yugoslav model to Russia’s North Caucasus republics could look like are not academic issues.

Armed attacks in the republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia have been almost daily occurrences over the last few months. In June the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was seriously wounded in a bomb attack and two days ago the republic’s Construction Minister was shot to death in his office.

Similar armed attacks on and slayings of police, military and government officials are mounting in Dagestan and Chechnya.

The shootings and bombings are perpetrated by separatists hiding behind the pretext of religious motivations – in the main Saudi-based Wahhabism. Until his death in 2002 the main military commander of various self-proclaimed entities like the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the Caucasus Emirate was one Khattab (reputedly born Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem), an ethnic Arab and veteran of the CIA’s Afghan campaign of the 1980s, who also reportedly fought later in Tajikistan and Bosnia.

Assorted self-designated presidents and defense ministers of the above fancied domains have been granted political refugee status by and are living comfortably in the United States and Britain.

That plans for carving up Russia by employing Yugoslav-style armed secessionist campaigns are not limited to foreign-supported extremist troops was demonstrated as early as 1999 – the year of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia – when the conservative Freedom House think tank in the United States inaugurated what it called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. By the middle of this decade its board of directors was composed of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, Steven Solarz, and Max Kampelman.

Members included the three main directors of the Project for the New American Century: Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Bruce P. Jackson. Jackson was the founder and president of the U.S. Committee on NATO (founded in 1996) and the chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (launched months before the invasion of that nation in the autumn of 2002).

Other members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya included past CIA directors, National Security Advisers, Secretaries of State and NATO Supreme Allied Commanders like the previously mentioned Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haig and James Woolsey, Richard V. Allen and a host of neoconservative ideologues and George W. Bush administration operatives with resumes ranging from the Committee on the Present Danger to the Project for the New American Century like Morton Abramowitz, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes and Norman Podhoretz.

The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya has evidently broadened its scope and is now called the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus. Its mission statement says:

“The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC) at Freedom House is dedicated to monitoring the security and human rights situation in the North Caucasus by providing informational resources and expert analysis. ACPC focuses on Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Adygeya, as well as the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.”

Abkhazia and South Ossetia are of course in the South Caucasus and not in Georgia except in the minds of those anxious to expel Russia from the Caucasus, North and South, and transparently have been included as they are targets of designs by U.S. empire builders to further encircle, weaken and ultimately dismantle the Russian Federation.

Russian political leadership has been reserved if not outright compliant over the past decade when the U.S. and NATO attacked Yugoslavia, invaded Afghanistan and set up military bases throughout Central and South Asia, invaded Iraq in 2003, assisted in deposing governments in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Adjaria, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan to Russia’s disadvantage and brazenly boasted of plans to drive Russia out of the European energy market.

But intensifying the destabilization of its southern republics and turning them into new Kosovos is more than Moscow can allow.

1) U.S. Department of State, June 24, 2008
2) Black Sea: Pentagon’s Gateway To Three Continents And The Middle East
Stop NATO, February 21, 2009

Black Sea: Pentagon’s Gateway To Three Continents And The Middle East

Eurasian Crossroads: The Caucasus In US-NATO War Plans
Stop NATO, April 7, 2009

Eurasian Crossroads: The Caucasus In U.S.-NATO War Plans

Azerbaijan And The Caspian: NATO’s War For The World’s Heartland
Stop NATO, June 10, 2009

Azerbaijan And The Caspian: NATO’s War For The World’s Heartland

West’s Afghan War And Drive Into Caspian Sea Basin
Stop NATO, July 10, 2009

West’s Afghan War And Drive Into Caspian Sea Basin

3) Ibid
4) Mr. Simmons’ Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border
Stop NATO, March 4, 2009

Mr. Simmons’ Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border

5) PanArmenian.net, March 31, 2007
6) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 6, 2009
7) Azertag, January 1, 2008
8) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 9, 2008
9) Russia Today, August 8, 2008
10) PanArmenian.net, August 8, 2008
11) The Financial, June 27, 2008
12) Prime News (Georgia), August 10, 2006
13) Civil Georgia, April 2, 2007
14) Civil Georgia, December 7, 2006
15) Civil Georgia, August 11, 2009
16) Trend News Agency, August 11, 2009
17) Agence France-Presse, March 14, 2004
18) Azertag, August 12, 2009
19) Rustavi 2, August 11, 2009
20) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 6, 2009
21) World Investment News, April 22, 2009
22) Azeri Press Agency, August 12, 2009
23) PanArmenian.net, August 12, 2009
24) Ibid
25) Black Sea Press, August 6, 2009
26) Itar-Tass, August 8, 2009
27) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 1, 2009
28) Interfax, August 3, 2009
29) Daily Times (Pakistan), August 5, 2009
30) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 5, 2009
31) Voice of Russia. August 5, 2009
32) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 6, 2009
33) Stars and Stripes, August 8, 2009
34) Russia Today, August 9, 2009
35) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 4, 2009
36) PanArmenian.net, August 7, 2009
37) Azeri Press Agency, August 6, 2009
38) Strategic Culture Foundation, June 12, 2008
39) Strategic Culture Foundation, April 18, 2008
40) Russia Today, August 7, 2009

Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions

Stop NATO articles

Stop NATO
August 12, 2009

Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions
Rick Rozoff

A press report on August 10 revealed that the government of Italy is planning to modify if not dispense with its post-World War II constitutional limitations on conducting offensive military operations; that is, to reverse a 61-year ban on waging war.

The news story, reminding readers that “Italy’s post-World War II constitution places stringent limits on the country’s military engagements,” stated the Italian government intends to introduce a new military code “specifically for missions abroad,” one that – in a demonstration of evasiveness and verbal legerdemain alike – would be “neither of peace nor of war.” [1]

On August 10 and 11, respectively, the nation’s Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini were interviewed in the daily Corriere della Sera and in tandem they bemoaned what they described as undue restrictions on the Italian armed forces in performing their combat roles in NATO’s war in Afghanistan.

Commenting on La Russa’s and Frattini’s assertions, another news account summarized them as follows:

“Italy’s 2,800 soldiers operate under a military peace code, which largely restricts them to shooting back if they are attacked. Changes could give the troops heavier equipment and allow them to go on the offensive.”

Frattini is quoted as saying, “We need a code for the missions that aim to bring peace, which cannot be achieved only through actions for civilians but also through real military actions.” [2]

The tortuous illogicality of that claim is an attempt to circumvent both the letter and the spirit of Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution which reads in part that “Italy repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of the peoples and as a means for settling international disputes.”

The rest of the Article includes, and in doing so anticipates the nation’s inclusion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization the following year, “it agrees to limitations of sovereignty….”

Article 11 is emblematic of ones in the post-World War II constitutions adopted by, or rather imposed on, those powers responsible for unleashing history’s deadliest war in Europe and Asia: The members of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis or Tripartite Pact.

The 1949 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, amended and extended to all of the country after unification in 1990, contains a ban on preparing a war of aggression, Article 26, which reads: Activities tending and undertaken with the intent to disturb peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for aggressive war, are unconstitutional. They shall be made a punishable offense.

The 1947 U.S.-authored Japanese constitution contains an equivalent, Article 9, which states:

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

U.S. military, especially air, bases in Germany, Italy and Japan have been used in every major military campaign waged by the Pentagon from the Korean War to the current one in Afghanistan for basing bombers and for the transit of troops, weapons and equipment.

So despite constitutional requirements to repudiate and renounce and bans against preparing for war, the three former Axis nations have indeed been partners to a series of armed conflicts for sixty years.

But for most of that period, indeed for almost a half century, the nations’ legal prohibitions against direct military aggression have been observed even in the breach. Italy was a founding member of NATO in 1949, though unlike most others didn’t send troops for the Korean War. Along with the United States, Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg did.

Greece and Turkey deployed contingents as a precondition for NATO membership, which they received in 1952, but West Germany, which joined in 1955, didn’t.

Although Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand supplied troops, Japan didn’t.

The war proscriptions were abandoned by two of the three nations, Germany and Italy, in NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in early 1999. Both countries supplied military aircraft for the 78-day air war and the U.S. and NATO air base at Aviano served as the main hub for daily bombing runs against military targets, non-military infrastructure and civilians. U.S., British, Canadian, Spanish, Portuguese and other warplanes operated out of the base.

The semantic acrobatics of the current Italian Foreign Minister Frattini in attempting to deny that war is war have already been examined, and comparable statements by German and Italian cabinet ministers and parliamentarians in 1999 were no less convoluted and transparently false. Germany and Italy had gone to war against a nation (with no troops outside its own borders) for the first time since the days of Hitler and Mussolini and, moreover, against a nation that the two fascist leaders had attacked 58 years earlier.

The post-World War II, post-Nuremberg restriction against military aggression by the defeated Axis powers was violated and for the past decade Germany, Italy and Japan have continued asserting themselves as military powers on a regional and international scale, culminating in the three nations participating in various degrees in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan currently.

Germany now has the maximum amount of troops parliamentary limitations – at least for the time being – allow: 4,500 and another 300 manning NATO AWACS recently deployed for the escalation of the war. It has the fourth largest contingent in Afghanistan after the U.S., Britain and Canada.

Italy has the sixth largest amount of troops, 3,250, in command of Western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, and just as the 1999 war against Yugoslavia was the first air war either nation had engaged in since World War II, so Afghanistan is the first ground war.

Germany has lost 38 soldiers so far and Italy 15.

A poll conducted by a major Italian daily in late July showed that 56% of Italians want a withdrawal of their nation’s troops from the Afghan war theater, but Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Foreign Minister Frattini and Defense Minister La Russa insist they will stay and have recently added 500 more troops and committed to deploying more Predator drones, Tornado warplanes and military helicopters.

Late last month defense chief La Russa said, “It is possible we will also increase the number of helicopters to have better aerial coverage, as well as deploying our Tornadoes offensively.” [3]

At the same time Foreign Minister Frattini spoke in a similar vein: “We will increase the use of Predator (unmanned surveillance aircraft) and Tornado (fighters), not just for reconnaissance but for real coverage (of troops).”

An Italian news account at the time added, “He also said Italy would reinforce the armour of its Lince troop carriers and send new generation armoured vehicles.” [4]

Five previous articles in this series have documented Germany’s rise as a post-Cold War global military power [5,6,7,8,9], including the ongoing transformation of the Bundeswehr into an “international intervention force,” [10] and the Merkel administration’s policy “to drop some of [Germany’s] post-World War II inhibitions about robust security measures, including the use of military force abroad and at home” [11] and a 2006 German Defense Ministry White Paper demanding that the army “be thoroughly restructured into an intervention force” [12], and a supporter of the current chancellor stating “it is time that Germany moved on from its postwar inhibitions about force.” [13]

On August 8, weeks after “German troops embarked on their largest military offensive since World War II in Kunduz,” it was reported that “German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said in a newspaper interview…that the country’s armed forces could be in Afghanistan for up to 10 more years.” [14]

That the German government is openly advocating the use of its army at home as well as abroad, and did just that by deploying Bundeswehr forces in Kehl this April against anti-NATO protesters during the 60th anniversary Alliance summit, was dangerous ground first trod by the Berlusconi government in Italy a year ago when 3,000 troops were deployed in Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin against immigrants and Roma (gypsy) communities as well as – allegedly at least – crime syndicates.

The use of the military for domestic purposes is disturbingly reminiscent of practices not seen in Italy and Germany since the era of Mussolini and Hitler.

Two months afterwards it was reported in an article called “NATO pours rent money into Mafia coffers” that in Naples, where NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Naples was established in 2004, “government funding earmarked to support NATO end[ed] up in the pockets of Italy’s most violent criminal organisation.” [15]

Another news story last November recounted this:

“The head of Naples’ anti-mafia task force, Franco Roberti, censured NATO and U.S. officials for knowingly leasing houses to suspected mob bosses in a story published in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Rent paid by Americans and NATO personnel garner landlords between 1,500 and 3,000 euros a month — fees that can be two or three times above the market value.” [16]

Italian troops were back on the streets of the nation’s cities and the Casalese camorra was not only unmolested but enriched.

Last year Berlusconi also confirmed that the plans reached during his previous tenure as prime minister to expand the U.S. Camp Ederle at Vicenza with the nearby Dal Molin airport into “the biggest American military base outside the US” [17] would continue apace. Camp Ederle already hosts 6,000 U.S. troops and will soon house all six battalions of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, some currently in Germany. The 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years.

Late last July American troops from the Vicenza-based Southern European Task Force (Airborne) contributed to a force of 1,000 soldiers deployed to Georgia for the NATO Immediate Response 2008 exercises – the largest number of American troops deployed to the Caucasus nation at one time – to train the armed forces of their host nation for a war with Russia that would ensue within days.

“U.S. personnel responsible for training members of the Georgian military remain stationed inside the volatile country, where fighting erupted Friday [August 8] between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

“The U.S. European Command said on Monday that there were no plans at this time to withdraw the U.S. military trainers from the country.” [18]

In January of 2008 the Italian government announced that it was building a highway to connect Vicenza with the Aviano air base. “Airborne soldiers based at Caserma Ederle in Vicenza use Aviano for training and for hooking up with planes for long deployments: The 173rd Airborne Brigade’s last three deployments downrange have all involved launches from Aviano.” [19]

Decades-long interpretations of the Japanese Constitution’s Article 9 against remilitarization have agreed that the nation could not rearm for military actions abroad and could not engage in what is euphemistically called collective self-defense. The first is a self-evident prohibition against deploying troops, warships and warplanes outside of Japanese territory and waters to participate in armed hostilities.

The second is a ban on entering into bilateral and multilateral military treaties and alliances that obligate Japan to aid other nations engaged in war and join programs like the U.S.-led global missile shield project.

Over the past eight years successive Japanese governments have violated both components of the constitutional ban on stationing troops in conflict zones and on entering into joint defense arrangements which are in truth only partially defensive in nature.

Tokyo first tested the waters on stationing troops abroad when it deployed 600 soldiers to East Timor in 2002 to join those from Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Fiji, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand and the United States.

The following December the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi authorized 600 soldiers and hundreds of more support personnel to be sent to Iraq nine months after the invasion of the country by the U.S. and Britain.

The Iraqi deployment marked the first time that Japanese military forces were sent to an active war zone since World War II.

Much as with Italian and German leaders who cannot pronounce the word war even while prosecuting one, Tokyo called its deployment force the Japanese Iraq Reconstruction and Support Group. The name aside, Japanese troops were stationed in support of allies who had invaded Iraq in violation of international law and without United Nations sanction and were at the time conducting large-scale combat operations. The nation’s soldiers remained there until 2006 when the focus of the U.S. and its NATO allies started shifting back to Afghanistan.

In 2006 Japan compensated for its troop withdrawal by providing the occupation forces airlift operations in Iraq, then ended that mission last December when the Afghan War emerged as the uncontested priority of its Western military allies.

Japan has supported the latter war from its inception and “Despite its pacifist constitution, Japan has participated in an Indian Ocean naval mission since 2001 that provides fuel and other logistical support to the US-led coalition fighting in Afghanistan.” [20] It provided the majority of fuel to U.S. and NATO warships in the Indian Ocean, including those firing Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan. Japan briefly withdrew its naval forces at the end of 2007, but redeployed them a year later where they remain in support of the world’s major war.

What is remarkably still referred to as pacifist Japan, then, has actively supported the West’s last two wars.

In an interview last month with the U.S. Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes Japanese Democratic Party Diet member Keiichiro Asao, touted to become the nation’s next defense minister should his party, substantially ahead in current national polls, win the next election, spoke of the Afghan War and said “If peace talks proved successful in part of Afghanistan, even if other areas were still combat zones, ‘then we might send ground troops to that area to help build back civil society.'” [21]

Troops on the ground in the world’s preeminent theater of war would strip away the remaining vestiges of Japan’s post-World War II demilitarization and the nation would fully join the ranks of Germany and Italy as war belligerents.

And just that has been planned for years, as in January of 2007 the Japan Defense Agency was transformed into the Ministry of Defense, a ministry that hadn’t existed since the nation’s defeat in World War II.

In the same month it was reported that then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma were “considering authorizing [Japan’s] troops to launch pre-emptive strikes during international peacekeeping operations” and planned “to study ways to ease the constitutional ban on Japan to use force to defend its allies in so-called ‘acts of collective self-defense.’

“The government plans to achieve the goal by changing the interpretation of the constitution,” stated the Yomiuri daily newspaper. [22]

Three months later a report titled “Japan To Consider Fighting for Allies Under Attack” detailed that “Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is leaning toward allowing Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense in four cases,” which include “the use of Japan’s missile defense system against a ballistic missile attack on an allied country, such as the U.S.,” the Kyodo News Agency revealed. [23]

The other three instances in which Tokyo would be prepared to violate the constitutional ban against so-called collective defense are cases of “a counterattack when a warship sailing along with a Japanese vessel comes under attack, or when a military unit in a multinational forces is attacked, and in some situations when Japan is working as part of a UN peacekeeping operation.” [24]

It’s worth recalling that Prime Minister Abe continued the tradition of his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi in paying annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine where Japanese war dead including 14 convicted World War II era war criminals are buried.

“‘It’s not appropriate for the government to specifically draw a conclusion’ on the war responsibility of the war criminals,” Abe told the Japanese Diet on October 3, 2006. [25]

The visits by Japanese prime ministers to the shrine from 2001-2006 outraged China, the two Koreas, Thailand, the Philippines and other nations that had already “specifically draw[n] a conclusion” about the war crimes perpetrated against their countries and peoples and the rehabilitation of the guilty parties in a bid to revive Japanese militarism.

The most dangerous application of Japanese plans for preemptive military attacks and the first of the four scenarios laid out by the government in 2007 to justify joint military action is that pertaining to so-called missile defense, which in fact is incorporating Japan into a U.S.-led global interceptor missile grid which includes land, air and sea components and which will be integrated with the deployment of surveillance satellites and missiles in space.

On August 11 the commander of the Russian Air Force, Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin, warned that “By 2030…foreign countries, particularly the United States, will be able to deliver coordinated high-precision strikes from air and space against any target on the whole territory of Russia.” [26]

The following day Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi addressed the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and warned against an “arms race in outer space,” stating that “Outer space is now facing the looming danger of weaponization” and “Countries should neither develop missile defense systems that undermine global strategic stability nor deploy weapons in outer space.” [27]

In 2005 the U.S. and Japan agreed to establish a missile defense facility at the American Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo. A local news sources, Kyodo, said of the project that “Japan’s success will have an impact on the nuclear potential of China and Russia in East Asia. There is no doubt that the two countries will step up their efforts to develop missiles with a higher performance.” [28]

In May of 2007 Pentagon chief Robert Gates “urged Japan to declare the right to collective defense so its missile defense shield can be used to intercept North Korean ballistic missiles targeted at the United States….” [29]

North Korea is the pretext employed to expand the global missile shield system with its threat of nuclear blackmail and potential for a first strike against Russia and China. However, as reported of the Gates’ initiative at the time, “The U.S. demand on collective defense reflects its strategy to boost its deterrence toward China and also carries Washington’s hope that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will partially allow the use of such a right by revising the Constitution.” [30]

In the same month, May of 2007, it was revealed that “Japan’s defense ministry has been providing U.S. forces with intelligence gathered by its Air Self-Defense Force’s early warning radar network since late April” and that “The ministry began permanent linking of the ASDF’s intelligence gathering network with the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Air Force at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo before the two countries agreed to boost information-sharing for missile defense at a top security meeting in Washington on May 1….” [31]

Two years ago the ruling Liberal Party completed post-Cold War plans to reverse the situation where “Japan’s pacifist Constitution bans warfare and overseas military action. The Japanese government’s current interpretation is that the Constitution prohibits Japan from exercising the right to defend an ally under attack” [32]. That is, Article 9 will be either eviscerated of any real force or scrapped altogether.

As Japan intensifies its demand that Russia’s Kuril Islands be ceded to it in a resurgence of post-World War II revanchism, Tokyo has joined its former allies in Berlin and Rome in casting off constraints placed on the use of its military abroad, including in “preemptive” actions, imposed on it after World War II.

With the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe a generation ago and with NATO moving to take over former Warsaw Pact territory, many demons that had lain dormant for decades have been awakened from their slumber, including unabashed militarism, irredentist and other demands to redraw borders, and World War II revisionism and revanchism. And fascism.

In February of 2007 the Bucharest Court of Appeal in Romania, which joined the German-Italian-Japanese Axis during World War II, ruled that the participation of 800,000 Romanian troops in Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a “war for the liberation of Bessarabia and Bucovina” (contemporary Moldova). [33]

In late July of this year the mayor of the Romanian city of Constanta, Radu Mazare, wore a Nazi military uniform at a fashion show in the city and said “I wanted to dress like a general from the Wehrmacht because I have always liked this uniform, and have admired the strict organization of the German army.” [34]

Two years earlier Rein Lang, the Justice Minister of Estonia, a member in good standing of NATO and the European Union, celebrated his fiftieth birthday in pub in a “Hitler night” celebration which included a one-man play called Adolf in which the lone actor recited “Hitler’s monologue before [his] suicide with a swastika in the background. In this monologue the Fuhrer called on his allies to ‘further promote ideas of the Third Reich.'” [35]

This July 26 veterans of the Estonian SS 20th Division celebrated a 1944 battle with the Soviet army in the latest of a series of annual commemorations of the Nazi past. The events included a march and “Supporters of fascism from the Baltic states, Holland, Norway, Denmark and even from Georgia took part in the parade.” [36]

As a Russian commentator said of trends in the country, “People who make no attempt to conceal their appreciation of Nazism and Nazi ideology are running Estonia.” [37]

Three months before 300 Latvians marched in the annual Legionnaires Day parade which honors the nation’s Waffen SS veterans who “took part in punitive operations and mass killings of Jews, Belorussians and Latvians.” [38] Latvia is also a member of NATO and the EU. The yearly marches are staged in the capital of Riga and although not endorsed by the government the latter provides police protection for the Nazi sympathizers and has arrested anti-fascist protesters in the past.

The prototype for this fascist resurgence was Croatia in 1991 with the rehabilitation and glorification of the Nazi-allied Ustashe and the new brown plague has even spread to Ukraine, where last year President Victor Yushchenko, product of the 2004 “Orange Revolution” and a U.S. client whose poll ratings recently have sunk to under 1%, “conferred posthumously the title of Hero of Ukraine on Roman Shukhevich, one of the chieftains of Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought along with the Third Reich, and has signed a decree on celebrating the day of the Insurgent Army’s formation.” [39]

In his waning days Yushchenko is intensifying efforts to drag his nation into NATO despite overwhelming popular opposition and has officiated over developments like the erection of statues in honor of Stepan Bandera, leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

With the return of Germany, Italy and Japan to waging and supporting wars and the revival of Nazi sentiments in Europe a student of the future could be forgiven for thinking that the Axis powers were the victors and not the losers of World War II and that the Nuremberg trials had never occurred.

1) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 10, 2009
2) Associated Press, August 11, 2009
3) Defense News, July 22, 2009
4) Reuters, July 26, 2009
5) New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
July 12, 2009
6) From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
July 14, 2009
7) Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power
July 16, 2009
8) Germany And NATO’s Nuclear Nexus
July 18, 2009
9) Germany: World Arms Merchant In First Post-WW II Combat
July 24, 2009
10) Der Spiegel, August 10, 2009
11) Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2008
12) Newsweek, November 13, 2006
13) Ibid
14) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 8, 2009
15) Sydney Morning Herald, November 6, 2008
16) Stars and Stripes, November 27, 2008
17) ANSA (Italy), September 22, 2006
18) Stars and Stripes, August 12, 2008
19) Stars and Stripes, January 2, 2008
20) Agence France-Presse, August 10, 2009
21) Stars and Stripes, July 21, 2009
22) Associated Press, January 14, 2007
23) Agence France-Presse, April 7, 2007
24) Ibid
25) Japan Times, December 28, 2006
26) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 11, 2009
27) Associated Press, August 12, 2009
28) Kyodo News, December 21, 2007
29) Kyodo News, May 17, 2007
30) Ibid
31) Xinhua News Agency, May 13, 2007
32) Xinhua News Agency, June 30, 2007
33) Infotag (Moldova), February 21, 2007
34) Sofia News Agency, July 20, 2009
35) Voice of Russia, July 6, 2007
36) Voice of Russia, July 27, 2009
37) Voice of Russia, July 6, 2007
38) Voice of Russia, March 13, 2009
39) Voice of Russia, October 25, 2008