NATO Makes War – NATO Is Not an Alliance for Peace
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 22 Sep 2014
Robin Edward Poulton – TRANSCEND Media Service
NATO’s summit in Wales (September 4-5) was BAD NEWS for peace makers, and bad for all world citizens. Led by the pugilistic David Cameron, and urged on by the gladiatorial military that pushes Barack Obama’s policy machine, the NATO summit decided to create a new 4,000 strong rapid reaction force for initial deployment in the Baltic…. And then where will this policy lead us?
Are the NATO Nuts going to invade Ukraine? Do they want to create a new European war?
Dangerous rhetoric and dangerous ideas lead to dangerous actions.
Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate, actually has had a pretty good track record of resisting the military adventures that Senator John McCain and American generals are constantly imagining. Where Obama has a weak record, is in his failure to restructure the decision-making machinery in Washington that is dominated by hawks and missile warriors and manufacturers.
Before the American and other NATO lobbyists turn the internal political disagreements of Ukrainian politics into a new European war, we need ‘some cool heads and people of wisdom’ to sit down and talk sense to each other. That is not what happened in Wales.
If there were a few more women among the leaders of NATO, it would be much more attractive alliance, with a much more constructive agenda. Instead, we are still run by testosterone-fuelled men and too many of them are wearing military uniforms.
How could I not agree with Mairead Maguire when she writes:
“NATO’s latest proposals of 4,000 soldiers, and a separate force of 10,000 strong British-led joint expeditionary force also proposed, is a highly aggressive and totally irresponsible move by the United States, United Kingdom and NATO. It is breaches the 1997 agreement with Moscow under which NATO pledged not to base substantial numbers of soldiers in Eastern Europe on a permanent basis.
NATO should have been disbanded when the Warsaw Pact disintegrated but it was not and is now controlled by the United States for its own agenda. When speaking of NATO, one of President Bill Clinton’s officials said “America is NATO”. Today NATO, instead of being abolished, is re-inventing itself in re-arming and militarising European states and justifying its new role by creating enemy images – be they Russians, IS (the Islamic State), and so on.”
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/09/no-to-usnato-and-yes-to-peace/
Mairead Maguire was awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her actions to help end the deep ethnic/political conflict in her native Northern Ireland.
Her ideas are worth reading.
Anyone with a cool head can see that NATO has had a disastrous recent history.
In Afghanistan in 2001, NATO (well, George Bush and Dick Cheney with NATO following blindly) started a war with the wrong enemy and turned a mess (civil war between warlords) into a disaster (ten more years of civil war with the Pakistani-supported Pashtuns called ‘Taliban’). In Iraq in 2003, NATO turned a peaceful dictatorship into civil war and a sectarian dictatorship……. Which proceeded in 2011 to infect Syria, causing misery for millions of internal and external refugees, creating chaos that will lose a generation of educated people and threatens to wipe out the oldest Christian civilization in the world: the churches created by St Paul and the other Apostles.
I am not crying out here to support dictatorships; I am saying that dictatorship is better than civil war, and better than military invasion by American (in Iraq) or Sunni Arab (in Syria) foreigners. America’s favorite, racist, corrupt dictatorships in Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia are no better than the dictatorships of Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad. At least Saddam and Bashar ran a ‘tyranny of the minority’ which is generally less dangerous and oppressive than a Tyranny of the Majority.
But like ‘em or hate ‘em, these dictatorships are definitely better than war.
And NATO makes war.
Gadafy in Libya was a terrible man: but what NATO and their allies the Qatari Special Forces did when they killed Gadafy in 2011, was to replace dictatorship with civil war. Libya is in chaos, and the Libyan people are now victims of a NATO-created, Saudi-funded, Qatari-stimulated, Sudan-encouraged civil war. No parent with children wants war. Libya will take decades to rebuild, and no one can even imagine when the rebuilding will begin. War is bad for children, bad for women, bad for business.
War, of course, is Good for weapons manufacturers
And NATO makes war.
While Iraqi and Syrian and Libyan children lose their lives and their education.
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Robin Edward Poulton PhD – Professor of French West African Studies (affiliate), School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. Senior Fellow, UNIDIR Geneva, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. Member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.
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