Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Marjory Collins On the trolley in Baltimore Apr 1943
As the first subglacial eruption has been registered in the Barbardunga volcano, and there are earthquakes in the region about every minute, a German magazine reports that Berlin (or, actually, even Bonn) has been spying on NATO partners like Turkey for decades. Which is funny, because I was just wondering – with a degree of suspicion – where and how Merkel gets her information.
She’s in Kiev calling for a ceasefire – which at least is a step up from what Washington is doing -, but says that first the border between Ukraine and Russia needs to be sealed off so no more support for the rebels can be smuggled in. See, I’m getting the idea that perhaps Angela relies for these kinds of claims on information she gets from NATO, who in turn get it from Kiev. Which has proven to be the most unreliable source of information in a long time.
On Tuesday, presidents Putin and Poroshenko, and some EU leaders, will meet in Minsk, Belarus, for discussions on the ceasefire. It’s starting to look like “our” side is going into the talks with so many demands, and of such obviously impossible nature for Putin, that they will kill any serious discussion before it’s even started.
Over the past few days, NATO has claimed that the Russian aid convoy, which has returned home today without any incidents, was a Trojan horse, “a disguised attempt to reinforce separatist forces”. And that the Russians are shelling the Ukraine army both cross-border and from within Ukraine. And that there are huge troop concentrations and movements happening at the Russian side of the border. And that Russia is delivering weapons and mercenaries into Ukraine. These are all things that Ukraine claimed first, and NATO simply repeated. And, you know what’s coming next, for none of it has one single piece of evidence been presented. Something we’ve long since ceased to expect from Kiev.
But NATO itself has the technology, the ability to find and present evidence. And the obligation to us, the people who pay for its entire apparatus, do so prior to making any claims. So why does it simply parrot Kiev claims, and in very aggressive language to boot, instead of finding its own truths, and present us with proof? I’m guessing it’s a combination of the proof simply not being there, and the same hubris that’s prevalent in Washington.
The Ukraine army claimed yesterday that the returning aid convoy trucks had taken ‘equipment from a factory in Luhansk that makes firearm magazines and a Topaz plant that produces radars’. And taken it back with them to Russia. They gave no reason why this would have been done, nor, once gain, any proof that it happened at all. Inspections of the trucks as they crossed back over the border showed nothing.
Angela Merkel yesterday refused to rule out yet more sanctions against Russia. Poroshenko today held a large military parade in Kiev, and vowed to spend $3 billon to prop up the Ukraine army. Funny, because Ukraine is not just bankrupt, it’s way beyond that stage. Which factually means the west has pledged those $3 billion, in addition to all the other billions “invested” in Ukraine, to prop up that army. On the eve of the peace talks that Putin will attend.
Perhaps this is inevitable. NATO was a child of WWII and even more of the Cold War. It can be argued that it had an important function in keeping Europe out of Russian hands. So far, so good, you might think. But NATO also grew into a behemoth of an organization that is extremely secretive about its intelligence, and as such a potential powder keg, a state within its member states. The sort of institution that’s very hard to get rid of, because it acquires political power of itself/
NATO lost the enemy it had been built to withstand, 25 years ago when the Berlin wall came down. Given all that, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that, provided a few hot heads rose up in its ranks, it would turn into an alliance looking for an enemy. This process began to take shape some 15 years after the Soviet Union fell apart, and NATO, despite clearly defined commitments not to, started expanding eastward. The US House voted on a resolution to officially authorize this expansion, and Ron Paul said this about it on the House floor on April 1, 2008:
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution calling for the further expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia. NATO is an organization whose purpose ended with the end of its Warsaw Pact adversary. When NATO struggled to define its future after the Cold War, it settled on attacking a sovereign state, Yugoslavia, which had neither invaded nor threatened any NATO member state.
This current round of NATO expansion is a political reward to governments in Georgia and Ukraine that came to power as a result of US-supported revolutions, the so-called Orange Revolution and Rose Revolution. The governments that arose from these street protests were eager to please their US sponsor and the US, in turn, turned a blind eye to the numerous political and human rights abuses that took place under the new regimes. Thus the US policy of “exporting democracy” has only succeeding in exporting more misery to the countries it has targeted.
NATO expansion only benefits the US military industrial complex, which stands to profit from expanded arms sales to new NATO members. The “modernization” of former Soviet militaries in Ukraine and Georgia will mean tens of millions in sales to US and European military contractors. The US taxpayer will be left holding the bill, as the US government will subsidize most of the transactions.
Providing US military guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia can only further strain our military. This NATO expansion may well involve the US military in conflicts as unrelated to our national interest as the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. The idea that American troops might be forced to fight and die to prevent a small section of Georgia from seceding is absurd and disturbing.
Mr. Speaker, NATO should be disbanded, not expanded.
Dr. Paul reiterated some of this a few days ago, when he launched a fund raiser for the Ron Paul Insititute for Peace and Prosperity, on his birthday:
We are fighting the war party, challenging their propaganda at every turn. But we are on the ropes and we need your help – as I write this to you they are trying to lie us into yet another war that could be the end of us all. Our job is to tell the truth and to expose their lies.
That’s why I founded the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and right now I am especially concerned about the drive to war against Russia. Indeed, I have never seen such a dangerous stand-off between nuclear powers. The US government continues to add sanction upon sanction against Russia over a civil war in Ukraine resulting from a US-staged coup.
The propaganda over the Malaysian jetliner, and the pushing of NATO missiles right up to the Russian border – to take just two worrisome events – are chilling. How would Americans react to Russian missiles on the Texas border?
But Paul is a lone voice in the desert. Unfortunately. More than ever in the past 25 years. NATO’s back! And it’s got a new leader:
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Friday the alliance has observed an alarming buildup of Russian ground and air forces in the vicinity of Ukraine. “We have also seen transfers of large quantities of advanced weapons, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery to separatist groups in eastern Ukraine,” Rasmussen said in a statement. Rasmussen said Russia continued to escalate the crisis in eastern Ukraine and that this could lead to further isolation of Moscow.
He also condemned Russia for sending a “so-called humanitarian convoy” into Ukraine without the consent of the Ukrainian authorities and without any involvement of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “It can only deepen the crisis in the region, which Russia itself has created and has continued to fuel,” Rasmussen said in a statement. He said it was a blatant breach of Russia’s international commitments.
And Rasmussen’s been making similar statements as long as any journalist was willing to listen. Which is not that long, since only with Ukraine NATO has found itself a long and badly desired stage again. And don’t let’s forget NATO’s other preferred media go-to guy:
Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, accused Russia of using the convoy as “a front for the resupply of separatists and Russian operatives”.
If there is a place for NATO in the world today, it must be as a force for peace. If not, it can only be a war mongerer, a tool for what Dr. Paul calls the war party. NATO started as a deterrent force, a united stand versus Russia’s alleged expansionist aspirations post-WWII. How real those were is questionable, but what is not is that they are now in the past. NATO’s recent aggressive language is not. And neither is its endless string of unproven claims about Russia.
German vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel yesterday talked about a wish for the federalization of Ukraine. But because that appears to be a sensitive topic in Ukraine, Chancellor Angela Merkel said he had meant ‘decentralization’. Apparently, Poroshenko supports such a thing. To grant a few more ‘rights’ to what remains of east Ukraine, as it will supposedly still be ruled by Kiev, which just destroyed much of its infrastructure and killed thousands of Ukrainian citizens there.
Yeah, that should work. It’s not like Kiev will finance the rebuilding of the area, because it’s already devoting what funds are left, to rebuilding the very army that ransacked east Ukraine. Does anyone think that Putin will say yes to this, that the rebels will lay down their arms and risk being slaughtered by what poses as the Ukraine army, the sturmtroops and mercenaries?
We’ve seen no evidence that Putin arms and supports the rebels, we’ve only seen allegations. But we do have proof of far-reaching western involvement in Ukraine, of billions in financial support, of US secret service operatives, US mercenaries, and swastika waving Ukrainians. What side are we on again? And how did we get there?
But all may not be lost for NATO. It may even find itself spread thin. As we get news that Iranian soldiers are fighting in Iraq against IS, a weird pair of bedfellows, along with the US and the Kurds (Iran also just announced it downed an Israeli drone), the Observer has a report that NATO should find interesting, and the rest of us alarming:
IS Surges Towards The Borders Of Turkey As West Mulls Options (Observer)
Islamic State extremists are pushing to secure the border between Turkey and north-western Syria as the main gateway for recruits to join the caliphate they have imposed across much of eastern Syria and western Iraq. Large numbers of jihadists from Islamic State (formerly Isis) are moving this weekend towards the Turkish border area, about 60 miles north of Aleppo, in columns of armoured trucks that they looted from abandoned Iraqi military bases.
The area is now one of the most active front lines in the group’s attempt to redraw the borders of the Levant, a campaign that will have huge ramifications for Turkey. Residents and Syrian opposition militants in the town of Marea, close to the Turkish border, on Saturday said that Isis had advanced to within sight of the town and had sent envoys to negotiate access. “They could storm in like the Mongols, if they wanted to,” said a fighter from Syrian rebel group Islamic Front. “But they’re trying to be nice. We have dealt with them before. There is no reconciling with them. We will have to fight.”
[..] “The Turkish border is the only way to smuggle oil, weapons and foreign fighters into [Iraq and Syria],” said Dr Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi expert on Isis. “If it’s closed, it will cut three things: funding, an entrance for the foreign fighters and links to Europe which they are trying to open. If those plans are destroyed, they will aim for another gate to Lebanon.”
some senior figures in the Middle East and Europe say Turkey has facilitated either through neglect or undeclared policy. “Let’s see how they react to the latest Isis advance,” said one regional leader on Saturday. “For more than a year now people have been telling them this has got out of control. They have to seal their border now. This so-called caliphate cannot be allowed to stand.” Al-Hashimi said Ankara would now be forced to act. “This time Turkey will do something and block the borders because they don’t trust Isis any more after they attacked Kurdistan. They understand now that Isis could turn on them.”
Guess what? Turkey, even if Germany has been spying on it for decades, and its new president has been highly critical of the US and the rest of the west, is a member of … NATO! And NATO is based on one for all, all for one. If any of its member states are attacked, all others are obligated to come to its defense. IS know this, and it therefore also knows how to draw the US and Europe into the next major war. At a time of its choosing.
