http://www.workers.org/2007/world/nato-1101/

NATO: Making enemies 'out of area'

Built up as an anti-Soviet military pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance had no defined purpose after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. But under Washington’s guidance, NATO has now expanded to be a worldwide NATO, tool of imperialist conquest “out of area.” The first step was to use NATO in Yugoslavia starting in 1992.

Yugoslavia was the last remaining socialist country in Eastern Europe, rich in resources and with a skilled, trained working class. The U.S. and the European imperialist countries began a campaign of demonization and destabilization of the Yugoslav state, replete with false charges of genocide and mass rape, that lasted for a decade.

On March 24, 1999, with U.S. President Bill Clinton leading the way, NATO opened a brutal 78-day campaign of “humanitarian bombing” of Yugoslavia. The physical destruction of what was left of a united Yugoslavia was followed by a U.S.-NATO destabilization program that used George Soros’ “Open Society” as well as the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA and other government assets.

The campaign ended with a coup that toppled the government of Slobodan Milosevic in September 2000 and ended with the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia broken into pieces. NATO kidnapped, incarcerated and tried Milosevic on phony war-crimes charges. As he was successfully finishing his defense against these charges, Milosevic finally died under suspicious circumstances in a prison near The Hague once used by Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, U.S., German and other imperialist firms privatized and grabbed up the most profitable parts of the Serbian economy.

Then NATO went to work with a vengeance on Eastern Europe and the former USSR. As one British foreign policymaker said, Yugoslavia was “the foot in the door.” (Sean Gervasi, “Why is NATO in Yugoslavia,” NATO in the Balkans, IAC). NATO expanded its influence into Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia, all formerly part of the socialist camp. And last March the U.S. Senate approved NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine, even if NATO itself has not.

The Western NATO countries under U.S. leadership have expanded NATO to put the resources and people of all of the new countries of the former USSR, Eastern Europe and Asia within their reach.

Most European and Canadian workers are wary of NATO’s military expansionism and people in Canada and Quebec will be demonstrating Oct. 27 against the Canadian military adventure in Afghanistan. They are not happy to supply their youths as cannon fodder, nor to pay for this militarism. In the U.S. the anti-war forces are more concerned with direct U.S. intervention—in places like Iraq and Afghanistan—than with NATO expansion as such.

NATO’s new best friends in Eastern Europe

The Wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are part of NATO strategy. Opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq makes recruitment for soldiers from Western European NATO countries like England and the Netherlands difficult, as well as in Canada.

NATO managers look to the new puppet states in Eastern Europe and the former USSR for support. The governments of Slovakia and Poland have volunteered their children to fight and die for NATO expansionism, and Georgia’s lackeys-in-waiting have volunteered their youth.

As in the rest of the former socialist republics, unemployment, violent cuts in social services, low wages and an impoverished peasantry make poor Eastern European youth available as cannon fodder for the deadly Afghan and Iraq wars.

The Associated Press on Oct. 21 reported that former CIA director and current U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Kiev in the Ukraine to attend meetings of the Southeast European Defense Ministers, a 12-nation group created in 1996, at Washington’s initiative, to reinforce “security cooperation in the volatile Balkans and to facilitate cooperation with NATO.”

In the Czech Republic the majority of the people, also fearful of US/NATO expansion in the region, have opposed the proposed plan to place an advanced radar in their country as part of a proposed “European arm of the U.S. missile defense system that is now based mainly in Alaska and California.”

Gates was meeting in Kiev with defense ministers from Croatia, Albania and Macedonia “to discuss progress they have made toward satisfying NATO requirements for earning an invitation to join the alliance.” (AP, Oct. 21)

Meanwhile, Polish soldiers are currently stationed in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Kosovo and Bosnia. In Afghanistan the Polish contingent numbers 1,200, and NATO is recruiting Bulgarian warships to patrol the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. (Focus News Agency, Bulgaria, Oct. 19)

NATO powers in Europe and North America met in Norway during the week of Oct. 22 to form a strategic military partnership which would stretch from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea. (Focus News, Oct. 22)

And Israel is enthusiastically welcoming NATO inclusion. Since last year, the Israeli government has been in a bilateral cooperation program between Israel and NATO, the first for a country outside of Europe. (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 21)

Resisting NATO expansion

In July, people in and around the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa pitched tents for days, protesting against military NATO war games. (Voice of Russia, July 9).

Massive opposition plagues the NATO stooges in their capitals. Only 16 percent of the Ukrainian population supports NATO membership (Herald Tribune, July 10, 2006) and open resistance to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government throughout that country makes these two nations shaky allies for the U.S. and the Western European imperial powers.

Russia has expressly opposed the “financial and political engagement of the U.S. in Georgia and the Ukraine or the planned radar stations in East Europe,” according to Professor Alexander Krylov of the University of Bremen. (Islamic Republic News Agency, Oct. 20).

People in the Czech Republic and Poland have demonstrated again and again in opinion polls and protests against their countries’ involvement in NATO. A conference on Oct. 20, which included activists from Europe and North America, opposed to the deployment of a U.S. radar station in the Czech Republic. The deputy speaker of the Czech Parliament’s lower house, Voiteh Filipp, said an overwhelming majority of Czechs opposed the radar station and demanded a national referendum on the issue. (Voice of Russia, Oct. 20)

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has called NATO an “illegitimate alliance. ... We made a deal with the USA—we break off the Warsaw Pact and you dissolve NATO.” (Makfax, Macedonia, July 20). The U.S. reneged on the deal. A U.S./NATO demonization campaign has targeted Lukashenko because he has refused to privatize his economy and is still providing jobs and social services in the former USSR republic.

Part II to come: Brzezinski’s worst nightmare. Thanks to the work of Rick Rozoff, administrator of the listserv: STOPNATO, for making much of this research available.

NATO expansion and Brzezinski's nightmare

Once the USSR was gone and the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved, the ruling classes of the NATO countries, as well as in Japan, started taking steps to re-establish colonial domination over the peoples and resources of the world.

But obstacles arose. The Iraqi and Afghan peoples’ resistance exposed the weaknesses of the Pentagon. In addition, some of the more powerful of the nonimperialist states have taken joint diplomatic steps to counter the NATO offensive.

Talk of NATO expansion into Africa and Pentagon plans to set up an African command—dubbed AFRICOM—to coordinate its military maneuvers in the area began to arouse opposition. Even Morocco, a U.S. client state, joined Algeria and Libya in saying that AFRICOM was set up “only to secure a constant flow of oil to the United States.”

On July 27, Radio Free Europe, a U.S. propaganda agency set up during the Cold War, said what Washington is thinking: “The Arctic and Antarctica are the last vast untapped reservoirs of mineral resources on the planet. Underneath the Arctic Ocean, there are gigantic reserves of tin, manganese, nickel, gold, platinum and diamonds. But the Arctic’s most lucrative treasure is the enormous deposits of oil and gas, which could amount to 25 percent of the world’s resources.”

Norway, Denmark (through its colony Greenland), Canada and the U.S. are NATO members with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean. However, the longest part of the Arctic coast belongs to Russia. Moscow estimates that the region contains at least 10 billion tons of oil and natural gas reserves.

When NATO threatened to claim the Arctic as its new region of control, the Russian government sent submarines in an unprecedented 13,800-foot dive beneath the North Pole. During the dive, NATO spy planes buzzed the Russian icebreaker Rossia. (Voice of Russia, July 27) The expedition planted the Russian flag on the ocean floor.

The imperialist powers are in a frenzy to control the resources of the world, and have fashioned the new NATO to do this. Only 95,000 troops are left in the European Command (EUCOM) to do the “primary job to ensure European stability,” meaning maintaining rightist and pro-capitalist governments in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. According to U.S. Vice Adm. Richard Gallagher, EUCOM’s new deputy commander and former head of its operations, “stability” in Eastern Europe “is what’s good for us, good for business, good for the United States’ central interests.” (Stars and Stripes, Oct. 16)