[Disarmo] NATO: 65 Years Later - Rick Rozoff

[Jure Ellero LT <glry at ngi.it>]

Da: Rick Rozoff
Oggetto: NATO: 65 Years Later
Data: 04 aprile 2014 04:55:32 CEST
A: Stop NATO <stopnato  @yahoogroups.com>

http://rickrozoff.wordpre ss.com/2014/04/03/nato-65-years-later/


Stop NATO
April 4, 2014


NATO: 65 Years Later
Rick Rozoff

When the U.S. recruited its Western European military allies to jointly 
create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, it was with the 
purpose of perpetuating American military presence on the European 
continent and to introduce nuclear weapons in Europe for the first time.

Currently, sixty-five years afterward, the Pentagon continues to 
maintain air, infantry and naval bases in Britain, Spain, Portugal, 
Germany, Italy, Norway, Greece, Turkey and other older NATO member 
states and, in addition, courtesy of the past fifteen years' NATO 
expansion, has acquired new bases directly and under NATO auspices in 
Kosovo, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary and the 
Czech Republic. These military facilities include (the permanent use of) 
air bases in  Hungary (the world's first multinational global strategic 
airlift operati on in Papa), Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia and 
Poland, which the U.S. has spent millions of dollars modernizing and 
expanding over the past ten years.

Washington first deployed nuclear bombs to Europe in 1949 immediately 
after the founding of NATO, before the Soviet Union developed its first 
atomic bomb, and continues to this day to maintain B61 nuclear bombs on 
air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey under 
the provisions of what is alternately called the NATO burden sharing or 
NATO nuclear sharing arrangement. The tactical nuclear bombs in question 
are American, but under the conditions of the NATO agreement they are to 
be delivered by the air forces of the respective host nations.

With the announcement by Washington of what it calls the European Phased 
Adaptive Approach interceptor missile system in 2009 and the subsequent 
endorsement of it by NATO, the Atlantic Alliance has become the 
Pentagon's chief mechanism for the "Son of Star W ars" missile shield to 
be deployed in and cover all of Europe (except for Russia and Belarus) 
and the seas bordering the continent and as building blocks in a 
proposed global (and space-based) interceptor missile program.

NATO member states collectively spend over a trillion dollars a year on 
arms and the military.

***

When Turkey invaded North Cyprus in 1974, the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization neither acted to prevent nor criticized that act of 
aggression because Turkey is a member of NATO and Cyprus was not. Forty 
years later when the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to leave 
post-coup Ukraine and affiliate with the Russian Federation, a 
completely peaceful process, NATO in response has mounted a steady 
drumbeat of threats regarding its Article 5 provision concerning 
"collective defense," which is to say concerted military efforts. In 
common parlance, war.

With the defeat of the ruling AKEL party in Cyprus last year and the 
formation of a pro- NATO government which immediately gave its American 
and other Western backers what they demanded - the express offer to join 
NATO's Partnership for Peace transitional program, the program employed 
to prepare the 12 Eastern European nations that NATO absorbed as full 
members in the decade from 1999-2009 - now all of the 39 European 
nations (42 if the countries of the South Caucasus are included and 
excluding the mini- or micro-states of Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, 
San Marino and Vatican City) are either full NATO members or members of 
one or more NATO military partnership programs: The Partnership for 
Peace, the Adriatic Charter, the aspirant countries category, Individual 
Partnership Action Plan, Membership Action Plan, Annual National 
Programmes, etc.

With other partnership programs - the Mediterranean Dialogue (in north 
Africa and the Middle East), the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (in the 
Persian Gulf), the new Partners Across the Globe (Afghanistan, 
Australia, Iraq, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Korea 
to begin with) and evolving individual arrangements with nations in 
Latin America (Colombia and El Salvador to date) - NATO members and 
partners now constitute over 70 nations, more than a third of the 
countries in the world, on every inhabited continent.

In addition, in recent years NATO has been striving to establish 
partnerships with the ten-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations 
(ASEAN), the 54-nation African Union, India, China and other nations 
throughout the world. NATO, in short, has in the post-Cold War epoch 
expanded into the world's largest and history's first global military 
bloc. One which over the past fifteen years has waged full-fledged wars 
in three continents - Europe (Yugoslavia in 1999), Asia (Afghanistan to 
the present day) and Africa (Libya in 2011) - and which has subsequently 
incorporated the defeated and conquered nations, or fragments thereof, 
into its international network of military pa rtnerships.

As with many workers in the U.S. and other nations, 65 years of age 
should be the age of mandatory retirement for this dangerous, most 
dangerous of all, threat to world peace.


Inoltrato da Jure Ellero glry at ngi.it