NATO is Building Up for War
By Brian Cloughley
April 05, 2015 "ICH"
- "RPI"
- The German city of Frankfurt is continental Europe’s largest financial center
and host to the country’s Stock Exchange, countless other financial
institutions, and the headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) which is
responsible for administering the monetary policy of the 18-nation Eurozone. The
place is awash with money, as demonstrated by the plush new ECB office building
which is costing a fortune.
The original price of the bank’s enormous palace was supposed to be 500 million
euros, about 550 million dollars, but the bill has now been admitted as €1.3
billion (£930 m; $1.4 bn). This absurdly over-expensive fiasco was directed by
the people who are supposed to steer the financial courses of 18 nations and
their half billion unfortunate citizens. If the ECB displays similar skill sets
in looking after Europe’s money as it has in controlling the cost of
constructing its huge twin-tower headquarters, then Europe is in for a rocky
time.
Intriguingly, the Bank isn’t alone in contributing to Europe’s bureaucratic
building boom. There is another Europe-based organization of equal ambition,
pomposity and incompetence which is building a majestically expensive and
luxurious headquarters with a mammoth cost overrun about which it is keeping
very quiet indeed.
The perpetrator of this embarrassing farce is NATO, the US-Canada-European North
Atlantic Treaty Organization which is limping out of Afghanistan licking its
wounds, having been fighting a bunch of sandal-wearing rag-clad amateur
irregulars who gave the hi-tech forces of the West a very hard time in a war
whose outcome was predictable. But the debacle hasn’t dimmed the vision of the
zealous leaders of NATO who are confronting Russia in order to justify the
existence of their creaking, leaking, defeated dinosaur. Their problem is not
only do they lose wars, but they then look for another one to fight — to be
directed from a glittery new and vastly expensive building whose cost has soared
above all estimates.
Just like NATO’s wars.
NATO’s operation "Unified Protector" to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi
involved a massive aerial blitz of 9,658 airstrikes which ended with the
gruesome murder of Gadhafi — and caused collapse of Libya into an omnishambles
where fanatics of the barbarous Islamic State are now establishing themselves.
In spite of the horror of NATO’s Libyan catastrophe one does have to have a
quiet smile about Ivo H. Daalder and James G Stavridis whose deeply researched
analysis in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2012 was titled "NATO’s Victory
in Libya." These sages declared that “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been
hailed as a model intervention . . . NATO’s involvement in Libya demonstrated
that the alliance remains an essential source of stability . . . NATO may not be
able to replicate its success in Libya in another decade. NATO members must
therefore use the Chicago summit to strengthen the alliance by ensuring that the
burden sharing that worked so well in Libya — and continues in Afghanistan today
— becomes the rule, not the exception.”
Not much is working well in either Libya or Afghanistan two years after the
Daalder-Stavridis advocacy of “burden sharing” and it is obvious that NATO has
been the opposite of a “source of stability” in both unfortunate countries.
In October 2005 I
wrote
that “NATO is to increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan to 15,000 and its
secretary-general states that instead of acting as a peacekeeping force it will
assume the combat role of US troops, which is insane . . . The insurgency in
Afghanistan will continue until foreign troops leave, whenever that might be.
After a while, the government in Kabul will collapse and there will be anarchy
until a brutal, ruthless, drug-rich warlord achieves power. He will rule the
country as it has always been ruled by Afghans: by threats, religious ferocity,
deceit, bribery, and outright savagery when the latter can be practiced without
retribution. And the latest foreign occupation will become just another memory.”
The number of US-NATO troops in Afghanistan has been reduced from a high of
130,000 to 13,000, of which some 10,000 are US, but NATO’s new headquarters
building in Brussels is expanding in both size and cost. The budget for the
immense complex was approved at 460 million Euros (500 million US dollars) in
2010 but has now surged to over 1.25 billion Euros, about 1.4 billion dollars.
Germany’s Der Spiegel
reported in January that the scandal of the cost overrun was being kept
secret by all governments contributing to this redundant organization. A leaked
cable from Germany’s ambassador explained that at a meeting of NATO
representatives last December they “pointed to the disastrous effect on the
image of the alliance if construction were to stop and if NATO appeared to be
incapable of punctually completing a construction project that was decided at
the NATO summit of government leaders in April 1999 in Washington. The risk of a
further cost increase is already palpable.”
The solution to NATO’s self-imposed image problem was simple : the people
responsible for managing the affairs of a military alliance involving 28
countries, 3.5 million combatants and 5,000 nuclear weapons decided, as asked by
the staff of its Secretary General, to deal with the matter “confidentially.” In
other words, the cost overruns and delays in construction are being deliberately
concealed from the public in the hope that NATO’s executives will not appear
incompetent.
Meantime, while trying to conceal their flaws, faults and failings in management
of basic administrative affairs, NATO’s chiefs are squaring up to Russia in an
attempt to persuade the world that President Putin is about to mount an invasion
from the east. The focal point of NATO’s contrived alarm is the corrupt and
chaotic regime in power in Ukraine, which has serious disagreements with Russia
and is therefore energetically supported by the United States to the point of
distortion, menace, and mendacity.
As reported in the UK’s Daily Telegraph on March 4, the commander of US troops
in Europe, General Frederick “Ben” Hodges, has accused Russia of having 12,000
troops inside eastern Ukraine, which was irresponsible nonsense.
Hodges was formerly the army’s Congressional Liaison Officer in Washington where
he obviously acquired a taste for political grandstanding, as in a political
speech of the sort that generals have no right to make he declared that “We have
to raise the cost for Putin. Right now he has 85 per cent domestic support. But
when mothers start seeing their sons come home dead, when the price goes up,
domestic support goes down,” which was as offensive as it was hostile.
In February the Wall Street Journal reported Hodges as saying “I believe the
Russians are mobilizing right now for a war that they think is going to happen
in five or six years—not that they’re going to start a war in five or six years,
but I think they are anticipating that things are going to happen, and that they
will be in a war of some sort, of some scale, with somebody within the next five
or six years.” Just what President Putin was supposed to make of that is
anyone’s guess — but it is certain that Hodges’ bellicose meanderings did
nothing to persuade Moscow that there would be any attempt by the US-NATO
coalition to modify its policy of uncompromising enmity.
Other pronouncements by NATO leaders have been equally threatening and intended
to convince the public of western Europe that Russia attacked Ukraine.
But even if Russia had indeed invaded Ukraine, it would have had nothing
whatever to do with anyone else.
The US-NATO coalition willfully ignores the fact that Ukraine is not a member of
either the European Union or NATO and has no treaty of any sort with any nation
in the world that would require provision of political, economic or military
support in the event of a bilateral dispute with any other country. Yet NATO has
seized upon the Ukraine-Russia discord to justify its policy of unrelenting
hostility to Moscow.
NATO should have been disbanded at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union
because that threat was the sole reason for its existence; but it decided to
multiply membership and extend its military presence closer and closer to
Russia’s borders. There is little wonder that Russia is apprehensive about
NATO’s intentions, as the muscle-flexing coalition lurches towards conflict.
NATO’S Supreme Commander, US General Breedlove, has also contributed greatly to
tension and fear in Europe by issuing dire warnings about Russia’s supposed
maneuvers. On March 5 he indulged in fantasy by claiming, without a shred of
evidence and no subsequent proof, that Russia had deployed “well over a thousand
combat vehicles” along with “combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air
defense, battalions of artillery” within Ukraine. This pronouncement was similar
to his downright lie of November 18, 2014, when he told the German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that there were “regular Russian army units in
eastern Ukraine.”
The swell of anti-Russian propaganda, confrontation and attempted intimidation
by NATO has increased, and if it continues to do so it is likely that Moscow
will take action, thereby upping the stakes and the danger even more. It is time
that NATO’s nations came to terms with the reality that Russia is a major
international power with legitimate interests in its own region. Moscow is not
going to bow the knee in the face of immature threats by sabre-rattling US
generals and their swaggering acolytes. It is time for NATO to forge ties rather
than destroy them — and to build bridges rather than glitzy office blocks.
Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and
military affairs from his home in Voutenay sur Cure, France.
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