NATO summit plans for continued aggressions

Helicopter gunships patrolled the skies, missile launcher ships were anchored in the Tagus estuary, and police with heavy machine guns and armored cars were deployed on the main streets. Heads of state and government of the 28 NATO member countries were cloistered in the Parque das Nações, a part of Lisbon that had been turned into a top-security area similar to Baghdad’s “Green Zone.”

The rather sinister gathering’s original purpose had been to discuss how to withdraw NATO troops from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011, a target which most of the allies present favored. Shortly before the meeting, however, Washington abruptly announced that the 2011 date was being “de-emphasized.” Despite President Barack Obama’s promise last year, troops would stay in Afghanistan until at least 2014.

Another summit goal was to reevaluate NATO’s “strategic concept.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was originally set up in 1949 to prevent workers’ revolutions in Western Europe and to threaten the Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, while still maintaining a hostile stance towards the Russian Federation, NATO expanded its aggressive mission to intervene first in Yugoslavia, and then in Afghanistan.

Now, it is officially updating its strategy — making Lisbon, in the words of Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “one of the most important summits in NATO’s history.” (globalpost.com, Nov.19)

Shortly before the summit began, Rasmussen told Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper that NATO had to be prepared for expeditionary warfare even beyond Afghanistan: “But we must realize,” he said, “that in the modern world we have to go beyond our borders to actually protect and defend our borders.” (globalpost.com Nov. 19)

Some of the imperialist powers at the Lisbon Summit expressed tactical differences. France’s new defense minister, Alain Juppé, said flatly this week that Afghanistan is a “trap” for allied troops. Some analysts see a very grim scenario for imperialism in Central Asia. “Success in Afghanistan is almost impossible,” said Shmuel Bar, a director at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel. “If NATO is making its future contingent on victory in Afghanistan, they are not living in the real world.” (Boston Globe, Nov. 18)

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, the leader of the U.S. puppet government, stunned U.S. officials by demanding that the U.S.-NATO forces should take a “lower profile” and “reduce the visibility and intensity of their military operations. The time has come to reduce military operations,” Karzai said. (Washington Post, Nov. 18)

Despite Karzai’s statement, on Nov. 20 the Pentagon announced that it would ratchet up its aggression by sending huge, heavily armored Abrams tanks into the battle against the Afghan resistance, a first for the U.S. military in that country. It is another step up in the U.S. and NATO assault on the Afghan people.

The U.S. nuclear threat

Fearing a decline of solidarity among the NATO members, the U.S. came up with a rather bizarre mechanism: a missile shield over Europe. The alleged enemy in this scenario is Iran, although Iran is not mentioned specifically because of objections from the Turkish government. In reality, it is a slap in the face to the Russian Federation. A similar proposal to put missiles in Poland near the end of the Bush administration led to icy relations with the Russian government, which perceived that the so-called shield was directed against it.

Only a day before NATO announced the missile shield, the Republican leadership of the U.S. Senate indicated that it might refuse to ratify a recently negotiated nuclear arms treaty with Russia (New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). Some pundits have speculated that the Republicans merely want to deny Obama a political victory. It appears, however, that there is a deeper political division within the U.S. ruling class over the issue of arms reduction which cuts across political party lines.

The Pentagon’s intelligence organizations, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Gates have called for the treaty to be ratified as soon as possible. They point out that the treaty would permit U.S. inspections of Russian military sites to resume, while minimally limiting the U.S. deployment of missiles and nuclear weapons.

According to Paula DeSutter, an assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration, the absence of a U.S.-Russian arms control treaty would mean that the U.S. would need to focus more spy satellites over Russia, satellites that otherwise could be used to peer on other sites such as Iraq and Afghanistan. (Washington Times, Nov. 18) In other words, the Pentagon wants the START treaty ratified, not to promote peace and disarmament, but in order to more efficiently utilize its military resources to carry out wars of aggression and occupation in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East.

Just where the U.S. and NATO will get the money to pay for all these new missile shields, nuclear weapons and spy satellites is another subject avoided by both the NATO summit and the U.S. Senate.