4 New Messages
Digest #4620
Messages
Sat Feb 2, 2013 6:05 am (PST) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
February 1, 2013
Building connectivity between Special Forces and partners
Optimising the employment of Special Forces and building on the lessons learnt in current operations is crucial to improving Alliance capabilities. To help do this, the NATO Special Operations Headquarters (NSHQ) is training Allied and partner Special Forces to improve their interoperability and to create a network of trained personnel.
“The purpose of the NSHQ mission is to make the employment of Special Operations Forces as effective, efficient, and coherent as possible, so as to deliver to the Alliance a highly agile Special Operations capability across the range of military operations,” explains Scott Morrison, Director of the Commander’s Action Group at NSHQ. “21st century NATO Special Operations brings much more to the table than the commando work most are familiar with,” he adds.
Located at SHAPE Headquarters in Mons, Belgium, the NSHQ was set up to coordinate NATO’s Special Operations and to optimise the employment of Special Forces. It has one of the most diverse multinational compositions within the Alliance, with 33 NATO countries and partners working together.
“One of the most critical instruments to enabling this NATO SOF capability is an enduring NATO SOF Headquarters’ Allied and Partner Collaborative Network, the centrepiece of which are the people,” Morrison adds.
Connected through training
Much of the training led by NSHQ takes place at the NATO Special Operations School at nearby Chièvres Air Base, where students are taught and work with common NATO doctrine, processes, and methods. This means that a Special Forces Network is comprised of those who have the same training, background and understanding to allow them to operate more effectively and coherently when deployed.
During the last year, the NATO Special Operations School had almost 1,000 graduates, with a total of 3,453 graduates since 2007. “The Special Forces Network is about fostering deeper, more effective and enduring partnerships throughout the Special Forces community,” says Major Remigijus Bridikis from Lithuania.
While many of these relationships are built on the ground or in training, the NSHQ also makes use of communications that include secure video teleconferencing to bring together personnel in all areas of operations for conferences, workshops and information sharing.
“The investment in the relationships among Special Operations Forces facilitates information sharing among a rich multinational Special Forces community, and develops understanding and perspectives that are essential ingredients to operating successfully in the complex operational environment of the 21st century,” he adds.
==============================
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==============================
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
February 1, 2013
Building connectivity between Special Forces and partners
Optimising the employment of Special Forces and building on the lessons learnt in current operations is crucial to improving Alliance capabilities. To help do this, the NATO Special Operations Headquarters (NSHQ) is training Allied and partner Special Forces to improve their interoperability and to create a network of trained personnel.
“The purpose of the NSHQ mission is to make the employment of Special Operations Forces as effective, efficient, and coherent as possible, so as to deliver to the Alliance a highly agile Special Operations capability across the range of military operations,” explains Scott Morrison, Director of the Commander’s Action Group at NSHQ. “21st century NATO Special Operations brings much more to the table than the commando work most are familiar with,” he adds.
Located at SHAPE Headquarters in Mons, Belgium, the NSHQ was set up to coordinate NATO’s Special Operations and to optimise the employment of Special Forces. It has one of the most diverse multinational compositions within the Alliance, with 33 NATO countries and partners working together.
“One of the most critical instruments to enabling this NATO SOF capability is an enduring NATO SOF Headquarters’ Allied and Partner Collaborative Network, the centrepiece of which are the people,” Morrison adds.
Connected through training
Much of the training led by NSHQ takes place at the NATO Special Operations School at nearby Chièvres Air Base, where students are taught and work with common NATO doctrine, processes, and methods. This means that a Special Forces Network is comprised of those who have the same training, background and understanding to allow them to operate more effectively and coherently when deployed.
During the last year, the NATO Special Operations School had almost 1,000 graduates, with a total of 3,453 graduates since 2007. “The Special Forces Network is about fostering deeper, more effective and enduring partnerships throughout the Special Forces community,” says Major Remigijus Bridikis from Lithuania.
While many of these relationships are built on the ground or in training, the NSHQ also makes use of communications that include secure video teleconferencing to bring together personnel in all areas of operations for conferences, workshops and information sharing.
“The investment in the relationships among Special Operations Forces facilitates information sharing among a rich multinational Special Forces community, and develops understanding and perspectives that are essential ingredients to operating successfully in the complex operational environment of the 21st century,” he adds.
==============================
Stop NATO e-mail list home page with archives and search engine:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
Stop NATO website and articles:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.co
To subscribe for individual e-mails or the daily digest, unsubscribe, and otherwise change subscription status:
stopnato-subscribe@yahoogroups
==============================
Sat Feb 2, 2013 6:21 am (PST) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
R2P and 'Genocide Prevention': The Good Intentions That Pave the Road to War
By Diana Johnstone
Paris: Opposing genocide has become a sort of cottage industry in the United States.
Everywhere, “genocide studies” are cropping up in universities. Five years ago, an unlikely “Genocide Prevention Task Force” was set up headed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary William Cohen, both veterans of the Clinton administration.
The Bible of the campaign is Samantha Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell”. Ms. Power’s thesis is that the U.S. Government, while well-intentioned, like all of us, is too slow to intervene to “stop genocide”. It is a suggestion that the U.S. government embraces, even to taking on Ms. Power as White House advisor.
Why has the U.S. Government so eagerly endorsed the crusade against “genocide”?
The reason is clear. Since the Holocaust has become the most omnipresent historical reference in Western societies, the concept of “genocide” is widely and easily accepted as the greatest evil to afflict the planet. It is felt to be worse than war.
Therein lies its immense value to the U.S. military-industrial complex, and to a foreign policy elite seeking an acceptable pretext for military intervention wherever they choose.
The obsession with “genocide” as the primary humanitarian issue in the world today relativizes war. It reverses the final judgment of the Nuremberg Trials that:
War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Instead, war is transformed into a chivalrous action to rescue whole populations from “genocide”.
At the same time, national sovereignty, erected as the barrier to prevent strong nations from invading weaker ones, that is, to prevent aggression and “the scourge of war”, is derided as nothing but a protection for evil rulers (“dictators”) whose only ambition is to “massacre their own people”.
This ideological construct is the basis for the Western-sponsored doctrine, forced on a more or less reluctant United Nations, of “R2P”, the ambiguous shorthand for both the “right” and the “responsibility” to protect peoples from their own governments.
In practice this can give the dominant powers carte blanche to intervene militarily in weaker countries in order to support whatever armed rebellions they favor. Once this doctrine seems to be accepted, it can even serve as an incitement to opposition groups to provoke government repression in order to call for “protection”.
One among many examples of this cottage industry is a program called “World Without Genocide” at the William Mitchell College of Law in my home town, Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose executive director Ellen J. Kennedy recently wrote an article for the Minneapolis Star Tribune which expresses all the usual clichés of that seemingly well-meaning but misguided campaign.
Misguided, and above all, misguiding. It is directing the attention of well-intentioned people away from the essential cause of our time which is to reverse the drift toward worldwide war.
Ms. Kennedy blames “genocide” on the legal barrier set up to try to prevent aggressive war: national sovereignty. Her cure for genocide is apparently to abolish national sovereignty.
For more than 350 years, the concept of “national sovereignty” held primacy over the idea of “individual sovereignty.” Governments basically had immunity from outside intervention despite human-rights violations they perpetrated within their borders. The result has been an “over and over again” phenomenon of genocide since the Holocaust, with millions of innocent lives lost in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Guatemala, Argentina, East Timor — the list is long.
In fact, Hitler initiated World War II precisely in violation of the national sovereignty of Czechoslovakia and Poland partly in order, he claimed, to stop human rights violations that those governments allegedly perpetrated against ethnic Germans who lived there. It was to invalidate this pretext, and “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, that the United Nations was founded on the basis of respect for national sovereignty.
Of course, there is no chance that the United States will abandon its national sovereignty. Rather, all other countries are called upon to abandon their national sovereignty – to the United States.
Ms. Kennedy’s lengthens her list by arbitrarily grouping disparate events under the single label of “genocide”, mostly according to their place in the official U.S. narrative of contemporary conflicts.
But the significant fact is that the worst of these slaughters – Cambodia, Rwanda and the Holocaust itself – occurred during wars and as a result of wars.
The systematic rounding up, deportation and killing of European Jews took place during World War II. Jews were denounced as “the internal enemy” of Germany. War is the perfect setting for such racist paranoia. After all, even in the United States, during World War II, Japanese American families were dispossessed of their property, rounded up and put in camps. The result was not comparable, but the pretext was similar.
In Rwanda, the horrific slaughter was a response to an invasion by Tutsi forces from neighboring Uganda and the assassination of the country’s president. The context was invasion and civil war.
The Cambodian slaughter was certainly not the fault of “national sovereignty”. Indeed, it was precisely the direct result of the U.S. violation of Cambodia’s national sovereignty. Years of secret U.S. bombing of the Cambodian countryside, followed by a U.S.-engineered overthrow of the Cambodian government, opened the way for takeover of that country by embittered Khmer Rouge fighters who took out their resentment against the devastation of rural areas on the hapless urban population, considered accomplices of their enemies. The Khmer Rouge slaughters took place after the United States had been defeated in Indochina by the Vietnamese. When, after being provoked by armed incursions, the Vietnamese intervened to overthrow the Khmer Rouge, they were condemned in the United Nations by the United States for doing so.
Some of the bloodiest events do not make it to Ms. Kennedy’s “genocide” list. Missing is the killing of over half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 and 1966. But the dictator responsible, Suharto, was “a friend of the United States” and the victims were communists.
But while ignoring over half a million murdered Indonesians, she includes Bosnia on her list. In that case, the highest estimate of victims was 8,000, all men of military age. Indeed, the NATO-linked International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) has ruled that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was “genocide”. To arrive at this verdict, despite the fact that the alleged perpetrators spared women and children, the ICTY found a sociologist who claimed that since the Muslim community of Srebrenica was a patriarchy, murdering the menfolk amounted to “genocide” in a single town, since the women would not return without the men. This far-fetched judgment was necessary to preserve “Bosnia” as Exhibit A in the case for NATO military intervention.
It is generally overlooked that Srebrenica was a garrison town where the Muslim men in 1995 were not all natives of that originally multi-ethnic town and had been carrying out attacks on surrounding Serb villages. Nor have Western media given much attention to the testimony by Srebrenica Muslim leaders of having heard the Islamist party leader, Alija Izetbegovic, confide that President Clinton had said that a massacre of at least 5,000 Muslims was needed to bring the “international community” into the Bosnian civil war on the side of the Muslims. Those Muslim leaders believe that Izetbegovic deliberately left Srebrenica undefended in order to set up a massacre by vengeful Serbs.
Whether or not that story is true, it points to a serious danger of adopting the R2P principle. Izetbegovic was the leader of a party which wanted to defeat his enemies with outside military aid. The world is rife with such leaders of ethnic, religious or political factions. If they know that “the world’s only superpower” may come to their aid once they can accuse the existing government of “slaughtering its own people”, they are highly motivated to provoke that government into committing the required slaughter.
A number of former U.N. peacekeepers have testified that Muslim forces in Bosnia carried out the infamous “Marketplace bombings” against Sarajevo civilians in order to blame their Serb enemies and gain international support.
How could they do such a horrid thing? Well, if a country’s leader can be willing to “massacre his own people”, why couldn’t the leader of a rebel group allow some of “his own people” to be massacred, in order to take power? Especially, by the way, if he is paid handsomely by some outside power – Qatar for instance – to provoke an uprising.
A principal danger of the R2P doctrine is that it encourages rebel factions to provoke repression, or to claim persecution, solely to bring in foreign forces on their behalf. It is certain that anti-Gaddafi militants grossly exaggerated Gaddafi’s threat to Benghazi in order to provoke the 2011 French-led NATO war against Libya. The war in Mali is a direct result of the brutal overthrow of Gaddafi, who was a major force for African stability.
R2P serves primarily to create a public opinion willing to accept U.S. and NATO intervention in other countries. It is not meant to allow the Russians or the Chinese to intervene, say, to protect housemaids in Saudi Arabia from being beheaded, much less to allow Cuban forces to shut down Guantanamo and end U.S. violations of human rights – on Cuban territory.
U.S. intervention does not have a track record of “protecting” people. In December 1992, a Marine battalion landed in Somalia in “Operation Restore Hope”. Hope was not restored, Marines were massacred by the locals and were chased out within four months. It is easier to imagine an effective intervention where none has been attempted – for instance in Rwanda – than to carry it out in the real world.
For all its military power, the United States is unable to make over the world to its liking. It has failed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The 1999 “Kosovo war” is claimed as a success – only by studiously ignoring what has been going on in the province since it was wrested from Serbia by NATO and handed over to Washington’s ethnic Albanian clients. The “success” in Libya is publicly unraveling much faster.
Like all the R2P advocates, Ms. Kennedy exhorts us “never again” to allow a Holocaust. In reality there has “never again” been another Holocaust. History produces unique events which defy all our expectations.
But what, people ask me, if something that dreadful did happen? Should the world just stand by and watch?
What is meant by “the world”? The Western ideological construct assumes that the world should care about human rights, but that only the West really does. That assumption is creating a deepening gap between the West and the rest of the world, which does not see things that way. To most of the real world, the West is seen as a cause of humanitarian disasters, not the cure.
Libya marked a turning point, when the NATO powers used the R2P doctrine not to protect people from being bombed by their own air force (the idea behind the “no fly zone” UN resolution), but to bomb the country themselves in order to enable rebels to kill the leader and destroy the regime. That convinced the Russians and Chinese, if they had had any doubts, that “R2P” is a fake, used to advance a project of world domination.
And they are not alone and isolated. The West is isolating itself in its own powerful propaganda bubble. Much, perhaps most of the world sees Western intervention as motivated by economic self-interest, or by the interests of Israel. The sense of being threatened by U.S. power incites other countries to build up their own military defenses and to repress opposition militants who might serve as excuses for outside intervention.
By crying “genocide” when there is no genocide, the U.S. is crying wolf and losing credibility. It is destroying the trust and unity that would be needed to mobilize international humanitarian action in case of genuine need.
DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
A shorter version of this article appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on January 25.
==============================
Stop NATO e-mail list home page with archives and search engine:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
Stop NATO website and articles:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.co
To subscribe for individual e-mails or the daily digest, unsubscribe, and otherwise change subscription status:
stopnato-subscribe@yahoogroups
==============================
By Diana Johnstone
Paris: Opposing genocide has become a sort of cottage industry in the United States.
Everywhere, “genocide studies” are cropping up in universities. Five years ago, an unlikely “Genocide Prevention Task Force” was set up headed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary William Cohen, both veterans of the Clinton administration.
The Bible of the campaign is Samantha Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell”. Ms. Power’s thesis is that the U.S. Government, while well-intentioned, like all of us, is too slow to intervene to “stop genocide”. It is a suggestion that the U.S. government embraces, even to taking on Ms. Power as White House advisor.
Why has the U.S. Government so eagerly endorsed the crusade against “genocide”?
The reason is clear. Since the Holocaust has become the most omnipresent historical reference in Western societies, the concept of “genocide” is widely and easily accepted as the greatest evil to afflict the planet. It is felt to be worse than war.
Therein lies its immense value to the U.S. military-industrial complex, and to a foreign policy elite seeking an acceptable pretext for military intervention wherever they choose.
The obsession with “genocide” as the primary humanitarian issue in the world today relativizes war. It reverses the final judgment of the Nuremberg Trials that:
War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Instead, war is transformed into a chivalrous action to rescue whole populations from “genocide”.
At the same time, national sovereignty, erected as the barrier to prevent strong nations from invading weaker ones, that is, to prevent aggression and “the scourge of war”, is derided as nothing but a protection for evil rulers (“dictators”) whose only ambition is to “massacre their own people”.
This ideological construct is the basis for the Western-sponsored doctrine, forced on a more or less reluctant United Nations, of “R2P”, the ambiguous shorthand for both the “right” and the “responsibility” to protect peoples from their own governments.
In practice this can give the dominant powers carte blanche to intervene militarily in weaker countries in order to support whatever armed rebellions they favor. Once this doctrine seems to be accepted, it can even serve as an incitement to opposition groups to provoke government repression in order to call for “protection”.
One among many examples of this cottage industry is a program called “World Without Genocide” at the William Mitchell College of Law in my home town, Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose executive director Ellen J. Kennedy recently wrote an article for the Minneapolis Star Tribune which expresses all the usual clichés of that seemingly well-meaning but misguided campaign.
Misguided, and above all, misguiding. It is directing the attention of well-intentioned people away from the essential cause of our time which is to reverse the drift toward worldwide war.
Ms. Kennedy blames “genocide” on the legal barrier set up to try to prevent aggressive war: national sovereignty. Her cure for genocide is apparently to abolish national sovereignty.
For more than 350 years, the concept of “national sovereignty” held primacy over the idea of “individual sovereignty.” Governments basically had immunity from outside intervention despite human-rights violations they perpetrated within their borders. The result has been an “over and over again” phenomenon of genocide since the Holocaust, with millions of innocent lives lost in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Guatemala, Argentina, East Timor — the list is long.
In fact, Hitler initiated World War II precisely in violation of the national sovereignty of Czechoslovakia and Poland partly in order, he claimed, to stop human rights violations that those governments allegedly perpetrated against ethnic Germans who lived there. It was to invalidate this pretext, and “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, that the United Nations was founded on the basis of respect for national sovereignty.
Of course, there is no chance that the United States will abandon its national sovereignty. Rather, all other countries are called upon to abandon their national sovereignty – to the United States.
Ms. Kennedy’s lengthens her list by arbitrarily grouping disparate events under the single label of “genocide”, mostly according to their place in the official U.S. narrative of contemporary conflicts.
But the significant fact is that the worst of these slaughters – Cambodia, Rwanda and the Holocaust itself – occurred during wars and as a result of wars.
The systematic rounding up, deportation and killing of European Jews took place during World War II. Jews were denounced as “the internal enemy” of Germany. War is the perfect setting for such racist paranoia. After all, even in the United States, during World War II, Japanese American families were dispossessed of their property, rounded up and put in camps. The result was not comparable, but the pretext was similar.
In Rwanda, the horrific slaughter was a response to an invasion by Tutsi forces from neighboring Uganda and the assassination of the country’s president. The context was invasion and civil war.
The Cambodian slaughter was certainly not the fault of “national sovereignty”. Indeed, it was precisely the direct result of the U.S. violation of Cambodia’s national sovereignty. Years of secret U.S. bombing of the Cambodian countryside, followed by a U.S.-engineered overthrow of the Cambodian government, opened the way for takeover of that country by embittered Khmer Rouge fighters who took out their resentment against the devastation of rural areas on the hapless urban population, considered accomplices of their enemies. The Khmer Rouge slaughters took place after the United States had been defeated in Indochina by the Vietnamese. When, after being provoked by armed incursions, the Vietnamese intervened to overthrow the Khmer Rouge, they were condemned in the United Nations by the United States for doing so.
Some of the bloodiest events do not make it to Ms. Kennedy’s “genocide” list. Missing is the killing of over half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 and 1966. But the dictator responsible, Suharto, was “a friend of the United States” and the victims were communists.
But while ignoring over half a million murdered Indonesians, she includes Bosnia on her list. In that case, the highest estimate of victims was 8,000, all men of military age. Indeed, the NATO-linked International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) has ruled that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was “genocide”. To arrive at this verdict, despite the fact that the alleged perpetrators spared women and children, the ICTY found a sociologist who claimed that since the Muslim community of Srebrenica was a patriarchy, murdering the menfolk amounted to “genocide” in a single town, since the women would not return without the men. This far-fetched judgment was necessary to preserve “Bosnia” as Exhibit A in the case for NATO military intervention.
It is generally overlooked that Srebrenica was a garrison town where the Muslim men in 1995 were not all natives of that originally multi-ethnic town and had been carrying out attacks on surrounding Serb villages. Nor have Western media given much attention to the testimony by Srebrenica Muslim leaders of having heard the Islamist party leader, Alija Izetbegovic, confide that President Clinton had said that a massacre of at least 5,000 Muslims was needed to bring the “international community” into the Bosnian civil war on the side of the Muslims. Those Muslim leaders believe that Izetbegovic deliberately left Srebrenica undefended in order to set up a massacre by vengeful Serbs.
Whether or not that story is true, it points to a serious danger of adopting the R2P principle. Izetbegovic was the leader of a party which wanted to defeat his enemies with outside military aid. The world is rife with such leaders of ethnic, religious or political factions. If they know that “the world’s only superpower” may come to their aid once they can accuse the existing government of “slaughtering its own people”, they are highly motivated to provoke that government into committing the required slaughter.
A number of former U.N. peacekeepers have testified that Muslim forces in Bosnia carried out the infamous “Marketplace bombings” against Sarajevo civilians in order to blame their Serb enemies and gain international support.
How could they do such a horrid thing? Well, if a country’s leader can be willing to “massacre his own people”, why couldn’t the leader of a rebel group allow some of “his own people” to be massacred, in order to take power? Especially, by the way, if he is paid handsomely by some outside power – Qatar for instance – to provoke an uprising.
A principal danger of the R2P doctrine is that it encourages rebel factions to provoke repression, or to claim persecution, solely to bring in foreign forces on their behalf. It is certain that anti-Gaddafi militants grossly exaggerated Gaddafi’s threat to Benghazi in order to provoke the 2011 French-led NATO war against Libya. The war in Mali is a direct result of the brutal overthrow of Gaddafi, who was a major force for African stability.
R2P serves primarily to create a public opinion willing to accept U.S. and NATO intervention in other countries. It is not meant to allow the Russians or the Chinese to intervene, say, to protect housemaids in Saudi Arabia from being beheaded, much less to allow Cuban forces to shut down Guantanamo and end U.S. violations of human rights – on Cuban territory.
U.S. intervention does not have a track record of “protecting” people. In December 1992, a Marine battalion landed in Somalia in “Operation Restore Hope”. Hope was not restored, Marines were massacred by the locals and were chased out within four months. It is easier to imagine an effective intervention where none has been attempted – for instance in Rwanda – than to carry it out in the real world.
For all its military power, the United States is unable to make over the world to its liking. It has failed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The 1999 “Kosovo war” is claimed as a success – only by studiously ignoring what has been going on in the province since it was wrested from Serbia by NATO and handed over to Washington’s ethnic Albanian clients. The “success” in Libya is publicly unraveling much faster.
Like all the R2P advocates, Ms. Kennedy exhorts us “never again” to allow a Holocaust. In reality there has “never again” been another Holocaust. History produces unique events which defy all our expectations.
But what, people ask me, if something that dreadful did happen? Should the world just stand by and watch?
What is meant by “the world”? The Western ideological construct assumes that the world should care about human rights, but that only the West really does. That assumption is creating a deepening gap between the West and the rest of the world, which does not see things that way. To most of the real world, the West is seen as a cause of humanitarian disasters, not the cure.
Libya marked a turning point, when the NATO powers used the R2P doctrine not to protect people from being bombed by their own air force (the idea behind the “no fly zone” UN resolution), but to bomb the country themselves in order to enable rebels to kill the leader and destroy the regime. That convinced the Russians and Chinese, if they had had any doubts, that “R2P” is a fake, used to advance a project of world domination.
And they are not alone and isolated. The West is isolating itself in its own powerful propaganda bubble. Much, perhaps most of the world sees Western intervention as motivated by economic self-interest, or by the interests of Israel. The sense of being threatened by U.S. power incites other countries to build up their own military defenses and to repress opposition militants who might serve as excuses for outside intervention.
By crying “genocide” when there is no genocide, the U.S. is crying wolf and losing credibility. It is destroying the trust and unity that would be needed to mobilize international humanitarian action in case of genuine need.
DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
A shorter version of this article appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on January 25.
==============================
Stop NATO e-mail list home page with archives and search engine:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
Stop NATO website and articles:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.co
To subscribe for individual e-mails or the daily digest, unsubscribe, and otherwise change subscription status:
stopnato-subscribe@yahoogroups
==============================
Sat Feb 2, 2013 6:45 am (PST) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://blog.gmfus.org/2013/02/
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
February 1, 2013
NATO’s Second Annual Report: Defense Matters!
Mark R. Jacobson*
====
NATO has demonstrated the ability to react on short-notice with airpower in Libya and addressed Alliance concerns about Syria through the deployment of Patriot missile batteries to Turkey
NATO members must deal with the economic realities at home and the need to ensure that alliance capacity remains relevant. But they must also address the third ring — a ring that extends past Europe and into Africa and Asia. The NATO Alliance remains transatlantic at its core, but it must recognize that its solidarity requires a more global perspective.
====
On Thursday morning, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen released NATO’s Second Annual Report. His presentation was not simply an overview of the past year’s defense priorities and capabilities, but also an opportunity to candidly address the challenges facing the Alliance.
Arguably, over the past several years, NATO has conducted missions that even ardent advocates would not have predicted possible a decade ago. NATO has adapted tactically and operationally in Afghanistan and, significantly, is still on schedule to transition to a train and assist mission at the end of 2014. Likewise, NATO has demonstrated the ability to react on short-notice with airpower in Libya and addressed Alliance concerns about Syria through the deployment of Patriot missile batteries to Turkey. Admittedly, the record is not perfect, and the blemishes of a 28-nation political-military Alliance will challenge efforts from time to time.
As NATO moves forward, however, it will have to consider how to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable international environment. Not only must NATO remain engaged and capable, but must do so with increasing effectiveness and, of course, efficiency. Rasmussen, as well as Supreme Allied Commander, Admiral James Stavridis, has led the charge to shore up NATO’s competitive advantages and focus on “smart” approaches to using limited resources. The new Strategic Concept, guidance for NATO Forces 2020, and initiatives to re-energize the NATO Response Force has each helped set the stage for this evolution, but NATO must now execute. The challenge, however, is that only a few NATO members have met the 2 percent of GDP defence spending requested by the Alliance, while the United States continues to hold the lion’s share of the financial burden. NATO members must provide the spending needed to bridge gaps and correct current and potential imbalances in
Alliance capacity. NATO’s versatility, effectiveness, and credibility are at stake if this principal inequity is not corrected.
Equally important is the conceptual shift that must take place throughout the Alliance. NATO faces a range of new and emerging threats — cyber security, proliferation, terrorism, and regional instability — certainly not those envisioned by the Washington Treaty in 1949. Budget austerity, however, cannot be an excuse for failing to live up to the obligations required for collective security. As Secretary Rasmussen made clear, these threats “will not go away as we focus on fixing our economies.”
I was told years ago of a NATO Secretary General who once chided diplomats complaining about NATO having too much to handle at one time by telling them, “if you can’t handle three rings, what are you doing in the circus.” NATO must learn to handle the three rings, militarily and politically. In this case, NATO members must deal with the economic realities at home and the need to ensure that alliance capacity remains relevant. But they must also address the third ring — a ring that extends past Europe and into Africa and Asia. The NATO Alliance remains transatlantic at its core, but it must recognize that its solidarity requires a more global perspective.
*Mark R. Jacobson is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a Senior Advisor to the Truman National Security Project. He was previously the Deputy NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan and, as a military reservist, deployed to NATO missions in Bosnia (1996) and Afghanistan (2006).
==============================
Stop NATO e-mail list home page with archives and search engine:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
Stop NATO website and articles:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.co
To subscribe for individual e-mails or the daily digest, unsubscribe, and otherwise change subscription status:
stopnato-subscribe@yahoogroups
==============================
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
February 1, 2013
NATO’s Second Annual Report: Defense Matters!
Mark R. Jacobson*
====
NATO has demonstrated the ability to react on short-notice with airpower in Libya and addressed Alliance concerns about Syria through the deployment of Patriot missile batteries to Turkey
NATO members must deal with the economic realities at home and the need to ensure that alliance capacity remains relevant. But they must also address the third ring — a ring that extends past Europe and into Africa and Asia. The NATO Alliance remains transatlantic at its core, but it must recognize that its solidarity requires a more global perspective.
====
On Thursday morning, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen released NATO’s Second Annual Report. His presentation was not simply an overview of the past year’s defense priorities and capabilities, but also an opportunity to candidly address the challenges facing the Alliance.
Arguably, over the past several years, NATO has conducted missions that even ardent advocates would not have predicted possible a decade ago. NATO has adapted tactically and operationally in Afghanistan and, significantly, is still on schedule to transition to a train and assist mission at the end of 2014. Likewise, NATO has demonstrated the ability to react on short-notice with airpower in Libya and addressed Alliance concerns about Syria through the deployment of Patriot missile batteries to Turkey. Admittedly, the record is not perfect, and the blemishes of a 28-nation political-military Alliance will challenge efforts from time to time.
As NATO moves forward, however, it will have to consider how to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable international environment. Not only must NATO remain engaged and capable, but must do so with increasing effectiveness and, of course, efficiency. Rasmussen, as well as Supreme Allied Commander, Admiral James Stavridis, has led the charge to shore up NATO’s competitive advantages and focus on “smart” approaches to using limited resources. The new Strategic Concept, guidance for NATO Forces 2020, and initiatives to re-energize the NATO Response Force has each helped set the stage for this evolution, but NATO must now execute. The challenge, however, is that only a few NATO members have met the 2 percent of GDP defence spending requested by the Alliance, while the United States continues to hold the lion’s share of the financial burden. NATO members must provide the spending needed to bridge gaps and correct current and potential imbalances in
Alliance capacity. NATO’s versatility, effectiveness, and credibility are at stake if this principal inequity is not corrected.
Equally important is the conceptual shift that must take place throughout the Alliance. NATO faces a range of new and emerging threats — cyber security, proliferation, terrorism, and regional instability — certainly not those envisioned by the Washington Treaty in 1949. Budget austerity, however, cannot be an excuse for failing to live up to the obligations required for collective security. As Secretary Rasmussen made clear, these threats “will not go away as we focus on fixing our economies.”
I was told years ago of a NATO Secretary General who once chided diplomats complaining about NATO having too much to handle at one time by telling them, “if you can’t handle three rings, what are you doing in the circus.” NATO must learn to handle the three rings, militarily and politically. In this case, NATO members must deal with the economic realities at home and the need to ensure that alliance capacity remains relevant. But they must also address the third ring — a ring that extends past Europe and into Africa and Asia. The NATO Alliance remains transatlantic at its core, but it must recognize that its solidarity requires a more global perspective.
*Mark R. Jacobson is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a Senior Advisor to the Truman National Security Project. He was previously the Deputy NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan and, as a military reservist, deployed to NATO missions in Bosnia (1996) and Afghanistan (2006).
==============================
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Sat Feb 2, 2013 7:13 am (PST) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://www.itar-tass.com/en/
Itar-Tass
February 2, 2013
Moscow calls on West not to impose outside values on peoples of Middle East, Africa
====
“If we consider the most unstable regions – the Middle East, Northern Africa, the Sahel zone, it is complicated to ignore a feeling of some curved space. Does support for change of regimes justify terror methods? Is it possible to be fighting in one situation against those who you support in another one?”
“The objective of the removal of Bashar al-Assad is the only reason of the tragedy which continues in Syria. All discussions about interpretation of the Geneva Communique are not serious, there is nothing to be interpreted here, everything is absolutely clear.”
====
MUNICH: Moscow calls on the West not to impose any values scale to peoples of the Middle East and Africa, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a conference on security in Munich on Saturday.
“We all aspire for stability and conditions for sustainable development in the Middle East and in Africa, we want the peoples of countries there to be able to move towards the democracy and well-being, to have guaranteed human rights, smooth supplies of hydrocarbons and other vital resources,” he said.
“If those are our joint objectives, then, we may agree on transparent and clear rules, which should be used by all players in their practical actions,” Lavrov said. “Agree that we all will be supporting the democratic reforms of the changing countries, but not to impose an outside value scale, acknowledging the variety of development models.”
“Should agree that we shall be supporting the peaceful settlement of the inner state conflicts and the stopping of violence via conditions for an inclusive dialogue with involvement of all national political groups,” Lavrov continued. “Should agree that we shall refrain from outside interference, especially by force, without a clear mandate from the UN Security Council and from any unilateral sanctions. That we should continuously and firmly fight extremism and terrorism in all forms, should demand the observation of rights for ethnic and confessional minorities.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asked his foreign counterparts if it is possible to be fighting in one situation against those who you support in another one.
“If we consider the most unstable regions – the Middle East, Northern Africa, the Sahel zone, it is complicated to ignore a feeling of some curved space,” Lavrov said during the Munich conference on Saturday. “Approaches of our Western counterparts cause many questions.”
“Does support for change of regimes justify terror methods? Is it possible to be fighting in one situation against those who you support in another one?” he asked the foreign ministers participating in the conference.
“How to make sure the weapons you supply to a conflict zone are not directed against yourself? Which governor is legitimate, and which not? When is it possible to cooperate with authority regimes both civil, and not that much civil, and when is it possible to support their overthrow by force?”
Lavrov continued. “Which are the cases where it is necessary to accept forces elected during democratic polls, and in what cases should one refuse from contacting those? What are criteria and standards to make considerations about all this?”
These are the questions, he said, “answers to which should be found jointly, especially regarding final objectives for the efforts to settle crises in countries of the Euro-Atlantic region, which have more uniting aspects rather than discrepancies.”
If all participants in the Syria Action Group fulfilled the Geneva Communique, the war in Syria would have stopped, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the 49th Munich Conference on Security on Saturday.
“But for this, it is necessary to fulfill honestly what has been agreed upon and not to extract or add anything,” he said.
For that purpose Moscow “has been suggesting a new meeting of the Action Group.”
Russia is against organisation of a humanitarian air corridor in Syria, as it considers as unacceptable any use of force, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday.
“We can remember perfectly well what happened to the UN Security Council’s resolution on Libya,” he said. “A humanitarian corridor is possible in an armistice only.”
“The objective of the removal of Bashar al-Assad is the only reason of the tragedy which continues in Syria,” Lavrov said. “All discussions about interpretation of the Geneva Communique are not serious, there is nothing to be interpreted here, everything is absolutely clear.”
Itar-Tass
February 2, 2013
Moscow calls on West not to impose outside values on peoples of Middle East, Africa
====
“If we consider the most unstable regions – the Middle East, Northern Africa, the Sahel zone, it is complicated to ignore a feeling of some curved space. Does support for change of regimes justify terror methods? Is it possible to be fighting in one situation against those who you support in another one?”
“The objective of the removal of Bashar al-Assad is the only reason of the tragedy which continues in Syria. All discussions about interpretation of the Geneva Communique are not serious, there is nothing to be interpreted here, everything is absolutely clear.”
====
MUNICH: Moscow calls on the West not to impose any values scale to peoples of the Middle East and Africa, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a conference on security in Munich on Saturday.
“We all aspire for stability and conditions for sustainable development in the Middle East and in Africa, we want the peoples of countries there to be able to move towards the democracy and well-being, to have guaranteed human rights, smooth supplies of hydrocarbons and other vital resources,” he said.
“If those are our joint objectives, then, we may agree on transparent and clear rules, which should be used by all players in their practical actions,” Lavrov said. “Agree that we all will be supporting the democratic reforms of the changing countries, but not to impose an outside value scale, acknowledging the variety of development models.”
“Should agree that we shall be supporting the peaceful settlement of the inner state conflicts and the stopping of violence via conditions for an inclusive dialogue with involvement of all national political groups,” Lavrov continued. “Should agree that we shall refrain from outside interference, especially by force, without a clear mandate from the UN Security Council and from any unilateral sanctions. That we should continuously and firmly fight extremism and terrorism in all forms, should demand the observation of rights for ethnic and confessional minorities.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asked his foreign counterparts if it is possible to be fighting in one situation against those who you support in another one.
“If we consider the most unstable regions – the Middle East, Northern Africa, the Sahel zone, it is complicated to ignore a feeling of some curved space,” Lavrov said during the Munich conference on Saturday. “Approaches of our Western counterparts cause many questions.”
“Does support for change of regimes justify terror methods? Is it possible to be fighting in one situation against those who you support in another one?” he asked the foreign ministers participating in the conference.
“How to make sure the weapons you supply to a conflict zone are not directed against yourself? Which governor is legitimate, and which not? When is it possible to cooperate with authority regimes both civil, and not that much civil, and when is it possible to support their overthrow by force?”
Lavrov continued. “Which are the cases where it is necessary to accept forces elected during democratic polls, and in what cases should one refuse from contacting those? What are criteria and standards to make considerations about all this?”
These are the questions, he said, “answers to which should be found jointly, especially regarding final objectives for the efforts to settle crises in countries of the Euro-Atlantic region, which have more uniting aspects rather than discrepancies.”
If all participants in the Syria Action Group fulfilled the Geneva Communique, the war in Syria would have stopped, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the 49th Munich Conference on Security on Saturday.
“But for this, it is necessary to fulfill honestly what has been agreed upon and not to extract or add anything,” he said.
For that purpose Moscow “has been suggesting a new meeting of the Action Group.”
Russia is against organisation of a humanitarian air corridor in Syria, as it considers as unacceptable any use of force, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday.
“We can remember perfectly well what happened to the UN Security Council’s resolution on Libya,” he said. “A humanitarian corridor is possible in an armistice only.”
“The objective of the removal of Bashar al-Assad is the only reason of the tragedy which continues in Syria,” Lavrov said. “All discussions about interpretation of the Geneva Communique are not serious, there is nothing to be interpreted here, everything is absolutely clear.”
