{"id":72812,"date":"2016-05-02T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=72812"},"modified":"2016-04-29T16:14:14","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T15:14:14","slug":"why-nato-has-become-one-of-the-most-destructive-forces-on-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/why-nato-has-become-one-of-the-most-destructive-forces-on-the-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Why NATO Has Become One of the Most Destructive Forces on the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actions in Afghanistan, Europe, and Libya have created insecurity rather than order. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>

Photo Credit: David Axe\/Flickr Creative Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Apr 2016 – <\/em>In May 2012, in the warm Chicago sunshine, I sat with journalist Jim Foley who had just returned from Syria. Jim and I had come for a large demonstration against a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). War reporting in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria had not been easy on Jim, who was an easy-going man. \u201cYou can\u2019t get what the Afghan people really think,\u201d he said, when you travel with US troops and rely upon a US-military translator. Nearby sat a group of Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans who had planned to return their medals to their commanders. Jim had a great deal to say about warmongers, the merchants of war. NATO\u2019s advocates were among them. They had come to celebrate their war on Libya. Meanwhile, in Libya, the devastation had spilled social toxicity across its landscape. This mattered little to NATO\u2019s bureaucrats.<\/p>\n

Jim would later return to Syria, where ISIL took him prisoner. Sadly, two years later, Jim would be the first American to be beheaded by ISIL on camera. He was another victim of a senseless war. At the NATO protest in 2012, one protestor carried a sign, \u201cI can\u2019t believe we still have to protest this shit.\u201d I remember pointing that sign out to Jim. One more war, more civilians dead, more chaos produced, less security for all.<\/p>\n

European Divides<\/strong><\/p>\n

President Barack Obama went around Europe this week with two apparent purposes: to urge the United Kingdom not to sever its ties to the European Union and to plead with European countries to increase their military spending. European unity, Obama argued, was a force for good. NATO would only be able to function if Europe remained united and if it spent more on military goods. \u201cI\u2019ll be honest,\u201d Obama said, \u201csometimes Europe has been complacent about its own defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Europe is rife with political conflict. Southern European economies continue to splutter along on fumes. The defeat of the Grexit (Greece\u2019s departure from the Euro) is temporary. When the pain of austerity rises once again, the politics of exit from Europe will return. In Spain, there is no government as the conservatives refuse to give up power to the anti-austerity bloc in parliament. The \u201crefugee crisis\u201d continues to rattle European societies, where an anti-refugee bloc has made gains at the ballot box. Austria is the latest test, where the far right anti-refugee party and the Green Party displaced the establishment parties in the presidential elections; it is the right and the Greens that will go for a run-off. It is this polarity between the Far Right and the Left that has broken the \u201ccentrist\u201d consensus of European politics.<\/p>\n

The politics of departure from the European project oscillate from the Right to the Left. It is the Right that sees \u201cEurope\u201d as the Trojan Horse for unbridled immigration, while it is the Left that sees \u201cEurope\u201d as the instrument of the Bankers. Britain\u2019s departure\u2014Brexit\u2014is framed by the Right\u2019s anti-immigration stance, while Greece\u2019s departure\u2014 Grexit\u2014developed out of the anti-austerity spirit. Even if Britain votes to stay in the European Union, bilious ideas about immigrants will not be defeated. They will fester. The anti-austerity bloc in Britain\u2014the Scottish National Party and sections of the Labour Party\u2014wants the country to remain in the European Union. It is prevented from making the case against Europe because of the strong anti-immigrant sentiment of that side of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s case for Europe is rhetorically about immigrants and refugees\u2014although Obama\u2019s own country has been tepid in its welcome to refugees from conflicts in North Africa and West Asia. A united Europe, Obama argues, is necessary for world security\u2014that is the why European unity is important, and why a strong NATO is essential.<\/p>\n

Security<\/strong><\/p>\n

The question of refugees and security are not separate. NATO\u2019s last major campaign\u2014the war in Libya\u2014destabilized the country and delivered it to human smugglers. It has become a major staging post for the refugee transit across the Mediterranean Sea. Victims of wars that have often been egged on by NATO powers and victims of trade policies pushed by European countries now line up on the Libyan shores and in Turkey, waiting for entry into Europe. Their countries have been vanquished by war and poverty. If the \u201csecurity\u201d strategies of NATO have produced refugees, why should NATO be strengthened?<\/p>\n

Is NATO as essential to world security as Obama claims? NATO\u2019s recent adventures\u2014in Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and Libya\u2014have created insecurity rather than order.<\/p>\n

Afghanistan: When NATO entered the Afghan theatre in 2001, a decisive victory seemed imminent. Al-Qaeda fled the country and the Taliban fighters threw off their guns and went amongst the population. Elections followed and all seemed over. As the winter snows receded in 2002, the Taliban returned. Each spring they have come back, stronger and more determined to defeat their adversaries. This year has been no exception. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jean-Nicholas Marti, says that 2016 has already shown the highest number of civilian casualties\u2014thirty per cent higher than last year. Opium cultivation has grown, and Afghanistan now ranks as the second highest refugee exporter to Europe. A UN report on education and healthcare in Afghanistan shows that the condition is dire and getting worse. \u201cIn 2015 children increasingly struggled to access health and education services due to insecurity and conflict-related violence, further exacerbated by high levels of chronic poverty,\u201d says UNICEF chief Akhil Iyer. NATO has begun to gradually withdraw from Afghanistan, which is fated to return\u2014in some manner\u2014to Taliban rule.<\/p>\n

Eastern Europe: Perhaps NATO\u2019s most striking disaster has been its confident march eastwards. One of the deals conducts by the West and the Soviets that bears consideration is around the unification of Germany. The Soviets agreed to the unification if NATO promised to remain at the German border. NATO was not to threaten Soviet security. That agreement was broken sharply. NATO began to absorb eastern European states and to pledge economic benefits for integration into the military alliance. A weak Russia in the 1990s did little to complain. It watched as NATO bombed the Balkans in 1999\u2014in a war that was public relations coup for Europe, which suppressed its own role in stoking Croatian and Slovenian secessionism to dissolve Yugoslavia (as the European Union\u2019s Badinter Commission had promised in 1991). Missile Defense shields and membership to the Baltic States poked Moscow\u2019s eye. The Ukraine conflict is a direct product of NATO\u2019s expansion eastwards. Now American F-22 raptors fly to Romania, while the USS Donald Cook slips into the Baltic Sea towards Russian waters. At a NATO meeting, the Russian ambassador Alexander Grushko described the Western provocations as \u201cattempts to exercise military pressure on Russia.\u201d Then, most chillingly, he said, \u201cWe will take all necessary measures, precautions, to compensate for these attempts to use military force.\u201d Rather than secure Eurasia from conflict, NATO has been an instrument for discord. Moscow\u2019s interests in its neighborhood are maligned in the Western press as the habits of empire, while Western requirements for NATO\u2019s intervention are seen in this media as acceptable.<\/p>\n

Libya: NATO dashed into the Libyan conflict with the imprimatur of a United Nations resolution (1973). It far exceeded its mandate \u2013 to protect civilians\u2014by going for regime change. It later refused to allow any international investigation\u2014even by the UN\u2014of its bombing in Libya. NATO was happy to bomb on a UN mandate, but would not permit any UN oversight. Libya\u2019s state was destroyed by the bombing run, creating mayhem across North Africa. Al-Qaeda\u2019s growth in Algeria, Libya, Mali and Tunisia can be directly attributable to the NATO regime change operation and the promiscuity of Western and Gulf Arab intelligence, which allowed Libyan fighters to go and fight in Syria. Many of these fighters also returned as the core of Libya\u2019s branch of ISIS. What did NATO bring to Libya? Destruction and chaos.<\/p>\n

Obama asks European states to drain their social funding toward military spending. He wants NATO to be stronger \u2013 surely not because he believes that NATO can solve the pressing security challenges faced by Europe. NATO and conventional European militaries will not be able to tackle the problems of terrorism. Hasn\u2019t the example of Afghanistan and Libya shown that the West\u2019s attitude towards crises seems only to inflame them further? Perhaps Europe was not being complacent, but only rational.<\/p>\n

In a new collection in honor of Jim Foley\u2013Ghazals for Foley (Hinchas Press), the poet Mart\u00edn Espada remembers Jim\u2019s work teaching refugees in Massachusetts. Foley was a young man whose curiosity about war led him to its frontlines. But war was his enemy. He preferred people. His death became a weapon for the Obama administration. The lesson could have been for the United States to take in more Syrian refugees. That would have been a tribute to Jim Foley. Instead, the lesson taken by the US government was to expand its war on Syria (most recently with 250 additional special forces inside Syria). Espada writes,<\/p>\n

His face on the front page sold the newspapers in the checkout line.
\nHis executioners and his president spoke of him as if they knew him.<\/em><\/p>\n

The reporter with the camera asked me if I saw the video his killers
\nwanted us to see. I muttered through a cage of teeth:\u00a0No. I knew him.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once he was a tall boy from New Hampshire, standing in my doorway.
\nHe spoke Spanish. He wanted to teach. I knew him. I never knew him.<\/em><\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including <\/em>Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), <\/em>The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming\u00a0<\/em>The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 alternet.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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