The party continues for ‘NATO’…..an alliance for ‘peace,’ against enemies…always enemies..always threatening no matter how crippled, tin-pottish, uninterested..
NATO – Still Mission-Creeping At 60
We’re at the sixtieth anniversary of NATO. This weekend there’s a ceremony in Strasbourg and Kehl, the latter being the German town facing Strasbourg on the east side of the Rhine. Sarkozy of France and Merkel of Germany meet and embrace, in symbolic affirmation of Unity Restored, after divisive conflicts now buried in the mists of time. I’m not sure what theatrical events have been planned to symbolize this celebration of Gallo-Teutonic warmth, perhaps some flotilla on the mighty Rhine itself, with Sarko as a latterday Mark Anthony and Merkel as the Cleo, perhaps some performance piece about Mars casting aside the instruments of war and entering the bower of Venus to enjoy the pleasures of peace. NATO’s impresarios could review a rather comical “Mars and Venus” I saw the other day, by the Dutch painter Cornelis Cornelisz, now in the excellent Norton Simon museum in Pasadena. Mars, lookinga bit like Sarko with a mustache, has taken off his helmet, tunic and trousers and is standing nervously with no clothes on, while while a rather suburban Venus, also en deshabille, lounges back on a plump cushion having her toenails trimmed.
To give vibrancy to the event Sarkozy has just formally brought France back into NATO’s “integrated command”. Charles de Gaulle, a leader who looks better and better with every passing decade, took France out of this same integrated command back in 1966 as a rebuke to American domination of the alliance. There were plaintive howls from NATO’s bureaucratic establishment at redeployment from chic Paris to dreary Brussels. No doubt there’ll soon be an institutional shift back to Paris by NATO personnel, wearied of Belgian beer, moules frites and waterzooi.
There are gale-force gusts of bombast about the NATO Alliance’s historic role as Europe’s mighty shield and buckler, guarantor of its freedoms against “aggression”, thus perpetuating sixty years of humbug. There was never the slightest chance of the Soviet Union and its auxiliaries in the Warsaw Pact moving rolling west in the prospective onslaught luridly evoked by Winston Churchill in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March, 1949. Churchill gestured to the specter of the “Mongol hordes” that had menaced Europe 700 years before, only heading home when the Great Khan died. “They never returned,” rumbled the old faker, “until now.”
Having borne almost the entire burden on the Eastern front of crushing Hitler’s armies and having suffered appalling casualties in so doing, the Soviet Union was in no condition to invade western Europe. As Jordan Marsh points out, “one of the best-kept secrets of the cold war is that Nato was founded in 1949 to protect Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact, which was founded in 1954. There never was a threat of Russian invasion. Stalin had entirely too much on his plate to think about such madness. But Nato had to be established to enable the arming of West Germany without upsetting the French and to provide a market for the US Military Industrial Complex. The biggest Russian threat was Stalin’s 1949 “Peace Initiative”, which would have included a united, unarmed, neutral German state. No market for the MIC. No threat to France, Eastern Europe, or Russia.”
This didn’t impede mad Western scenarios of the sort that threat-inflators routinely issued down the decades until the very moment the Soviet Union collapsed, and even then there were hold-outs who maintained that the Russian bear was faking it, to throw the West off guard.
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he, suddenly, it was all over. NATO’s formal purpose evaporated. The Soviet Union collapsed. Without delay NATO burgeoned into exactly what its left detractors had always said its essential function had been from the very start, a US-dominated political and military alliance, aimed at encircling Russia,and acting as enforcer for larger US imperial strategy. NATO’s onslaughts on Serbia duly followed.
Timed for the anniversary NATO’s leaders are scheduled to proclaim a new “strategic concept” to define the organization’s mission for the 21st century, doubtless including its availability to battle global warming, latest in the long line of imaginary threats, conjured up to elicit larger budgets, more weapons, new “missions” launched from the ramparts of Western capital. In the short term the warcry raised last week by Obama, only a few days after the tenth anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, is: On to Kabul!
NATO doesn’t need a new mission. It needs to disappear into the trashcan of history along with the cold war that engendered it.
Alex Cockburn….from a portion of his diary.. in counterpunch.org dated April 3, 2009