John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Desperate for Reason to Exist, NATO Installs Itself in Latin America
“The US military colony of Colombia is now a "global partner" of NATO, spooking Bolivia and Venezuela”
"Desperate for Reason to Exist, NATO..."
But NATO very much does have a reason to exist.
It’s a relatively new one, and it's just that it is an embarrassing one to discuss it openly.
The reason for NATO today is to serve making all America's wars and incursions have the appearance of being multi-lateral and international in character.
America’s general, openly-expressed contempt for the United Nations and undermining of it and other international organizations help create this need for a kind of geopolitical fig leaf. Bombing just seems so much more humane and proper with a couple of French and English and German planes accompanying America’s fleets.
We do very much live in an era of constant deception in constant wars. We see flimsy excuses, slogans, dark operations, and dishonest claims almost constantly now with America’s new hyper-aggression across many lands.
So why not add this pretense of international unity? It serves the same purpose as the dark-ops and false claims in covering America’s bloody trail across the planet, effectively hiding it or making it seem less than it is and giving it a sense of international cause. Of course, it isn’t international at all, it is all about American dominance.
A small contingent of European troops here and there serves the purpose of making the headlines read "NATO bombing" instead of "American bombing." It is entirely deceptive, but deception, along with bombing, is what America does these days. The European governments involved are not deceived, they are weak-willed and quietly intimidated.
America does not hesitate to use suggestions or threats with its financial and economic power behind the scenes to “convince” allies. We see this practice embarrassingly out in the open with votes at the United Nations and in other compromised international organizations and agencies. We’ve seen it in the unfortunate Dutch JIT investigation of the crash of MH-17 or in all the maneuvering around the coup-installed government of Ukraine and its many embarrassing failures.
In recent years, there have been many examples which make this point about the new purpose of NATO.
Perhaps, the strongest example was in Afghanistan. America had an army and air force there for years and was carrying on with the most brutal tactics imaginable, detailed in an essay I’ve given a reference for below (of course, it still is behaving like this, killing civilians daily, but that’s another story).
NATO countries were all pressed to "contribute" to this mighty and worthy cause.
In fact, most of them sent token forces - groups like 500 or 800 or 1,000 troops - and many of the troops served in non-combat roles such as policing or cooking or other housekeeping duties.
The small forces implicitly gave the lie to American claims of a terrible threat to the world - were the threat of Afghanistan even remotely what America claimed, we can be sure that France and Germany and others would have displayed a far more robust response. But token forces just being there still served the America's generation of press releases and stories reading, "NATO does this or that."
Readers may enjoy this background on America's pointless war in Afghanistan:
https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/americas-brutal-tactics/
https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/sorry-mr-prime-minister-afghanistan-is-not-our-war/
https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/a-response-to-hillary-clintons-assertion-that-all-nations-should-play-a-part-in-the-afghanistan-mission/
