Page 3 of 5 RUSSIA AND
THE NEW COLD WAR When
cowboys don't shoot straight By F William Engdahl
implement something called
Conplan 8022, "which provides the president a
prompt, global strike capability".
The
term Conplan is Pentagon shorthand for Contingency
Plan. What "contingencies" are Pentagon planners
preparing for? A preemptive conventional strike
against tiny North Korea or even Iran? Or a
full-force preemptive nuclear assault on the last
formidable nuclear power not
under the thumb of the United States'
full-spectrum dominance - Russia?
The two
words "global strike" are also notable. It's
Pentagon-speak to describe a specific preemptive
attack that, for the first time since the earliest
Cold War days, includes a nuclear option, counter
to the traditional US military notion of nuclear
weapons being only used in defense to deter
attack.
Conplan 8022, as has been noted by
some, is unlike traditional Pentagon war plans
that have in essence been defensive responses to
invasion or attack.
In concert with the
aggressive preemptive 2002 Bush Doctrine, Bush's
new Conplan 8022 is offensive. It could be
triggered by the mere "perception" of an imminent
threat, and carried out by presidential order,
without Congress.
Given the details about
false or faked "perceptions" in the Pentagon and
the Office of the Vice President about Iraq's
threat of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the
new Conplan 8022 suggests a US president might
order the missiles against any and every perceived
threat or even a potential, unproved threat.
In response to Rumsfeld's June 2004 order,
General Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, signed the order to make Conplan
8022 operational. Selected nuclear-capable
bombers, land- and sea-based missiles, and
"information warfare" units have been deployed
against unnamed high-value targets in "adversary"
countries.
Was Iran an adversary country,
even though it had never directly attacked the
United States? Was North Korea, even though it had
never in five decades launched a direct attack on
South Korea, let alone on any one else? Is China
an "adversary" because it's simply becoming
economically too influential?
Is Russia
now an adversary because it refuses to lie back
and accept being made what Zbigniew Brzezinski
termed a "vassal state of the American Empire"?
Because there has been zero open debate
inside the United States about Conplan 8022, there
has been virtually no discussion of any of these
potentially nuclear-loaded questions.
What
makes the June 2004 Rumsfeld order even more
unsettling to a world that truly had hoped nuclear
mushroom clouds had become a threat of the past is
that Conplan 8022 contains a significant
nuclear-attack component.
It's true that
the overall number of nuclear weapons in the US
military stockpile has been declining since the
end of the Cold War. But this is not, it seems,
because the US is moving the world back from the
brink of nuclear war by miscalculation.
The new missile-defense expansion to
Poland and Czech Republic is better understood in
the context of the remarkable expansion of NATO
since 1991. As Putin noted, "NATO has put its
frontline forces on our borders ... think it is
obvious that NATO expansion does not have any
relation with the modernization of the alliance
itself or with ensuring security in Europe.
"On the contrary, it represents a serious
provocation that reduces the level of mutual
trust. And we have the right to ask: Against whom
is this expansion intended? And what happened to
the assurances our Western partners made after the
dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?"
US
bases encircle Russia As Russian
strategist and military expert Yevgeny Primakov, a
close adviser to Putin, recently noted, NATO was
"founded during the Cold War era as a regional
organization to ensure the security of US allies
in Europe". He added, "NATO today is acting on the
basis of an entirely different philosophy and
doctrine, moving outside the European continent
and conducting military operations far beyond its
bounds. NATO ... is rapidly expanding in
contravention to earlier accords. The admission of
new members to NATO is leading to the expansion of
bases that host the US military, air-defense
systems, as well as ABM components.
Today,
NATO member states include not only the Cold War
core in Western Europe, commanded by an American.
NATO also includes the former Warsaw Pact or
Soviet states of Poland, Latvia, the Czech
Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria,
Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, formerly of
Yugoslavia. Candidates to join include the
Republic of Georgia, Croatia, Albania and
Macedonia.
Ukrainian President Victor
Yushchenko has tried aggressively to bring his
country into NATO. This is a clear message to
Moscow, not surprisingly one it doesn't seem to
welcome with open arms.
New NATO
structures have also been formed while old ones
were abolished: the NATO Response Force was
launched at the 2002 Prague Summit. In 2003, just
after the fall of Baghdad, a major restructuring
of the NATO military commands began.
The
Headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander,
Atlantic was abolished. A new command, Allied
Command Transformation (ACT), was established in
Norfolk, Virginia. ACT is responsible for driving
the "transformation" of NATO.
By 2007
Washington had signed an agreement with Japan to
cooperate on missile-defense development. It was
deeply engaged in testing a missile-defense system
with Israel. It has now extended its European
missile defense to Poland, where the minister of
defense is a close friend and ally of Pentagon
neo-conservative war-hawks, and to the Czech
Republic. NATO has agreed to put the question of
Ukraine's and Georgia's bids for membership on a
fast track. The Middle East, despite the debacle
in Iraq, is being militarized with a permanent
network of US bases from Qatar to Iraq and beyond.
On February 15, the US House of
Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved
a draft, the Orwellian-named NATO Freedom
Consolidation Act of 2007, reaffirming US backing
for the further enlargement of NATO, including
support for Ukraine joining along with Georgia.
From the Russian point of view, NATO's
eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War
has been in clear breach of an agreement between
then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and then-US
president George H W Bush that allowed for a
peaceful unification of Germany. NATO's expansion
policy is seen as a continuation of a Cold War
attempt to surround and isolate Russia.
New bases to guard
'democracy'? An almost unnoticed
consequence of Washington's policy since the
bombing of Serbia in 1999 has been establishment
of an extraordinary network of new US military
bases, bases in parts of the world where they seem
little justified as a US defensive precaution,
given the threat and huge taxpayer expense, let
alone other global military commitments.
In June 1999, after the bombing of Serbia,
US forces began construction of Camp Bondsteel, at
the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was
the linchpin in what was to be a new global
network of US bases. Bondsteel put US air power
within easy striking distance of the oil-rich
Middle East and Caspian Sea, as well as Russia.
Camp Bondsteel was at the time the largest
US military base built since the Vietnam War,
garrisoned with nearly 7,000 troops. The base had
been built by the largest US military construction
company, Halliburton's KBR. Halliburton's chief
executive officer at the time was Dick Cheney.
Before the start of the NATO bombing in
1999, the Washington Post matter-of-factly noted,
"With the Middle East increasingly
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