THE
ROVING EYE NATO, the ultimate
transformer By Pepe Escobar
To follow Pepe's articles on the Great
Arab Revolt, please click here.
Forget about the Hollywood
Transformer franchise; as facts on the
ground go, the ultimate transformer in real life
is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
NATO has just admitted it was "probably"
responsible for the humanitarian liberation of
nine Libyan civilians, plus 18 injured, via an
early morning strike against an apartment building
in a densely populated Tripoli neighborhood.
Liberating Northern Africans in their
sleep under tons of debris
now adds to NATO's - and the
Pentagon's - routine liberation of Pashtun wedding
parties.
Forget about the Ministry of
Truth-style non-denial denials enveloped in
newspeak of the "weapons system failure" or "great
care in conducting strikes" variety. Or don't - as
the war on Libya, under the newspeak moniker
Operation Unified Protector, slouches towards its
fourth month and over 4,300 "humanitarian"
strikes.
After all, NATO's wars - now
already spanning the Pentagon-coined "arc of
instability" from Northern Africa though the
Middle East towards Central Asia - are as much
against "unsavory" regimes (as in "not our
bastards") as against civilians.
One
model army In the dizzying labyrinth of
NATO's Ministry of Truth - which includes schemes
such as Partnership for Peace, Istanbul
Cooperation Initiative, Mediterranean Dialogue, to
name but a few - one now finds virtually every
certified or aspiring member of the Gulf
Counter-Revolution Club (also known as GCC, the
Gulf Cooperation Council), as well as monarchic
minions Jordan and Morocco. These paragons of
democracy are all involved in liberating the
wretched of the world for "humanitarian" reasons.
Unctuous Danish opportunist and NATO
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is on
overdrive across Europe. He has just boasted that,
"NATO is more needed and wanted than ever, from
Afghanistan to Kosovo, from the coast of Somalia
to Libya. We are busier than ever before."
This enthusiastic, across-the-board
embrace of Atlanticist weaponry though is still
not enough for US Defense Secretary Robert Gates -
for whom NATO is not lethal, or overreaching,
enough. Considering that NATO is no more than the
weaponized European arm of the Pentagon, that was
a classic case of once again Martian Americans
deriding wimpy Venusian Europeans.
Yet the
most sinister Rasmussen utterance was that, "we
can help the Arab Spring well and truly blossom".
That is code for never-ending bombing of Libya,
fierce lobbying for a "humanitarian" intervention
in Syria, and, why not, weaponized "humanitarian
liberation" slouching towards Algeria and even
Lebanon.
As for Egypt and Tunisia,
Rasmussen has already stated NATO wants to
re-train their military establishments - an
operation modeled on the ongoing retraining in
Iraq. The Transformer's tentacles are ubiquitous.
The war on Libya started as the Pentagon's
Africom first African war - remember Odyssey Dawn?
- and then merged into NATO's first Mediterranean
and also first African war. NATO's overt agenda is
to rule the Mediterranean - Ancient Rome's mare
nostrum - as a NATO lake.
That
explains the current Pentagon/NATO Sea Breeze 2011
naval exercise in the Black Sea, off the coast of
Ukraine and quite close to the Sebastopol-based
Russian Black Sea fleet.
The Pentagon is
being joined by the United Kingdom, Azerbaijan,
Algeria, Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Germany,
Macedonia, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.
All of these - except Algeria and Moldova - fall
into another NATO scheme; they are Troop
Contributing Nations for NATO's war in
Afghanistan.
Sea breeze is not a pop song;
it is an overt intimidation directly related to
Syria. Russia's Black Sea fleet has a base in
Syria - that is, in the Mediterranean. The
Pentagon/NATO want it gone. Thus the categorical
imperative of regime change in Syria.
So
Libya is just the beginning. Russian ambassador to
NATO Dmitri Rogozin has been quick to point out,
"the war in Libya means ... the beginning of
[NATO's] expansion south."
Transformer
NATO - the global Robocop - is on a roll, from
Southeastern Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean;
from the Persian Gulf to South and Central Asia.
All hail the One Model Army. As for civilians in
the wrong place at the wrong time, duck for cover.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
