Weissman writes: "NATO and its implicit ties to the European Union (EU) have
come to pose an unexpected threat to the United States, and nowhere more
dramatically than in Bill and Hillary Clinton's interventions in the Balkans
and Ukraine and her non-ending push for military action, especially in
Libya."
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her husband former president
Bill Clinton wait to go on stage at the Story County Democratic Picnic in
Ames, Iowa, November 15, 2015. (photo: Melina Mara/WP)
Bill and Hillary's Interventions Raise New Doubts About NATO
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
15 March 16
Many Americans see the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as our ultimate
line of defense. Some view it as an American puppet. Both takes need serious
rethinking. NATO and its implicit ties to the European Union (EU) have come
to pose an unexpected threat to the United States, and nowhere more
dramatically than in Bill and Hillary Clinton's interventions in the Balkans
and Ukraine and her non-ending push for military action, especially in
Libya.
"I know the United States has taken some actions against terrorists inside
Libya, particularly ISIS training camps," Hillary told CNN on February 23,
"and I support that."
These actions are open and covert preparations for an allied war in Libya,
as I reported last week, drawing on French media. Hillary may not have known
the full story when she talked to CNN. But given her experience, contacts,
and leading role in promoting the first Libyan war, she certainly knows
what's coming.
NATO's place in all this has been less clear, reflecting how far the
alliance has evolved. At the start in 1949, its first secretary general,
Lord Ismay, famously quipped that its purpose was to "keep the Germans down,
the Russians out, and the Americans in." The fall of the Berlin Wall four
decades later, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the epic transition
from the Common Market to the European Union have made the uses of NATO more
complex, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous. The resulting
rat's nest will cause grief no matter who becomes the next US president.
German chancellor Helmut Kohl and President George H.W. Bush opened the door
to danger when they hoodwinked Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the
Soviet Union, into believing that they would not expand NATO to the east.
Bill Clinton then led NATO to bring in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. This
put the world's most powerful military alliance right on Russia's doorstep,
feeding a real, if historically overblown, sense of victimhood that Vladimir
Putin puts at the heart of his national narrative.
"The policy of containment was not invented yesterday," he declared in his
State of the Nation speech at the end of 2014. "It has been carried out
against our country for many years, always, for decades, if not centuries.
In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or
independent, these tools are quickly put to use."
Without question, the proximity of a nuclear-armed NATO has provoked Russia
to respond. But Putin has chosen the responses to make, whether preaching an
increasingly right-wing Christian nationalism, "the historical reunification
of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia," massing his troops and little green
men to back armed conflict in Ukraine, making nuclear threats, or funding
Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie here in France and reportedly the
right-wing, anti-immigrant AfD in Germany.
NATO's expansion has also encouraged Eastern European nations - even those
not formally members of the alliance, such as Georgia - to bait the Russian
bear, foolishly expecting the United States and its allies will come to
their aid.
The Balkan Express
Besides pushing NATO beyond its original theater of operations, presidents
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton joined with Germany to redefine NATO's
mission, most dramatically in the former Yugoslavia. As early as 1992, NATO
began playing a small role in conjunction with United Nations peacekeepers
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Clinton then pushed for a massive intervention
after the July 1995 massacre in the village of Srebrenica, in which Bosnian
Serbs rounded up and killed some 8,000 Muslims.
If ever a massive blood-letting cried out for international intervention,
Srebrenica seemed the perfect case. But, as so often happens in supposedly
humanitarian acts of war, Bill Clinton and his top foreign policy advisers
had a much larger agenda and a truly imperial vision.
Richard Holbrooke, a one-time managing director of Lehman Brothers who
became ambassador to Germany and assistant secretary of state, saw an
expanded NATO as central to preserving American leadership throughout a
stable, unified Europe, which would embrace democracy, Western values, and
"free-market economies." Chancellor Kohl, French president Mitterrand, and
their allies were just creating a newly strengthened European Union, and
would - with the Clinton administration's encouragement - turn it into a
bastion of neo-liberal economics.
Strobe Talbott, Clinton's deputy secretary of state, saw an expanded NATO
primarily in terms of exercising hegemony over a weakened and pliable
Russia. Now president of the Brookings Institution, he remains a friend and
advisor to the Clintons.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand old man of the Democratic foreign policy
establishment, saw a much bigger goal in the control of Eurasia and its vast
oil and gas reserves. "NATO entrenches American political influence and
military power on the Eurasian mainland," he wrote in The Grand Chessboard.
"A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and
longer-term interests of U.S. policy."
Only a few savvy outsiders saw at the time the vast scope of these
ambitions, which extended beyond Western Europe, beyond the EU, beyond
Russia, and into the regions once controlled by the Ottoman Turks. In
pushing NATO into Bosnia, the Clinton administration was looking to make the
United States "the leader of an informal collection of Muslim nations from
the Persian Gulf to the Balkans," wrote Jacob Heilbrun and Michael Lind in
The New York Times in January 1996. "The disintegration of the Soviet Union
has prompted the United States to expand its zone of military hegemony into
Eastern Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And ?
most important of all ? the end of the Cold war has permitted America to
deepen its involvement in the Middle East."
Far more than any humanitarian concerns, these imperial ambitions led
Washington to push NATO airstrikes against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999,
which even the normally reluctant Congressman Bernie Sanders voted to
support. The Clinton administration then sent Col. Robert Helvey, of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, to train 20 militants from the Serbian student
group OTPOR in the techniques of strategic nonviolence to undermine the
authority of the Serbian leader Slobadan Milosevich, "the Butcher of the
Balkans." Supplied by the United States and backed by NATO, OTPOR overthrew
Milosevich and created the pattern for the color revolutions that George W.
Bush and Barack Obama would use primarily against pro-Russian governments on
the edges of the former Soviet Union.
You can read the story at length in "How Washington Learned to Love
Nonviolence," which I wrote in 2009. But events moved on. As Obama's
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton presided over the National Endowment for
Democracy, Foggy Bottom's own "democracy bureaucracy," and outside
contractors like Freedom House to create a second Orange Revolution against
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. You can find this documented in "Meet
the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev," Part I and Part II.
Hillary and Bill even played a personal role in the run-up to the coup
against Yanukovych, speaking at an oligarch-sponsored conference in
Ukrainian Crimea in September 2013.
The role of the Clintons dramatizes two key historical realities. Many
progressives tend to whitewash the Democratic Party by blaming the coup on
Republican neocons. Their best evidence is the hands-on role played by
Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state, the wife of Robert
Kagan, one of the neocon founders. But Hillary was Nuland's long-time boss
and mentor, and she exemplifies her party's long tradition of liberal
intervention. Kagan has now turned against the Republicans and endorsed
Hillary for president. A historian by trade, he has also been calling
himself a liberal interventionist.
Second, where Nuland gained fame for saying "Fuck the EU," Hillary
characteristically used Washington's coup-making machinery to serve European
ambitions to bring Ukraine into the EU - not into NATO, at least not at the
time. Obama made this clear in a roundabout way in the April edition of
Atlantic Monthly - and in scathing terms.
"There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time
about what it is worth going to war for and what is not," he told journalist
Jeffrey Goldberg. "Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim
that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern
Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it."
What neither the foreign policy realist Obama nor the more interventionist
Hillary Clinton has ever made clear is how it was in America's interest to
make a coup in Kiev to help the EU expand to include a conflict-riven and
extremely corrupt Ukraine.
Sarkozy's War
A bigger problem arose over Hillary's first war in Libya. And, once again,
it was never quite the humanitarian venture that both she and Obama made it
out to be.
As I reported much too cautiously in April 2011, the story began the
previous Autumn, when Nuri Mesmari, Gadhafi's chief of protocol and one of
his closest confidants, came to Paris and began meeting regularly with
French intelligence officials. On at least one occasion, at the Hotel
Concorde Lafayette on November 16, he reportedly had a long session with
close collaborators of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Shortly after,
French soldiers disguised as businessmen travelled to Benghazi to meet
secretly with Col. Abdallah Gehani, a Libyan Air Force officer whom Mesmari
had identified as about to turn against Gadhafi. On January 22, Gadhafi's
security forces arrested Gehani, but the rebellion was already under way,
breaking out on February 17, initially as a peaceful protest, but
increasingly with armed force.
Much of what I reported has since been confirmed in Hillary's secret emails
and Exit Gaddafi, a book by Ethan Chorin, a former US diplomat. Sarkozy and
his government were in touch with the rebels well before the philosopher and
journalist Bernard Henri Levy ever warned of an imminent massacre of
civilians in Benghazi ? and months before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
met in Paris on March 14, 2011, with the Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud
Jibril and gave him her seal of approval.
Some of the story still remains a mystery. On February 25, for example, the
too-well-connected Israeli news service Debkafile reported that the night
before French, British, and US military advisers landed in the region,
dispatched from warships and missile boats off the coastal towns of Benghazi
and Tobruk. Was this Israeli-inspired propaganda? Or was the US militarily
involved before Hillary gave her go-ahead?
Whatever Washington's start date, the bigger question is why Clinton and
Obama went along with Sarkozy's war, knowing as her emails state that French
companies had been guaranteed the lion's share of Libya gas and oil.
Hillary's answer comes through all too clearly in the two-part New York
Times special on her leading role in yet another war of choice that "ran
aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions
and a staggering quantity of arms."
The defining moment, and one that shows the danger that NATO and our
European allies now pose, came on March 19, when the wily Sarkozy met in
Paris with British prime minister David Cameron and Secretary Clinton.
French jets were already in the air, he told them. "I will recall them if
you want me to." Hillary was not prepared to object. "I'm not going to
recall the planes and create the massacre in Benghazi," she grumbled to an
aide. And that was how Sarkozy blackmailed the world's most powerful nation
into a war that served no American interest other than making nice with
untrustworthy allies.
________________________________________
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly
Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a
magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France,
where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How
Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently
Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her husband former president
Bill Clinton wait to go on stage at the Story County Democratic Picnic in
Ames, Iowa, November 15, 2015. (photo: Melina Mara/WP)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
Bill and Hillary's Interventions Raise New Doubts About NATO
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
15 March 16
any Americans see the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as our ultimate
line of defense. Some view it as an American puppet. Both takes need serious
rethinking. NATO and its implicit ties to the European Union (EU) have come
to pose an unexpected threat to the United States, and nowhere more
dramatically than in Bill and Hillary Clinton's interventions in the Balkans
and Ukraine and her non-ending push for military action, especially in
Libya.
"I know the United States has taken some actions against terrorists inside
Libya, particularly ISIS training camps," Hillary told CNN on February 23,
"and I support that."
These actions are open and covert preparations for an allied war in Libya,
as I reported last week, drawing on French media. Hillary may not have known
the full story when she talked to CNN. But given her experience, contacts,
and leading role in promoting the first Libyan war, she certainly knows
what's coming.
NATO's place in all this has been less clear, reflecting how far the
alliance has evolved. At the start in 1949, its first secretary general,
Lord Ismay, famously quipped that its purpose was to "keep the Germans down,
the Russians out, and the Americans in." The fall of the Berlin Wall four
decades later, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the epic transition
from the Common Market to the European Union have made the uses of NATO more
complex, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous. The resulting
rat's nest will cause grief no matter who becomes the next US president.
German chancellor Helmut Kohl and President George H.W. Bush opened the door
to danger when they hoodwinked Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the
Soviet Union, into believing that they would not expand NATO to the east.
Bill Clinton then led NATO to bring in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. This
put the world's most powerful military alliance right on Russia's doorstep,
feeding a real, if historically overblown, sense of victimhood that Vladimir
Putin puts at the heart of his national narrative.
"The policy of containment was not invented yesterday," he declared in his
State of the Nation speech at the end of 2014. "It has been carried out
against our country for many years, always, for decades, if not centuries.
In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or
independent, these tools are quickly put to use."
Without question, the proximity of a nuclear-armed NATO has provoked Russia
to respond. But Putin has chosen the responses to make, whether preaching an
increasingly right-wing Christian nationalism, "the historical reunification
of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia," massing his troops and little green
men to back armed conflict in Ukraine, making nuclear threats, or funding
Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie here in France and reportedly the
right-wing, anti-immigrant AfD in Germany.
NATO's expansion has also encouraged Eastern European nations - even those
not formally members of the alliance, such as Georgia - to bait the Russian
bear, foolishly expecting the United States and its allies will come to
their aid.
The Balkan Express
Besides pushing NATO beyond its original theater of operations, presidents
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton joined with Germany to redefine NATO's
mission, most dramatically in the former Yugoslavia. As early as 1992, NATO
began playing a small role in conjunction with United Nations peacekeepers
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Clinton then pushed for a massive intervention
after the July 1995 massacre in the village of Srebrenica, in which Bosnian
Serbs rounded up and killed some 8,000 Muslims.
If ever a massive blood-letting cried out for international intervention,
Srebrenica seemed the perfect case. But, as so often happens in supposedly
humanitarian acts of war, Bill Clinton and his top foreign policy advisers
had a much larger agenda and a truly imperial vision.
Richard Holbrooke, a one-time managing director of Lehman Brothers who
became ambassador to Germany and assistant secretary of state, saw an
expanded NATO as central to preserving American leadership throughout a
stable, unified Europe, which would embrace democracy, Western values, and
"free-market economies." Chancellor Kohl, French president Mitterrand, and
their allies were just creating a newly strengthened European Union, and
would - with the Clinton administration's encouragement - turn it into a
bastion of neo-liberal economics.
Strobe Talbott, Clinton's deputy secretary of state, saw an expanded NATO
primarily in terms of exercising hegemony over a weakened and pliable
Russia. Now president of the Brookings Institution, he remains a friend and
advisor to the Clintons.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand old man of the Democratic foreign policy
establishment, saw a much bigger goal in the control of Eurasia and its vast
oil and gas reserves. "NATO entrenches American political influence and
military power on the Eurasian mainland," he wrote in The Grand Chessboard.
"A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and
longer-term interests of U.S. policy."
Only a few savvy outsiders saw at the time the vast scope of these
ambitions, which extended beyond Western Europe, beyond the EU, beyond
Russia, and into the regions once controlled by the Ottoman Turks. In
pushing NATO into Bosnia, the Clinton administration was looking to make the
United States "the leader of an informal collection of Muslim nations from
the Persian Gulf to the Balkans," wrote Jacob Heilbrun and Michael Lind in
The New York Times in January 1996. "The disintegration of the Soviet Union
has prompted the United States to expand its zone of military hegemony into
Eastern Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And ?
most important of all ? the end of the Cold war has permitted America to
deepen its involvement in the Middle East."
Far more than any humanitarian concerns, these imperial ambitions led
Washington to push NATO airstrikes against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999,
which even the normally reluctant Congressman Bernie Sanders voted to
support. The Clinton administration then sent Col. Robert Helvey, of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, to train 20 militants from the Serbian student
group OTPOR in the techniques of strategic nonviolence to undermine the
authority of the Serbian leader Slobadan Milosevich, "the Butcher of the
Balkans." Supplied by the United States and backed by NATO, OTPOR overthrew
Milosevich and created the pattern for the color revolutions that George W.
Bush and Barack Obama would use primarily against pro-Russian governments on
the edges of the former Soviet Union.
You can read the story at length in "How Washington Learned to Love
Nonviolence," which I wrote in 2009. But events moved on. As Obama's
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton presided over the National Endowment for
Democracy, Foggy Bottom's own "democracy bureaucracy," and outside
contractors like Freedom House to create a second Orange Revolution against
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. You can find this documented in "Meet
the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev," Part I and Part II.
Hillary and Bill even played a personal role in the run-up to the coup
against Yanukovych, speaking at an oligarch-sponsored conference in
Ukrainian Crimea in September 2013.
The role of the Clintons dramatizes two key historical realities. Many
progressives tend to whitewash the Democratic Party by blaming the coup on
Republican neocons. Their best evidence is the hands-on role played by
Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state, the wife of Robert
Kagan, one of the neocon founders. But Hillary was Nuland's long-time boss
and mentor, and she exemplifies her party's long tradition of liberal
intervention. Kagan has now turned against the Republicans and endorsed
Hillary for president. A historian by trade, he has also been calling
himself a liberal interventionist.
Second, where Nuland gained fame for saying "Fuck the EU," Hillary
characteristically used Washington's coup-making machinery to serve European
ambitions to bring Ukraine into the EU - not into NATO, at least not at the
time. Obama made this clear in a roundabout way in the April edition of
Atlantic Monthly - and in scathing terms.
"There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time
about what it is worth going to war for and what is not," he told journalist
Jeffrey Goldberg. "Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim
that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern
Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it."
What neither the foreign policy realist Obama nor the more interventionist
Hillary Clinton has ever made clear is how it was in America's interest to
make a coup in Kiev to help the EU expand to include a conflict-riven and
extremely corrupt Ukraine.
Sarkozy's War
A bigger problem arose over Hillary's first war in Libya. And, once again,
it was never quite the humanitarian venture that both she and Obama made it
out to be.
As I reported much too cautiously in April 2011, the story began the
previous Autumn, when Nuri Mesmari, Gadhafi's chief of protocol and one of
his closest confidants, came to Paris and began meeting regularly with
French intelligence officials. On at least one occasion, at the Hotel
Concorde Lafayette on November 16, he reportedly had a long session with
close collaborators of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Shortly after,
French soldiers disguised as businessmen travelled to Benghazi to meet
secretly with Col. Abdallah Gehani, a Libyan Air Force officer whom Mesmari
had identified as about to turn against Gadhafi. On January 22, Gadhafi's
security forces arrested Gehani, but the rebellion was already under way,
breaking out on February 17, initially as a peaceful protest, but
increasingly with armed force.
Much of what I reported has since been confirmed in Hillary's secret emails
and Exit Gaddafi, a book by Ethan Chorin, a former US diplomat. Sarkozy and
his government were in touch with the rebels well before the philosopher and
journalist Bernard Henri Levy ever warned of an imminent massacre of
civilians in Benghazi ? and months before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
met in Paris on March 14, 2011, with the Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud
Jibril and gave him her seal of approval.
Some of the story still remains a mystery. On February 25, for example, the
too-well-connected Israeli news service Debkafile reported that the night
before French, British, and US military advisers landed in the region,
dispatched from warships and missile boats off the coastal towns of Benghazi
and Tobruk. Was this Israeli-inspired propaganda? Or was the US militarily
involved before Hillary gave her go-ahead?
Whatever Washington's start date, the bigger question is why Clinton and
Obama went along with Sarkozy's war, knowing as her emails state that French
companies had been guaranteed the lion's share of Libya gas and oil.
Hillary's answer comes through all too clearly in the two-part New York
Times special on her leading role in yet another war of choice that "ran
aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions
and a staggering quantity of arms."
The defining moment, and one that shows the danger that NATO and our
European allies now pose, came on March 19, when the wily Sarkozy met in
Paris with British prime minister David Cameron and Secretary Clinton.
French jets were already in the air, he told them. "I will recall them if
you want me to." Hillary was not prepared to object. "I'm not going to
recall the planes and create the massacre in Benghazi," she grumbled to an
aide. And that was how Sarkozy blackmailed the world's most powerful nation
into a war that served no American interest other than making nice with
untrustworthy allies.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly
Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a
magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France,
where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How
Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently
Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
