Webster G. Tarpley | 16 Oct 2015
The Tax Wall Street Party deplores the churlish, disgraceful, and dishonorable behavior of many representatives of the US government which has been on such egregious display in the two weeks since Russia joined the bombing campaign against ISIS terrorists in Syria. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, in a temper tantrum, has pledged that he would never cooperate with Russian forces seeking to oppose the Syrian terrorist rebels. At the United Nations, Samantha Power has refused to take part in even the smallest gesture of condemning the shelling of the Russian Embassy in Damascus as a terrorist act — obviously for fear of offending the sensibilities of the al Qaeda and other forces now supported by the US. All of these excruciating moments derive from the fundamental crime of viewing President Assad as the enemy, and the forces of chaos and destruction as agents of democracy. Putin has now mocked this stubborn and infantile refusal to cooperate:
‘Mr. Putin was responding to widespread accusations in the West that Russian warplanes were targeting practically every group opposed to the Syrian government except the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He complained that while the Russian government had asked for the coordinates of the groups that should or should not be attacked, the United States had not responded to either request. “Recently, we have offered the Americans: ‘Give us objects that we shouldn’t target.’ Again, no answer,” Putin said,
“It seems to me that some of our partners have mush for brains.”’ [i]
The Tax Wall Street party has long called attention to the mush-head factor in American politics and culture. “Mush-head” is a key component of our descriptive sociology. The mush-heads, as distinct from the outright neocon warmongers, are often supporters of regime change, humanitarian bombing, and promises of democracy, which usually turn out as a descent into chaos.
The problem of mush-heads in modern America deserves sustained attention by sociologists, psychologists, historians. Putin has once again performed a public service by putting this issue squarely on the agenda.
Tarpley on PressTV – US Refuses to Condemn Terrorism Against Russia
WHY NATO MUST BE BROKEN UP
Some Americans might be surprised by the demand to break up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, commonly known as NATO. NATO originally described itself as a purely defensive alliance against the power of the Warsaw Pact, and limited to the North Atlantic area. The colonial possessions of the European powers were carefully excluded, because the United States was reluctant to be dragged into efforts to re-impose a colonial yoke after World War II. But then, in the 1980s, the refrain became “Out of area or out of business.” This has opened the door to the use of NATO as an enforcement mechanism for imperialism, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East. These forays outside of the North Atlantic area were originally called out of area deployments, and they have now become chronic.
CRIMES OF NATO
The permanent NATO bureaucracy in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium is the heart of the matter. General de Gaulle of France announced in 1966 that France was leaving the NATO command structure (although not the North Atlantic alliance) and that NATO was being kicked out of his country; the headquarters was moved to Belgium. In the wake of these events, it was noticed that, while countries like West Germany and Italy, which had many NATO bases, were constantly torn by domestic terrorism, France fared much better in that department. But President de Gaulle became the target of more than 30 assassination attempts, many of them organized through the NATO bureaucracy.
In 1977, the Italian Christian Democratic statesman Aldo Moro worked to form a coalition government of his own party with the reformist and thoroughly domesticated Italian Communist Party. The goal was to provide Italy with a stable majority and a stable government, so that necessary modernization measures could be carried out. In March 1977, Moro was kidnapped by the terrorist Red Brigades, and his police escort assassinated. This occurred shortly after Moro had reportedly received a threat from the Kissinger faction about his plan to form a coalition government, which certain US circles regarded as a violation of the Yalta spheres of influence and an attempt by Italy to break out of NATO discipline. Moro was found dead in downtown Rome a few months later. NATO discipline won the day.
Aldo Moro
In that same year of 1977, the German banker and chief of the Dresdner Bank Jürgen Ponto was assassinated by the Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Group. Ponto had defied Wall Street and the City of London on a number of issues, and was planning a campaign of European capital investment for the modernization of Third World countries, including Africa. The leader of the German big business association, Hans Martin Schleyer, was also killed, and a German airliner was hijacked and flown around the Middle East by terrorists. This was NATO’s German autumn.
In 1989, while the communist regimes of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania were in the process of collapsing, another German banker named Alfred Herrhausen, this time from Deutsche Bank, launched an ambitious plan for capital investments and infrastructure in Eastern Europe. This, once again, violated the de facto NATO ban on improving the economic conditions in the former Soviet sphere, which Wall Street and London wanted to use as a terrain for primitive accumulation. Herrhausen was assassinated in November 1989.
In July 2011, NATO was undertaking yet another out of area deployment, this time the bombing of Libya, with the destruction of its state apparatus and the beginning of a period of chaos and breakdown. A number of countries had joined in the bombing of Libya. One of these was Norway. In the early summer of 2011, the government in Oslo announced that Norway would soon stop its participation in the campaign against Libya. The government of the Netherlands then made known that it too would stop participation in the bombings. This meant that the number of air assets available to NATO for this work of destruction had shrunk considerably, perhaps by a third. On July 22, 2011, the Norwegian fascist crackpot Anders Breivik set off a bomb in the part of Oslo where the government buildings are located, and killed eight people. He then proceeded to an elite summer camp where he massacred 67 children of the leaders of the cabinet and the Labor Party who were vacationing there. This terrorist act, like so many earlier ones, was actually aimed at maintaining transatlantic NATO discipline.
In early January 2015, French President François Hollande stated on the France Inter radio network that the economic sanctions against Russia “must stop.” Within 48 hours, on January 7, 2015, gunmen attacked the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12, including many of the resident cartoonists. Some of the victims were members of, or were close to, the French political elite. NATO discipline was again reinforced, and Hollande went largely silent on the Russia sanctions issue. The Minsk II conference, which was supposed to take place in January, was pushed into February, thus prolonging the war against the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In August-September 2015, largely because of the overwhelming pressure on her country caused by the massive influx of refugees and displaced persons from Syria and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany began calling for cooperation with Putin’s Russia in an effort to put an end to the Syrian civil war, implying an end to NATO economic sanctions against Russia. Authoritative voices in Germany were also speaking out in favor of a normalization of relations with President Assad of Syria, and of cooperating with Assad to put down the insurrection and end the conflict. Then, on September 18, 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency accused the German carmaker Volkswagen of using special software to defeat tailpipe emissions tests. VW calculated the damage of this revelation in terms of billions of dollars in lost sales, thousands of jobs destroyed in Germany and abroad, and serious budget problems for cities like Wolfsburg, where the company has major plants. The issue became a crisis for Merkel’s government, quite possibly weakening her permanently. Transatlantic NATO discipline had once again been enforced.
BEWARE NATO DRILLS, THEY GO LIVE
As is known, military drills and exercises are one of the favorite vehicles for starting wars or carrying out terrorist activities, often by the simple device of taking the exercise live, or flipping the exercise live, as is sometimes said. NATO’s Hilex 1975 exercise was denounced in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel as a possible vehicle for actually starting a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, a threat that was neutralized by mass actions by interested citizens in a number of NATO countries around Christmas, 1975.
At the center of the East-West conflict in fall 1983 – The Soviet SS-20 missile.
Able Archer was a NATO exercise in the autumn of 1983, which realistically simulated a buildup of political and military tensions towards confrontation and possible nuclear war. This was the autumn of the shooting down of the Korean airliner over the Soviet Far East and the deployment of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe. The simulation was so effective that the Soviet government became convinced that Able Archer was no mere drill, but an actual sneak attack being carried out by NATO. The Soviets accordingly went to their own highest alert, while NATO advanced towards DEFCON 1.
Along with the Cuban missile crisis, and one or two other incidents, Able Archer is generally considered to have been one of the world’s closest approaches to all-out nuclear war.
For this autumn, NATO has announced TRIDENT JUNCTURE 2015, one of the biggest military exercises in many decades. A military-industrial trade publication offered the following overview of this drill:
‘36,000 NATO and partner-nation troops. 140 aircraft. 60 naval vessels. 30 nations. But who are they fighting? When planning began two years ago for NATO’s largest wargames since 2002, the imaginary adversary wasn’t Russia. Officially, it still isn’t. But since the seizure of Crimea, the alliance’s chief of “transformation” told reporters today, planners have added new challenges to the standard scenario that sound awfully relevant to the Russian threat, from ballistic missile defense to rapid deployment to hybrid war.
If the original message of the Trident Juncture 2015 exercises was “NATO can still go big,” the message of the modified Trident Juncture might be, “Hey, NATO can adapt.”
“We had to adapt the scenario [to] integrate all the main challenges we are facing now,” French Air Force Gen. Denis Mercier, Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation, said in a roundtable with reporters here this morning. Compared to 13 years ago, the world is changing at a faster past, he said: “The threats and surprises have accelerated, so we have to be sure that we are flexible enough to integrate in our exercises these new concepts and to speed up the processes of developing new ideas.”
According to NATO, the drill will include operations and forces in and from Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, Canada, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.’ [ii]
After Hilex 75 and Able Archer 83, will TRIDENT JUNCTURE 2015 become the chosen vehicle for a clique of militarists and neocon madmen in Brussels and NATO headquarters at Mons to finally drag the people of Europe and America into nuclear World War III? Let’s not wait to find out!
The Tax Wall Street Party calls on all persons of good will to mobilize to have Trident Juncture called off and cancelled. We must then dismantle the permanent NATO bureaucracy which has done so much to inflict terrorism and war on Europe and the US.
[ii] http://breakingdefense.com/2015/10/hey-putin-nato-can-adapt-trident-juncture-2015/
