By Rick Rozoff
Recent statements by the defense ministers of Germany and Canada reveal that the globally-oriented Western military consortium that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization plans not only to continue but broaden the wars and military occupations it has conducted over the past twenty years.
The bloc's primus inter pares -- in fact its ringleader -- the United States, has with its Alliance partners spent the past generation at war almost with respite: The first war with Iraq in 1991, bombing campaigns and large-scale troop deployments in the Balkans (Bosnia in 1994-1995, Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999 and Macedonia in 2001), Afghanistan for the past decade (with military deployments to Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as part of the larger war theater), Iraq again from 2003 onward, the Horn of Africa (bases in and operations from Djibouti for attacks inside Somalia and Yemen and the maintenance of navy war groups in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden), airlift operations in western Sudan and Uganda, and the current 108-day air assault against Libya.
But, to borrow the title of a volume by French historian and novelist Zoé Oldenbourg, the world is not enough. Or, at the very least, nothing short of the entire world is sufficient to slake the ambitions of the world's only military bloc.
In May the German government announced that while cutting the number of troops in the Bundeswehr overall it was increasing the number assigned to foreign missions from 7,000 to 10,000. ("Simultaneously.") Berlin and its NATO allies cannot even pretend that their armed forces are necessary for defense of their respective homelands; they are completing the transformation from conscript or mixed conscript-volunteer forces to strictly professional (NATO's term and requirement) expeditionary armies.
Informative article here
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