Text Fwd:[Rick Rozoff] Asia: Pentagon Revives And Expands Cold War Military Blocs [릭 로조프] 미 국방부, 아시아에서 냉전 군사 블록을 재개하고 확장하다

* Rick Rozoff sent on Sept. 15, 2010

Stop NATO
September 14, 2010

Asia: Pentagon Revives And Expands Cold War Military Blocs
Rick Rozoff

The year before the Korean War began the United States established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Western and Southern Europe to contain and confront the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. NATO opened the door for the Pentagon to maintain, expand and upgrade, and gain access to new, military bases in Europe from Britain to Turkey, Italy to Norway, West Germany to Greece.

During the Korean War and after its end in 1953 (with Greece and Turkey having been absorbed into NATO), the U.S. replicated the NATO model to varying degrees throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

The Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty was set up in 1951 as troops from all three nations were fighting in Korea. Australian and New Zealand troops would also fight under American command in the Vietnam War under ANZUS obligations.

In 1954 the U.S. and fellow NATO founders Britain and France created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) with Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand as members and South Korea and South Vietnam as Dialogue Partners.

With U.S. encouragement and support, the next year Britain oversaw the creation of the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), also known as the Baghdad Pact Organization, which included Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan. In 1958 the METO/Baghdad Pact supported the U.S.'s deployment of 14,000 troops to Lebanon under the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine.

After the anti-monarchical revolution in Iraq of the preceding year led to that nation leaving the bloc in 1959, METO was renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO): There could be no Baghdad Pact without Baghdad itself where its headquarters had been. (Half a century later the Iraqi capital is home to United States Forces – Iraq headquarters.)

METO/CENTO, like SEATO before it, was modeled after NATO and served the same purpose as the original: To encircle the Soviet Union and its allies and, in the first-named instance, allow the Pentagon to penetrate the USSR's southern flank as NATO did its extended western one. CENTO was dissolved in 1979 after the revolution in Iran and the withdrawal of that country.

All Asia-Pacific SEATO members and partners except for Pakistan - Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and South Vietnam - provided the U.S. with troops for the war in Vietnam, but Pakistan withdrew in 1973 because SEATO hadn't supported it in its 1971 war with India. France followed suit in 1975 and SEATO was disbanded two years later, three years after the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement formalized by Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972.

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* Some Excerpts

_The U.S. is using a 21st century expeditionary - a global - NATO as its meta-military bloc.

_During the last month and a half alone U.S. troops and warships have participated in military exercises in and off the shores of Cambodia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Vietnam and Nepal.

The U.S. is currently conducting the large-scale, 10-day Valiant Shield exercises on and near Guam, the new hub for the Pentagon's operations in the Asia-Pacific region, with an aircraft carrier, amphibious ships and an Air Force expeditionary wing. On September 1 a Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle was flown from California to the Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.

The Pentagon is planning a $278 million program to expand interceptor missile testing on the Hawaiian island of Kauai for ship-based Standard Missile-3 (and
soon land-based versions of the same in the Baltic and Black Seas regions) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missiles. Washington's strategy for a layered, global missile shield system already includes the participation of Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific area, with India soon to be included.