Text Fwd: Afghanistan: [Rick Rozoff] Global NATO's First Ground War In Its Tenth Year

Rick Rozoff sent on Oct. 11, 2010

Rick Rozoff blog
Stop NATO
October 10, 2010
Afghanistan: Global NATO's First Ground War In Its Tenth Year

The military alliance that 61 years ago identified its core mission as to "promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area" is now embroiled in the tenth year of a war in Afghanistan launched by its dominant member, the United States.

South Asia is as far removed from the North Atlantic Ocean as possible while remaining in the Northern Hemisphere.

After "promoting stability and well-being" in the Balkans in the last decade by conducting a three-week bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) in 1995 and a 78-day air war against Yugoslavia four years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Macedonia in 2001 and shortly thereafter invoked its founding treaty's Article 5 - "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and...each of them...will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith...such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force" - on September 12, 2001.

In doing so NATO signed on for participation in Washington's so-called Global War on Terror, last year renamed Overseas Contingency Operations and perhaps to be called something else tomorrow as pretexts change.

As a consequence and demand alike of doing so, the North Atlantic Alliance deployed military forces to the first major military base the Pentagon has secured in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and on October 4, 2001 launched Operation Active Endeavour to patrol the entire Mediterranean Sea from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal and the Dardanelles Strait, ostensibly to - in NATO's own words - "help detect, deter and protect against terrorist activity" and especially to "combat...the proliferation and smuggling of weapons of mass destruction." The terrorism-weapons of mass destruction link was an obedient reflection of Washington's rhetoric at the time, though the second half of the combination has been shifted away from Iraq toward Iran as the 2003 invasion of the first failed to locate any weapons of mass destruction as well as connections to al-Qaeda.

No vessel enters or leaves the Mediterranean except under NATO surveillance. The Alliance's ships have hailed over 100,000 commercial vessels and boarded an admitted 155 or more. "Since April 2003, NATO has been systematically boarding suspect ships....[M]erchant ships passing through the Eastern Mediterranean are hailed by patrolling NATO naval units and asked to identify themselves and their activity. This information is then reported to both NATO’s Allied Maritime Component Commander in Naples, Italy, and the NATO Shipping Centre in Northwood, England." [1]

Without a mandate from the United Nations or attempt to obtain one and no justification under international law, the U.S.-dominated military bloc arrogates to itself the right to stop, board (peaceably or otherwise) and search any ship in the Mediterranean and in theory to seize its cargo and detain its crew, even to impound the ship itself. What is tantamount to a blockade of the entire sea if not what if perpetrated by a non-state actor would be condemned as piracy on the high seas.

NATO's Active Endeavour is now in its tenth year and there is no indication that it will ever end, even though not a single terrorist has been apprehended or a weapon of mass destruction confiscated. When an Israeli German-made Dolphin submarine, assumed to carry missiles with nuclear warheads - the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - crossed from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea in June of 2009, NATO made no attempt to interdict it.

The Mediterranean Sea has become NATO's mare nostrum.

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