(09-09-2023, 08:03 PM)Ninurta Wrote: I'm also not seeing how in the world NATO is an "existential threat" to Russia, whether on Russian borders or not. Why is NATO an "existential threat"? What has NATO done that threatens the existence of Russia? After all, threatening someone's very existence is an act of aggression, rather than an act of defense. Who is the aggressor? NATO or Russia? Which one is REALLY the "existential threat"?
Quote:From what I can see, a nuclear strike would not be "world ending", but it would definitely imperil the globalist's grip on the world, and create a hard reset. In the case of Russia, they need to figure out just how much MORE of their territory, population, and infrastructure they are willing to sacrifice just to make a point and hit "the west" with nukes. In the final analysis, I would say Russia has far more potential to be an "existential threat" to itself than NATO could ever have hoped to have been. All they gotta do is fuck around and find out.
Explanation: NATO is not a 'Defense' ONLY organization anymore OK!
Here is why ...
Operation Allied Force Lessons for the Future
Quote:On March 24, 1999, NATO forces initiated an air war against Serbia in an effort to put an end to the human rights abuses that were then being perpetrated against the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo. This bombing effort, code-named Operation Allied Force, ended 78 days later with the capitulation of Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, and the subsequent withdrawal of Serbian army and paramilitary forces from Kosovo. Yet despite its success in bringing about Milosevic's defeat, Operation Allied Force was a suboptimal use of air power to resolve a regional conflict. Although NATO's air offensive ultimately proved crucial to Milosevic's decision to submit to NATO's terms, a host of deficiencies—both strategic and operational—protracted the air effort and hampered its overall effectiveness.
NATO’s Bombing of Serbia: The Unpunished War Crime
Quote:[b]Act Two: The Phone Call[/b]
March 24, 1999. 9:20am. In the White House Situation Room, an aid places a phone call to the Kremlin, where Russian President Boris Yeltsin is waiting. The call goes through, and the aid hands the phone to Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. The conversation started off with a grimnotification: The leaders of NATO, including himself, Clinton said, “have decided we have to launch air strikes against military targets in Serbia soon.”
The problem, Clinton noted, was the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. “He has displaced 30,000 more people just since last Friday,” Clinton said. “He is killing innocent people. We have reports of summary executions.” Left unspoken was the role played by Kurtz and his fellow CIA operatives in creating the conditions for such actions. Clinton continued. “He [Milosevic] has basically told Russian, EU, and American negotiators that he doesn’t care what any of us think.”
Clinton was getting worked up by the consequences he had triggered by unleashing the CIA on Kosovo. “My God, they [the Europeans] have nightmares they’ll [the Serbs] repeat Bosnia and all the instability and all the problems, and it will spread from Kosovo to Macedonia to Albania and engulf all of their southern flank. They are very, very worried about it. They are right to be worried about it.”
Again, left unsaid was the fact that the very scenario that was giving the Europeans nightmares had been carefully crafted by the CIA, at Bill Clinton’s direction.
Yeltsin wasn’t buying any of it. “It is easy to throw bombs about,” he said, dismissing Clinton’s characterization of the problem and proffered solution. “It is intolerable because of the hundreds of thousands of people who will suffer and die.”
The consequences of any NATO strike, Yeltsin warned Clinton, were dire. “In the name of our future, in the name of you and me, in the name of the future of our countries, in the name of security in Europe, I ask you to renounce that strike, and I suggest that we should meet somewhere and develop a tactical line of fighting against Milosevic, against him personally. And we are wiser, we are more experienced, and we can come up with a solution. That should be done for the sake of our relationship. That should be done for the sake of peace in Europe.”
The Russian leader’s pleas fell on deaf ears. “Well, Boris,” Clinton replied, “I want to work with you to try and bring an end to this, but I don’t believe there is any way to call off the first round of strikes because Milosevic continues to displace thousands of people every day… I don’t want this to be a great source of a split between Russia and Europe and Russia and the US. We have worked too hard. There are too many economic and political things for us to do together, and I regret this more than I can say.”
The American president was outright lying to his Russian counterpart – the events in Kosovo were unfolding along the lines of a carefully scripted game plan that had been in motion for some time. War was inevitable because the US, through the CIA, had shaped the narrative to make it so. Worse, the US president was willing to sacrifice relations between the US and Russia in pursuit of this NATO objective. This fact was driven home by Yeltsin in his closing remarks.
“[O]ur people,” Yeltsin lamented, “will certainly from now on have a bad attitude with regard to America and NATO. I remember how difficult it was for me to try and turn heads of our people, the heads of politicians towards the West, towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that. Well, since I failed to convince the President, that means there is in store for us a very difficult, difficult road of contacts, if they prove to be possible. Goodbye.”
Quote:March 1999, several facts stick out. First is that Spain, as a member of the United Nations, is bound by its commitment to the Charter of that organization. When it comes to the use of force, the UN Charter is quite clear – there are only two acceptable conditions under which such force might be legitimately employed by a member state. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security, carried under the authority of a resolution passed by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter.
As Spanish bombs fell on Serbian soil, two things were quite clear – there was no Chapter VII resolution in existence which authorized an enforcement action against Serbia, and Serbia had committed no act of aggression against either Spain or its NATO allies that would justify any claim of self-defense in explaining the Spanish (and NATO) military assault on Serbia.
In short, by dropping bombs on Serbia, the Spanish Air Force was initiating an illegal war of aggression. “To initiate a war of aggression,”the judges who comprised the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremburg to judge the crimes of Nazi Germany, declared, “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulative evil of the whole.”
Spain wasn’t alone that night – aircraft from the air forces of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and other NATO members participated in this “supreme international crime.” Viewed individually, there is no doubt that each nation involved in the attack on Serbia violated the UN Charter and, as such, is guilty of the crime of initiating an illegal war of aggression.
Not so fast! NATO, it seems, had crafted a novel legal argument built around the notion that it had a right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it is, indeed, dominated by the United States, postulates that it is, indeed, such an organization, comprised as it is of “a number of powerful states, three of which are permanent members of the Security Council.”
The credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense,”however, arises from its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide which created not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity.
The problem for NATO is that its legal justification was built on a foundation of lies. The fiction that NATO is an organization not entirely dominated by the United States evaporates the moment one understands the role played by the CIA in preparing the script used by NATO to justify its actions. The fact that this script promulgated outright fabrications of alleged crimes perpetrated by Serbia to justify NATO military intervention only underscores the criminal nature of the entire NATO enterprise.
There is no escaping the fact that when the first bomb dropped by the Spanish Air Force on Serbia that evening 23 years ago to this date impacted on the ground, Spain and every other member of NATO had committed the “ultimate crime.”
That this crime remains unpunished is a travesty of international justice. That this crime remains unrecognized by those who perpetrated it is a testament to the hypocrisy of nations. That this crime set in motion the events that have led to the current state of affairs between the US and NATO on the one hand, and Russia on the other, is a global tragedy.
AND ...
Ten years after NATO intervention, Libya remains unstable
Quote:In 2011, the international community supported rebel forces against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But hopes of democracy and stability have yet to be fulfilled.
Eleven Years Ago: US-NATO Invasion of Libya and Its Consequences
Quote:The US-NATO invasion of Libya was not restricted to air raids. In the opening hours of the attack, American and British war ships and submarines fired scores of cruise missiles which, by 21 March 2011, had wiped out Gaddafi’s entire strategic air defence system along the Libyan coastline. US B-2 spirit bombers destroyed Libya’s largest airport, in the capital Tripoli, while Tornado aircraft launched Storm Shadow missiles at numerous strategic targets.
Gaddafi’s critical mistake “was to give up his nuclear weapons agenda”, as noted by prominent Indian historian Vijay Prashad (1). In a deal with the Western powers, Gaddafi had abandoned the enrichment of uranium for nuclear bombs, while sanctions were lifted on Libya. Various nations, including Iran and North Korea, informed Gaddafi that it was a serious error to weaken his defences and pursue overtly friendly relations with the West.
Quote:Through ostensibly outsourcing the war to NATO, Washington could deny accountability, and in the background apply the full measure of its economic and military power.
Quote:Gaddafi had ample warning of the imperialist states’ untrustworthy nature, and the brutal manner of their offensives. In the 1999 US-NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia’s third largest city, Niš, was struck with hundreds of “precision-guided” missiles, only 2% of which landed on military installations. Serbia as a whole was subjected to NATO cluster bomb attacks which killed women, children and the elderly. During the Kosovo War, the NATO list of civilian targets for their bombing of Yugoslavia, codenamed “Stage Three”, was published on the internet and completely ignored by the mass media.
Civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia earmarked for attack by NATO ranged from hospitals and schools, to museums and churches (25). Canada’s Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissell said, “It was common knowledge that NATO then went to Stage Three: Civilian targets. Otherwise they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places”.
Quote:The US-NATO invasion of Libya was not restricted to air raids. In the opening hours of the attack, American and British war ships and submarines fired scores of cruise missiles which, by 21 March 2011, had wiped out Gaddafi’s entire strategic air defence system along the Libyan coastline. US B-2 spirit bombers destroyed Libya’s largest airport, in the capital Tripoli, while Tornado aircraft launched Storm Shadow missiles at numerous strategic targets.
Gaddafi’s critical mistake “was to give up his nuclear weapons agenda”, as noted by prominent Indian historian Vijay Prashad (1). In a deal with the Western powers, Gaddafi had abandoned the enrichment of uranium for nuclear bombs, while sanctions were lifted on Libya. Various nations, including Iran and North Korea, informed Gaddafi that it was a serious error to weaken his defences and pursue overtly friendly relations with the West.
Quote:Through ostensibly outsourcing the war to NATO, Washington could deny accountability, and in the background apply the full measure of its economic and military power.
Quote:Gaddafi had ample warning of the imperialist states’ untrustworthy nature, and the brutal manner of their offensives. In the 1999 US-NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia’s third largest city, Niš, was struck with hundreds of “precision-guided” missiles, only 2% of which landed on military installations. Serbia as a whole was subjected to NATO cluster bomb attacks which killed women, children and the elderly. During the Kosovo War, the NATO list of civilian targets for their bombing of Yugoslavia, codenamed “Stage Three”, was published on the internet and completely ignored by the mass media.
Quote:Civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia earmarked for attack by NATO ranged from hospitals and schools of civilian targets for their bombing of Yugoslavia, codenamed “Stage Three”, was published on the internet and completely ignored by the mass media.
Civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia earmarked for attack by NATO ranged from hospitals and schools, to museums and churches (25). Canada’s Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissell said, “It was common knowledge that NATO then went to Stage Three: Civilian targets. Otherwise they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places”.
A key reason for the attack on Yugoslavia was that its president,[b] Slobodan Milosevic,[/b] had not been sufficiently obeying Washington’s orders, like Gaddafi after him. Canadian author Michael Ignatieff outlined that “the really decisive impulse” behind the invasion of Yugoslavia “was the need to impose NATO’s will on a leader [Milosevic] whose defiance, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, was undermining the credibility of American and European diplomacy and of NATO’s willpower”.
So NATO has a history of ATTACKING and not just defending, as it is claimed to just do OK!
Russia had great cause for concern when NATO creeped eastwards towards its very border by courting Ukraine.
Personal Disclosure: NATO fucked around and found out that Russia has its red line in the sand limits and woe betide those who ignore that eh.
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