President Obama wanted to showcase his adopted hometown of Chicago to the leaders of 60 NATO members and partnership countries. Instead, with his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel holding the political reins as mayor of Chicago, Obama showed the foreign heads of state and the international media a city in total police state lockdown.
Perhaps the fascist display of law enforcement brute force suppression of largely peaceful demonstrators and the preemptive arrest of protesters, who were hit with trumped up charges of “terrorism” prior to the start of the summit, were in keeping with NATO’s new mission: projecting to all parts of the globe a U.S.-centric military force that seeks to defend the financial elites and “new world order” from popular political change.
Why else would Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari be present at the “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization summit? Afghanistan and Pakistan are far from the North Atlantic. In effect, NATO, which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and Soviet Union, should have gone the way of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) into the ash heap of history, has become a “Global Treaty Organization.” The mission of this global “defense” organization has little to do with defense but is a modern-day offensive centurion force with the mission of protecting arcane empires that are collapsing faster than the Roman Empire.
Much has been written and spoken about NATO’s mission after the end of International Security Assistance Force military operations in Afghanistan in 2014. However, based on the rhetoric from U.S., British, and NATO officials, NATO will be a key component in enforcing the “Obama Doctrine,” which sees NATO as an enforcement arm for the imposition of pro-Western regimes in nations that don’t measure up to Western standards of “democracy.” The Obama Doctrine, which considers it in America’s and NATO’s interest to take on a “responsibility to protect” U.S.-supported opposition forces in targeted nations, such as Libya and Syria, will be used to interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean,
NATO also seeks to maintain the Cold War by placing an anti-ballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe that is, despite statements to the contrary, aimed at Russia, in addition to Iran. And it should not be forgotten that Chicago is the corporate headquarters of top Pentagon war contractor Boeing Corporation whose annual profits exceed the yearly gross domestic products of a number of NATO member states.
NATO is a huge racket for defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Electric and other companies that benefit from NATO’s military spending. At a time when banker dictated austerity measures are squeezing the life blood out of NATO members like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, and Belgium, NATO has reached an agreement that will see thirteen member states contribute to the purchase of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that will be shared among all 28 member states. One of the chief beneficiaries of the deal is Northrop Grumman, which will sell NATO five Global Hawk unmanned drones at a whopping cost of $1.4 billion. The drone deal comes at a time when Greece is slashing pensions for retirees and Portugal is canceling public holidays at the behest of the Shylockian central bankers of Frankfurt, London, New York, and Washington.
Robert Gates, before stepping down last year as Obama’s Defense Secretary, warned that NATO would descend into “collective military irrelevance” unless its member states boosted defense spending. With European nations barely able to maintain their social service programs and public infrastructure support in the face of banker-imposed draconian austerity budgets, defense spending is a low priority. However, NATO has come up with a way to pool declining defense budgets to award lucrative contracts for “shared” defense systems for NATO members. The chief architect of this new “smart defense” initiative is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary General and former Danish Prime Minister who committed Danish troops to foolhardy military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rasmussen, a cheerleader for NATO’s defense contractors, spent part of his time in Chicago visiting defense contractor exhibits set up in the media area of Chicago’s McCormick Place, the venue for the NATO summit.
NATO has approved two dozen shared defense projects that include, in addition to the drone project, common use of new maritime patrol aircraft, interoperability of weapons systems on fighter aircraft, and a common ground surveillance system.
Rasmussen is the most suitable Secretary General for NATO. He is an emperor who believes he has power because of his title. Rasmussen is just like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, who believed his non-existent “magic clothes” could only be seen by the wisest of people. However, those who are not fooled by NATO’s true mission know that Rasmussen is an emperor with no clothes and that NATO is an arcane alliance in search of a mission.
Rasmussen has a personal interest in maintaining his stewardship of NATO in Brussels and his good relations with the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, and other NATO member states. Europe has not had a United Nations Secretary General since Kurt Waldheim of Austria held the post. After Secretaries General from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, it is Europe’s turn next. Neo-conservatives have been quietly pushing Rasmussen as a candidate for the top UN post after South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon’s second term expires. Rasmussen, meanwhile, is able to curry favor with members of NATO and the European Union, an influential voting bloc in the United Nations, from his NATO perch in Brussels.
Although much was reported about France’s new Socialist president, Francois Hollande, remaining committed to a withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, two years ahead of NATO’s planned withdrawal date, it should be noted that Hollande remains a committed Atlanticist who will not reverse the decision of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, to reintegrate French troops into the NATO command structures. Just as Socialist President Francois Mitterand was more pro-NATO than his conservative predecessors, Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, Hollande is more pro-NATO than conservative Jacques Chirac.
In the face of Europe’s declining defense budgets, with Britain trimming its defense spending by 8 percent and economically hard hit countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Latvia, and Portugal showing no appetite for spending on unneeded war machinery, NATO still plans to expand. Although expansion was not a top priority in Chicago, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Georgia are all waiting to join NATO.
NATO’s Partnership for Peace and cooperation agreements has brought Sweden, Finland, Austria, Malta, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Australia, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, and other nations into the organization as de facto associate members. NATO is also pressuring Scotland’s Scottish National Party to commit to maintaining an independent Scotland’s membership in the alliance even though the SNP’s platform calls for withdrawal from NATO.
The anti-NATO protesters understood that NATO is an anachronism and should be abolished during a time when workers and students are seeing pensions, social security programs, college tuition aid, and health care programs being slashed while Obama, Rasmussen, David Cameron, and other Western leaders advance continued spending on irrelevant and redundant military hardware. Protest marches on Boeing’s headquarters in Chicago, the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the NATO summit venue at McCormick Place indicates to the world that the protesters targeted the real threats to security in the United States and the other member states of NATO
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
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Chicago NATO Summit: Obama showcases American fascism
Posted on May 31, 2012 by Wayne Madsen
President Obama wanted to showcase his adopted hometown of Chicago to the leaders of 60 NATO members and partnership countries. Instead, with his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel holding the political reins as mayor of Chicago, Obama showed the foreign heads of state and the international media a city in total police state lockdown.
Perhaps the fascist display of law enforcement brute force suppression of largely peaceful demonstrators and the preemptive arrest of protesters, who were hit with trumped up charges of “terrorism” prior to the start of the summit, were in keeping with NATO’s new mission: projecting to all parts of the globe a U.S.-centric military force that seeks to defend the financial elites and “new world order” from popular political change.
Why else would Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari be present at the “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization summit? Afghanistan and Pakistan are far from the North Atlantic. In effect, NATO, which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and Soviet Union, should have gone the way of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) into the ash heap of history, has become a “Global Treaty Organization.” The mission of this global “defense” organization has little to do with defense but is a modern-day offensive centurion force with the mission of protecting arcane empires that are collapsing faster than the Roman Empire.
Much has been written and spoken about NATO’s mission after the end of International Security Assistance Force military operations in Afghanistan in 2014. However, based on the rhetoric from U.S., British, and NATO officials, NATO will be a key component in enforcing the “Obama Doctrine,” which sees NATO as an enforcement arm for the imposition of pro-Western regimes in nations that don’t measure up to Western standards of “democracy.” The Obama Doctrine, which considers it in America’s and NATO’s interest to take on a “responsibility to protect” U.S.-supported opposition forces in targeted nations, such as Libya and Syria, will be used to interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean,
NATO also seeks to maintain the Cold War by placing an anti-ballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe that is, despite statements to the contrary, aimed at Russia, in addition to Iran. And it should not be forgotten that Chicago is the corporate headquarters of top Pentagon war contractor Boeing Corporation whose annual profits exceed the yearly gross domestic products of a number of NATO member states.
NATO is a huge racket for defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Electric and other companies that benefit from NATO’s military spending. At a time when banker dictated austerity measures are squeezing the life blood out of NATO members like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, and Belgium, NATO has reached an agreement that will see thirteen member states contribute to the purchase of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that will be shared among all 28 member states. One of the chief beneficiaries of the deal is Northrop Grumman, which will sell NATO five Global Hawk unmanned drones at a whopping cost of $1.4 billion. The drone deal comes at a time when Greece is slashing pensions for retirees and Portugal is canceling public holidays at the behest of the Shylockian central bankers of Frankfurt, London, New York, and Washington.
Robert Gates, before stepping down last year as Obama’s Defense Secretary, warned that NATO would descend into “collective military irrelevance” unless its member states boosted defense spending. With European nations barely able to maintain their social service programs and public infrastructure support in the face of banker-imposed draconian austerity budgets, defense spending is a low priority. However, NATO has come up with a way to pool declining defense budgets to award lucrative contracts for “shared” defense systems for NATO members. The chief architect of this new “smart defense” initiative is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary General and former Danish Prime Minister who committed Danish troops to foolhardy military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rasmussen, a cheerleader for NATO’s defense contractors, spent part of his time in Chicago visiting defense contractor exhibits set up in the media area of Chicago’s McCormick Place, the venue for the NATO summit.
NATO has approved two dozen shared defense projects that include, in addition to the drone project, common use of new maritime patrol aircraft, interoperability of weapons systems on fighter aircraft, and a common ground surveillance system.
Rasmussen is the most suitable Secretary General for NATO. He is an emperor who believes he has power because of his title. Rasmussen is just like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, who believed his non-existent “magic clothes” could only be seen by the wisest of people. However, those who are not fooled by NATO’s true mission know that Rasmussen is an emperor with no clothes and that NATO is an arcane alliance in search of a mission.
Rasmussen has a personal interest in maintaining his stewardship of NATO in Brussels and his good relations with the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, and other NATO member states. Europe has not had a United Nations Secretary General since Kurt Waldheim of Austria held the post. After Secretaries General from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, it is Europe’s turn next. Neo-conservatives have been quietly pushing Rasmussen as a candidate for the top UN post after South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon’s second term expires. Rasmussen, meanwhile, is able to curry favor with members of NATO and the European Union, an influential voting bloc in the United Nations, from his NATO perch in Brussels.
Although much was reported about France’s new Socialist president, Francois Hollande, remaining committed to a withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, two years ahead of NATO’s planned withdrawal date, it should be noted that Hollande remains a committed Atlanticist who will not reverse the decision of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, to reintegrate French troops into the NATO command structures. Just as Socialist President Francois Mitterand was more pro-NATO than his conservative predecessors, Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, Hollande is more pro-NATO than conservative Jacques Chirac.
In the face of Europe’s declining defense budgets, with Britain trimming its defense spending by 8 percent and economically hard hit countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Latvia, and Portugal showing no appetite for spending on unneeded war machinery, NATO still plans to expand. Although expansion was not a top priority in Chicago, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Georgia are all waiting to join NATO.
NATO’s Partnership for Peace and cooperation agreements has brought Sweden, Finland, Austria, Malta, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Australia, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, and other nations into the organization as de facto associate members. NATO is also pressuring Scotland’s Scottish National Party to commit to maintaining an independent Scotland’s membership in the alliance even though the SNP’s platform calls for withdrawal from NATO.
The anti-NATO protesters understood that NATO is an anachronism and should be abolished during a time when workers and students are seeing pensions, social security programs, college tuition aid, and health care programs being slashed while Obama, Rasmussen, David Cameron, and other Western leaders advance continued spending on irrelevant and redundant military hardware. Protest marches on Boeing’s headquarters in Chicago, the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the NATO summit venue at McCormick Place indicates to the world that the protesters targeted the real threats to security in the United States and the other member states of NATO
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).