(Article changed on October 6, 2012 at 11:43)
NATO is a "dangerous" instrument of American aggression that is undermining the United Nations and "must be abolished," a former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN says.
"The danger to global equilibrium is a growing NATO being expanded further by American and British ambitions into a monster military force of world proportions, way beyond any Atlantic or European alliance," writes Denis Halliday, who served in the high UN post from 1994-98. Terming NATO an "affront" to European states committed to genuine peacekeeping, Halliday says NATO is "a redundant, extravagant and unwelcome military toy that gobbles up human and financial resources to no positive end. It is nothing but a negative force."
Halliday's remarks appear in the Foreword to a new book, The Globalization of NATO(Clarity Press), by Mahdi Nazemroaya, the Canadian geopolitical analyst. Halliday goes on to write: "Worse, under the constant pressure of corporate arms dealers, funding for (U.S.) presidential elections and pathetically beribboned generals NATO has strayed beyond the scope of the original post-World War II alliance into threatening sovereign states such as Iran where dialogue together with homegrown solutions would likely suffice....without loss of innocent life, hugely damaged civilian infrastructure and the horror of nuclear weapons."
What's more, Halliday writes, "Genuine humanitarian intervention, or R2P as it is known, can never again be entrusted to NATO forces. Clearly NATO has no objectivity in a situation such as the much needed protection of the Palestinian civilian people from Israeli occupation, violation of their human rights and endless mutl-diverse forms of violence." Halliday says that NATO's expansion accompanied by intrusive military hardware, cyber technology and "the murderous capacity of drones" is actually "threatening North-South peace."
Halliday warned of "the creeping slime of NATO expansion into Asia" and said its "attempt to surround Russia, China and others can only end badly for the billions of human beings involved." Acknowledging the UN has become "ineffective" as a peacekeeper, Halliday says NATO "has no proven interest whatsoever in peace and non-violent coexistence. Warfare is the most profitable business of all. The military arms industry keeps entire economies afloat. Peace would put NATO out of the large scale and rewarding killing business."
He charged NATO "constantly seeks new resources, new weapons and new members to pursue violence against non-existent enemies, creating opportunities for warfare that require nothing more than dialogue, cooperation in a mature and civilized manner." Halliday adds, "There is nothing mature or civilized about NATO, or its leadership."
Halliday said the U.S. should be "disarming, and investing in the poverty of its own people, dealing with its economic collapse and adjusting to the pain of a declining empire facing its demise." In his book on NATO, Nazemroaya writes, "NATO expansion is not just limited to Europe, but is in pursuit of a worldwide capability to expand Washington's empire under a global confederacy."
As part of this expansion, Nazemroaya adds, "The U.S. and NATO have literally authorized themselves to go to war anywhere in the world." Moscow feels threatened, he adds, by the offensive military characteristics that NATO has adopted since the end of the Cold War, "which has taken NATO from intervention in the former Yugoslavia to fighting in Afghanistan and Libya, and both security and training missions in the Middle East and Africa." #
(Sherwood Ross is a media consultant for Clarity Books, publishers of The Globalization of NATO.)
