Bulgaria, Romania: U.S., NATO Bases For War In The East
Rick Rozoff
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??U.S. efforts in Romania and Bulgaria are part of a global redeployment strategy started in the early years of the Bush administration to shift U.S. forces out of Germany and move them eastward. ?
??The number of US military men at the two bases is not going to be large, but who can say that it will not be doubled, tripped or quadrupled in the future? Furthermore, the appearance of NATO bases on the Black Sea coast will come as an addition to the US military [deployments] in the Baltic region. As a result, Russia will find itself trapped. ?
??[T]he new land, sea and airbases along the Black Sea will provide much improved contingency access for deployments into Central Asia, parts of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. ?
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Last week was an eventful one in Eastern Europe.
The two top foreign policy veterans in the current U.S. administration, Vice President Joseph Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visited the capitals of Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia. Biden was in Warsaw, Prague and Bucharest to recruit all three nations into the new U.S.-led, NATO-wide interceptor missile system and to make arrangements for the deployment of American Patriot missiles and troops to Poland, the first foreign soldiers to be based in that nation since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact eighteen years ago.
Gates was in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, for a two-day meeting of NATO and partner states' defense chiefs which also focused on the establishment of a missile shield to encompass the entire European continent as well as the unparalleled escalation of the U.S.'s and NATO's war in Afghanistan.
A few days earlier the U.S. armed forces publication Stars and Stripes announced that the Pentagon will spend an additional $110 million to upgrade two of the seven military bases in Bulgaria and Romania it acquired the use of in agreements signed in 2005 and 2006.
The report led to political fallout in the two host countries with Bulgarian and Romanian officials scrambling to qualify the news and pretend that somehow their own subservient governments would retain control over the expanded bases. Sofia and Bucharest have no more say in how the Pentagon and NATO have used and will intensify the use of air fields and other bases in their nations than they do in determining which war zones their nations' troops are deployed to, which of late include Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The NATO defense chiefs meeting in Slovakia on October 22-23 endorsed the demands of the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for as many as 85,000 more U.S. troops to be added to the 68,000 American and 38,000 NATO and partner forces already in the South Asian war theater, and Poland immediately pledged 600 more troops with other Alliance states soon to follow. Combined U.S.-NATO troop strength in Afghanistan may reach 200,000.
Even during the peak of the American troop ??surge ? in Iraq at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 there was a total of 186,000 U.S. troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently there are an estimated 130,000 in Iraq and 68,000 in Afghanistan. In all 198,000. There were 34,000 American troops in Afghanistan on January 20th of this year when Barack Obama moved into the White House; there are twice that many now.
The figure of 85,000 additional American troops is what McChrystal reportedly termed his ??low-risk ? preference, with 40,000 the smallest and ??higher risk ? number bandied about in recent weeks.
The recently concluded NATO defense ministerial seems to have put to rest that false debate as well as another that has occupied the U.S. press corps in recent days, whether the dramatically expanding war in South Asia, Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, is to concentrate on ??counterinsurgency ? or ??counterterrorism. ? That is, whether the Pentagon and NATO will limit their military actions to hunting down alleged al-Qaeda survivors or wage full-scale warfare against all insurgent forces identified as Taliban on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
The second option of course would make the 85,000 figure not only likely but unavoidable.
McChrystal delivered a fifteen minute presentation at the NATO meeting and the Alliance's secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said ??What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal's overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach. ? [1]
The Los Angeles Times of October 24 wrote that ??America's NATO allies signaled broad support Friday for an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, adding to the momentum building for a substantial U.S. troop increase.
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