NATO Trips on Own Lies
with U-Turn on ‘Russian Aggressor’
By Finian Cunningham
January 11,
2015 "ICH"
- "SCF"
-
NATO’s civilian figurehead Jens Stoltenberg
this week urged Russia to be a partner
against terrorism. He was speaking the day
after the deadly gun attack on a magazine in
Paris where 12 people, including three
police officers, were killed by assailants
purporting to be affiliated with radical
Islamists.
During a visit to Germany,
the NATO general secretary called upon
Moscow to be “an ally in the fight against
terrorism” – adding: “We think it is
important that Russia, which is our biggest
neighbour in Europe, and NATO are working
together on important issues like fighting
terror.”
Well, how about that for a
screeching U-turn? After all, has it not
become NATO policy, since the Ukraine crisis
blew up last year, to terminate all security
co-operation with Russia in a bid to
ostracise the latter?
Only a few weeks ago,
Stoltenberg and other NATO officials were
accusing Russia of being the biggest threat
to security in Europe, asserting without
evidence that Moscow has aggressive designs
on Ukraine, the Baltic states and other
eastern European countries. According to
NATO, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is on a
revanchist revamp of the Soviet Empire,
casting a sinister spectre over the entire
continent.
The former Norwegian premier
has been banging the war drum against Russia
in perfect timing with the same hostile beat
as his predecessor, the insufferable Danish
robot Anders Fogh Rasmussen. When
Stoltenberg took over the NATO role last
mid-year his first official visit was to
rush to Poland in a pointed show of
solidarity with eastern European members of
the US-led military alliance, who he claimed
were living under the shadow of Russian
“expansionism”.
Stoltenberg’s military
counterpart in NATO, four-star American
General Philip Breedlove has for months been
sounding like a broken record, reiterating
over and over that Russian forces have
invaded Ukraine to subvert the
Western-backed Kiev regime. Breedlove has
never produced any verifiable evidence to
support his wild assertions that are posited
as “top intelligence”. These tiresome
incendiary claims have strangely become
muted recently, suggesting more than a hint
of disingenuousness from the General. How
can Russia be launching military invasions
month after month with no cumulative
evidence to that effect, and then, lo and
behold, all is quiet on the eastern front,
as must be gleaned from Breedlove’s recent
insouciance on the matter.
Nevertheless, such shrill
alarmism from Breedlove and Stoltenberg has
been used to justify NATO warplanes
multiplying their patrols over the Baltic
Sea and eastern Europe; as well as NATO
warships streaming into the Black Sea; and
an inordinate increase in US military
hardware, including missiles, tanks and
troops, in the region under Washington’s
so-called Atlantic Resolve initiative. All
this to allegedly protect the European
damsel-in-distress from drooling Russian
aggression.
This war-footing by NATO and
its tendentious accusations against Moscow
have formed the basis for unprecedented
American and European economic sanctions on
Russia. The Western sanctions have been met
with Russian counter-measures, which
together have led to the worse deterioration
in relations since the formal end of the
Cold War. The toll on European farmers and
the EU’s economic power house Germany have
been particularly severe, threatening to
plunge the bloc into deeper recession.
That alarming context makes
Stoltenberg’s appeal to Russia this week –
to be a partner with NATO in the fight
against terrorism – all the more
spectacularly incongruous.
On the one hand, NATO has
been vilifying Russia for behaving like a
tyrant threatening European borders and
freedom, waging a “hybrid war” against small
defenceless nations to snuff out their
dreams of Western democracy; then on the
other hand, simultaneously, NATO is
appealing to this same Russian tyrant in
order to help defeat terrorism. This
breath-taking contradiction involves a
stupendous feat of double think that reveals
more than it was supposed to.
Recall, too, that US
President Barack Obama has on at least two
high-profile occasions publicly equated
Russia with international terrorism. When he
addressed the UN General Assembly in New
York and the G20 forum in Brisbane,
Australia, at the end of last year, Obama
explicitly framed Russia’s alleged
aggression in Europe along with the
terrorism of radical Islamists as the top
threat to world peace.
Obama’s Secretary of State
John Kerry, America’s supposed urbane
diplomat, has waxed lyrical with faux
historical analogies comparing Russia’s
President Putin to fascist European
dictators during the darkest episodes of the
20th Century, accusing the Kremlin of trying
to change the borders of countries “down the
barrel of gun”. (The Americans have some
cheek to bandy about that particular
complaint given their track record of
destroying countries and killing millions of
civilians that do not comply with their
strategic interests.)
However, with the flip of a
coin, it seems, all this grave anti-Russian
bombast is suddenly redundant, with the
US-led NATO alliance, through its European
civilian cypher Stoltenberg, apparently
stretching out the hand of co-operation to
Russia.
No doubt, the Norwegian NATO
clerk has by now received a sharp phone call
from his American bosses for this week
daring, or being stupid enough, to waver
from the official narrative of Russia being
the consummate menace to Western values and
world peace. One can imagine the
consternation in the Pentagon and White
House: “Who the hell does that Norwegian
puppet think he is blabbing about Russian
partnership?”
What to make of Stoltenberg’s
U-turn and the hilariously mixed messages
from NATO? Is Russia a menacing threat to
world peace or is it a partner in
safeguarding world peace? Or is NATO
suffering from degenerative schizophrenia?
One deduction is that the
NATO general secretary evidently does not
believe the propaganda claims of his own
organisation and his own previous words,
which have sought to denigrate and
criminalise Russia over the Ukraine crisis.
How could he mouth such arrant
contradictions otherwise?
If Stoltenberg is not
convinced about the narrative of Russia as
“the aggressor” that’s simply because the
claims made by NATO, and further politicised
by Washington and Brussels, are groundless.
They are concoction, fabrication, fiction,
lies, you name it, all used for nefarious
political reasons to serve elite power
interests in Washington and Europe. Those
interests revolve around driving a
geopolitical wedge between Europe and Russia
and to undermine the latter as new pole in a
multipolar global economy, thus shoring up
the decrepit US dollar as reserve currency
and the hegemony of Western finance capital
– which, by the way, is crucifying millions
of Western citizens.
Despicably, this baseless
propaganda is driving the global economy
into deeper difficulties, inflicting misery
on millions of workers and their families,
including American, European and Russian.
Not only that but NATO’s anti-Russian
propaganda has led to a dangerous
militarisation in Europe on Russia’s
borders, leading Moscow to belatedly change
its defence doctrine to define NATO as its
main threat. NATO’s reckless posturing
against Russia is heightening the risk of
all-out war – all for the sake of satisfying
elite Western power interests.
Yet in the blink of an eye,
Jens Stoltenberg, the most senior civilian
representative of NATO, lets us know the
truth with his conspicuous U-turn this week
inveigling Russia as a partner against
terrorism. The truth being that Russian is
evidently not a threat to world peace. The
real threat to world peace, by deduction, is
NATO and its political masters in Washington
and Brussels.
© Strategic Culture
Foundation