The Harper Minority Government Supports NATO Plan to Supplant the United Nations

Focus Commentary on NATO Today

February 21^st 2010

On Tuesday February 23^rd, without the approval of Parliament, the Harper Conservative minority government conspiring with the USA and the EU in a closed meeting at the National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair Washington D.C. USA will commit Canada to the support of a new strategic concept for NATO as global arbiter and enforcer for imperialism. If agreement can be reached among NATO experts in Washington the proposal for a NATO face lift will go forward for adoption by all member states at a NATO summit late in 2010.[1]

NATO in its present form is untenable and in danger of unraveling as a cohesive imperialist military alliance.  The member states[2]^,[3] are wracked with economic and political crisis arising from decades of slavish adherence to NATO’s anti-Soviet cold war mandate.  The economic and political benefits from belonging to an aggressive anti-Soviet, anti-communist transatlantic alliance cobbled together in 1949 on the initiative of the United States, Britain and Canada, have become an economic burden and a political hot potato.  The costly, illegal and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are splitting public opinion in all member states the latest being the Netherlands.[4]

The anti-NATO tide is rising. Support is weak in Europe for a North Atlantic imperialist alliance morphing into a global imperialist alliance with a mandate to intervene aggressively in all continents and regions. The predictable response of China to NATO’s expansionist strategy has compelled its military planners to take steps.[5]

Since the brutal illegal aggression of NATO armed forces on Yugoslavia in 1998-99 the naked raw hard power military role of NATO is more difficult to justify to a skeptical war weary public. NATO, proclaiming in its charter[6]^,[7] to be a trans-Atlantic alliance adhering to the principals of the United Nations, today has little credibility as it sends thousands more troops into combat in Central Asia and the Middle East.[8]

World public opinion is hardening against NATO rogue global aggression and in particular its habit of attempting to ensnare the United Nations into providing it with a legal cover for naked aggression after the fact.

The NATO brass is compelled to create a soft-power façade for its global military ambitions.  More importantly it urgently requires a rationale for its enormously high budgetary costs to support a sprawling, hierarchical and parasitical military empire.  What NATO takes from the coffers of member states is at the expense of the social programs of those states.[9]

Career-mad brainy capitalist scholars, always on the lookout for easy corporate money, have leapt eagerly to the task of brushing up NATO’s image.  A group of experts, including a high profile Canadian[10] commissioned by NATO Secretary General have been labouring to come up with a new strategic raison d’etre for NATO’s bloody image.

Turning NATO from an aggressive imperialist military alliance with a record for launching illegal wars, into a benign international force for good is a stretch.  Undaunted, the group of experts simply appropriated the U.N. model and are busily refashioning NATO in its image.  The difference being of course that the UN and its Charter was the product of the allied victory over Nazism and NATO is the creature of the USA, Britain and Canada that paved the way for the re-arming of Germany, incorporating much of Hitler’s anti-Soviet doctrine.

At its inception NATO immediately began the recruitment of many top Hitler Generals.[11]^,[12],[13]  Notable among these were Hans Speidel, commander of NATO ground forces and General Adolf Heusinger, wanted for war crimes by the Soviet Union, who with the connivance of the USA was spared a death sentence after the Nuremberg war crime trials and rose to become a top NATO planner from 1961 to 1963.

Another critical difference is that NATO is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, has capability of forward rapid deployment forces, and is engaged in programs to study the deployment of weaponry to space via US programs.[14]

The Harper Government is proceeding by stealth with its pro-NATO program.  The Government is enhancing all of Canada’s military power on several tracks.  One is to make Canadian and US forces completing inter-operable and the other is to seek a larger role inside NATO to promote Canadian imperial ambitions on behalf of the an elite of foreign investments interests in particular the energy sector of the economy.  Prime Minister Harper’s repeated references to Canada as an energy super power is accompanied by constant references to Canada as a global military player “punching above its weight”.

Until organized labour shakes off its cold war lethargy and begins to look afresh at foreign policy it can be accused of going along with the Harper Government and its plan to contract out foreign and military policy from the Parliament of Canada to NATO headquarters in Brussels.  That Harper Government has a reactionary domestic and foreign policy.

The labour movement and left would do well to take a page from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) that is presently leading mass struggles against the attempts of the reactionary Greek Government cut workers pensions and benefits while at the same time campaigning to expose the aggressive intent of NATO.[15]  That’s what the CLC has to do in Canada.