EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY JULY 15, 2023
NATO Militarism Gone Mad—Be Sane: Stand Up for Peace
July 14, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—The very next day after the conclusion of the NATO Summit in Lithuania, cluster munitions were on the ground in Ukraine, having been delivered by the United States as a unilateral action. Since the U.S. first announced its plans to provide these weapons, on July 7, a week ago Friday, many denunciations have come forward, markedly from inside the United States, and also from a number of the 123 nations that signed the pact since 2008 against any use of cluster munitions. But, the top U.S. officials—President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and others—gave excuses and went ahead.
This U.S. action shows insultingly the meaning of the West’s vaunted “rules-based order.” It means: “we do what we want.”
However, beyond the hypocrisy and pure evil involved in this instance, look at the sheer dissociated madness now characterizing the U.S., U.K. and Global NATO, in terms of its newly ratified expansion plans. The July 11-12 Vilnius NATO Summit committed to a major NATO force buildup, when the NATO member nations’ own economies are dramatically in breakdown! On July 13, it was made known that President Biden has authorized the callup of 3,000 reserve troops, just to support current operations in Europe, at the same time that dozens of thousands more are mandated by NATO.
Supreme Allied Commander Christopher Cavoli has announced the commitment to create up to 12 army corps, with two to three divisions, having 20,000 soldiers each.
Over the last 24 hours, certain top military experts have provided specifics, showing how insane it is for NATO to assert that it will build and deploy a 300,000 person force.
Scott Ritter, weapons inspection expert, and ex-U.S. Marine, spoke at length on a July 13 in an online interview with Maverick Multimedia, on how NATO has a “fictional force” claiming 40,000—not able to even be in one place at the same time, and yet now is supposed to ramp up to 300,000? Not only are munitions in short supply to deploy, they are short to even allow live-fire practice. Drilling and strategy? NATO doesn’t have it. For 30 years, NATO conducted “low-intensity operations” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now has no depth in modern combat modes.
Gen. James Hecker, Commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe—obviously a NATO backer—nevertheless, yesterday said that the U.S. is not only short of munitions, but is also short of the means to deliver them.
All this disconnect with reality by the leaders of NATO member-nations does not make Global NATO less dangerous, but just the opposite. It goes without saying that our imperative is not to try and make NATO “competent,” but to seize the opportunity of this phase of glaring madness to mobilize to stop them. Shut it down.
Every initiative counts, from those community leaders who have demonstrated for decades against nuclear war, at the time of the August 6 and 9 anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, to those newly activated to take up leadership in the fight against the threat of nuclear war.
Today, the International Peace Coalition held its sixth weekly meeting, formed of individuals and networks on many continents at the initiative of the Schiller Institute leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche. In her remarks to the participants, she noted that there had been two crucial events in the last week: the July 8-9 Schiller Institute conference in Strasbourg, France, bringing together individuals and forces to forge a new world security and development architecture; and on the opposite side, the July 11-12 Vilnius NATO Summit. She called for the International Peace Coalition to rapidly grow and create a massive public outcry against the madness. The plan for international demonstrations on Aug. 6, the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by U.S. President Harry Truman, must be the basis for expanding this effort.
The International Peace Coalition discussed four points of agreement (paraphrased here), to be issued shortly on their website,
1) end the supply of weapons to Ukraine
2) begin unconditional peace talks with all parties to the war
3) end the NATO alliance
4) establish a new security and development architecture for all nations, ending the division of the world into warring “blocs.”
