The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will mark its 60th anniversary on April 4 and 5, 2009. At the same time, demonstrations will take place all over the world calling for an end to NATO’s war in Afghanistan. The Canadian Peace Alliance and the Collectif Échec à la guerre are calling for pan-Canadian demonstrations on April 4 to demand an end to the NATO-led occupation that has already killed thousands of Afghan civilians and threatens to bring war to the entire region.
Peace Alliance Winnipeg plans for April 4 are not finalized. We hope to announce these soon.
In the meantime, here are a couple of articles that offer a fresh look at a 60-year old military alliance.
NATO’s Global Mission Creep
by Diana Johnstone, Counterpunch, March 13/15, 2009
NATO, the main overseas arm of the U.S. military-industrial complex, just keeps expanding. Its original raison d’être, the supposedly menacing Soviet bloc, has been dead for twenty years. But like the military-industrial complex itself, NATO is kept alive and growing by entrenched economic interests, institutional inertia and an official mindset resembling paranoia, with think tanks looking around desperately for “threats”. Continued . . .
NATO’s Drive Into Eastern Europe – Tenth Anniversary
by Rick Rozoff, Global Research, March 14, 2009
March 12 of this year marked the tenth anniversary of NATO expanding into Eastern Europe and incorporating former members of its Warsaw Pact rival.
Nine years after the George H.W. Bush’s administration’s Secretary of State James Baker had assured the Soviet Union’s last president Mikhail Gorbachev that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” the Alliance, in the case of one of its new members, Poland, moved directly to the border of Russia’s Kaliningrad territory. Continued . . .
See also: Strasbourg to be locked down for NATO’s birthday party