One of the more disturbing developments emerging from the war in Ukraine is how it has warped an already deeply biased mass media environment, with pretzel logic increasingly the rule. Black versus white, good versus evil narratives, more suited to children’s tales, have dominated, with obvious- but inconvenient- facts shoved down memory holes.
One of the supposed chivalrous knights of these tales, NATO, has gotten even more coats of whitewash slathered on its gore encrusted edifice. It has been portrayed as the great defender of the abused maiden of Ukraine, part of its long quest to protect the weak and vulnerable nations of the world against brutal, aggressive dragons.
It is easily one of the biggest- and ugliest- lies to be spun as a byproduct this conflict. Not that the Western mass media has ever tired of polishing the (should have long since been flushed) turd that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NATO is unequivocally the most offensive, in several meanings of the word, defensive organization in history. It has no record of ever “defending” anything. Instead it has been, repeatedly, a truly brutal aggressor that has abused and crushed weaker nations.
A supposed force of righteousness and peace promotion, deterring wars and violations of national sovereignty with its steely, restrained resolve, it instead has been an initiator of numerous wars and a serial violator of national sovereignty, often pursued with a vicious, hateful enthusiasm. Sold as a vehicle to deter military actions and prevent political unrest, it is a repeated wrecker of stability, leaving nations and entire regions in chaos after disastrous, consistently failed, interventions.
Along with it’s imperial American master, NATO has spent the last 20+ years spanning the globe, wreaking havoc like a coked up Godzilla. The first nation to get stomped on was Serbia, to defend Kosovar separatists; ironically, considering NATO’s attitude in Ukraine to different separatists.
Beyond the legally questionable basis for part of a sovereign state for many centuries to unilaterally become independent, and the unquestionably criminal and terroristic nature of the Kosovo Liberation Army driving the effort, the brutality used to pry this region loose was shocking, setting the pattern of NATO being far from shy about terrorizing ‘enemy’ populations to enable a political outcome.
Several strikes blatantly targeting civilian, non-military targets seriously violated not only international law, but the laws of war. The ugly cruelty of these attacks still stuns, even in comparison to later NATO bloodbaths. Two particular attacks on civilians stood out.
On May 30, 1999, around 1PM, a small, narrow bridge, and therefore of questionable military value, at the Serbian village of Varvarin was bombed. In addition to the choice of a target that would in no way harm the Serbian army, the date and timing of the strike seemed callous to civilian casualties, at best. Carried out in the afternoon, on the Sunday of the Feast of the Pentecost, just after the church near the bridge had finished services, NATO should have known the area around and on the bridge would be crowded. And there was not just a single strike- minutes later, a second strike killed many trying to help the first strike’s victims. Ten people, including a child, died, 17 were severely injured.
No explanation was ever given for the strike.
And that was far from the only strike during the war that appeared to be targeting Serbian civilians. On April 12, 1999, a passenger train transiting a bridge over the Grdelica gorge was struck, killing up to 60 civilians. Again, a blatantly non-military target was attacked; again, in the middle of the day. And yet again, the initial illegal strike- which hit the train, instead of the supposed target of the bridge- was followed immediately with another strike on the train, despite acknowledgment that the pilot had seen that he had not hit the bridge, but instead a train. This time excuses were offered, if shaky and cruelly worded, calling the incident an “uncanny accident”, which NATO tried to justify using combat footage it had sped up five times (without acknowledgement, until caught out) .
There were many other similar strikes on what appeared to be purely civilian targets. And beyond this slaughter of everyday Serbian civilians, two other incidents went even further in violating multiple principles of international law, specifically those protecting journalists and those guaranteeing the sanctity of nation’s embassies.
On April 23, 1999, the headquarters and studios of Radio Television Serbia in central Belgrade were bombed, killing 16 employees. Denying the usual prohibition of attacks on journalists, NATO claimed the station was a legitimate target because it was producing propaganda. By this logic, Iraq would have been justified, if they had been capable, of bombing any of a number of US MSM outlets during the Iraq war for spreading the blatant, propagandistic, ultimately deadly lie of Iraqi WMD. The precedent it set, that journalistic operations become legitimate military targets once they are simply accused of spreading propaganda by a powerful entity or state, should have had Western ‘journalists’ in their cozy offices shaking in fear.
And as far as outlaw acts go, those were small beans compared to the strike by five GPS guided bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999. Again, journalists died- three. And this time it was in a Vienna Convention protected embassy, in likely the most blatant assault on a diplomatic mission by a nation-state in modern history. The ambassador himself only survived because the fifth bomb that penetrated the roof of his residence failed to detonate.
Subsequent US claims that this was just a tragic accident, despite support in a studied quiet of the usual imperial mockingbirds, failed to deflect a skepticism based in several curious (and some inexplicable) facts. As the bombs were GPS guided, pilot or surveillance satellite misidentification were not factors. The excuse that inaccurate maps and databases, as well as several failed double checks, resulted in 5 high precision bombs not only hitting the embassy, but hitting particular sensitive areas, fell flat in China and elsewhere. Also adding to the questioning was the fact that the target was the only strike throughout the conflict initiated at the CIA, not through military channels.
And at least Serbia, a middle-income (with commensurate industrialization and development), long established European country was able to stay together (mostly) as a nation-state after being savaged. In Libya, NATO fractured a once prosperous, ancient land into a civil war ravaged collection of militia fiefdoms.
The attack on Libya’s power structure was predicated, as have so many of NATO’s aggressive wars, on Western media’s inflation of claims of government brutality and violence, hyperbolically portrayed as being on the verge of extreme escalation. The selective nature of this outrage is curiously focused on imperial enemies in strategic regions. Government slaughter of Bahraini’s? “Don’t care, big US base there.” Slaughter of Tutsi’s in Rwanda? “Why bother? No real imperial interests involved.” Brutal coup crushes legally elected Egyptian government? “Criticize? We’re cheering Egypt being ushered back into the imperial orbit!”.
It is difficult to not see this ‘defensive’ alliance’s assault on Libya as simply taking advantage of an opportunity to eliminate a longtime threat to the Empire, and especially its European toadies, in Muammar Gaddafi. Their role was to wreck a strong, anti-colonial Libyan state; any plans beyond expending munitions for fun and profit, until an annoying regime fell, were not really considered.
The resulting fractured entity of quarreling warlords and perpetual conflict resembles 1920’s China more than any modern nation-state, with civilization rolling back to the point slave markets are openly operating. All due to a ‘North Atlantic’, ‘defensive’ alliance blatantly interfering in the internal politics of a country that in no way falls under its mandate. The people of Ukraine should be eyeing the prostate, bleeding, effectively dismembered state that is Libya nervously.
The NATO intervention in Afghanistan was also an exceedingly sketchily justified action that was in no way ‘defensive’, unless you believe the North Atlantic can be defended in the Hindu Kush. Again, an imperial enemy was suddenly inflated into an imminent threat, to allow a massive Western military operation to chew up a different distant, overmatched state for military industrial complex profit for 20 bloody years.
And those twenty years were characterized by both repeated NATO military failure and consistent, often suppressed, reports of NATO soldiers’ war crimes. And as revealed by Wikileak’s release of the Afghan Papers, NATO’s Afghan war crimes were not just the result of bored young men acting out their frustrations on an alien population, they were NATO policy, in the form of Task Force 373.
Task Force 373 was a secret special forces unit set up by NATO to ‘detain’ (in reality, usually kill) a list of suspected important Taliban members. In the course of fulfilling their mission, the group consistently killed civilians, and even Afghan policemen that got in their way. The deeply secret nature of the unit was clearly not just for security purposes.
The Afghan War Diaries also showed NATO’s indifference to war crimes in revealing numerous other incidents, often involving troops firing on civilian buses (and in one instance, an apparent revenge mortar attack by a Polish unit) that had been completely covered up, with no effort to determine criminality. Open slaughter of civilians was ignored, in a way that seems unlikely if those everyday people had been Western, and whiter.
NATO’s wars have confirmed, if nothing else, that in terms of war criminality, the European states were old hands. They may not be able to match their imperial master in terms of body count or mass destruction, but proved equally shameless in their willingness to abuse, raid, bomb, and kill civilians simply existing on the sovereign territory of their own nation. Many slipped back into old colonial approaches to terrorizing and subjugating the natives as easily as donning a comfortable pair of old shoes.
But they would not have been able (or even willing?) to inflict the brutality of war on these nations, and their peoples, without the Empire standing over their shoulder. As the war in Ukraine has shown, the European NATO states appear to have little ability to, and/or interest in, exercising their national sovereignty outside of the imperial program. Told to stick their hand in an economic wood chipper by rejecting Russian fossil fuels, they dutifully complied, to turn around and buy much more expensive, environmentally unfriendly fracked US LNG with their remaining hand. While simultaneously increasing military budgets to buy US arms.
Which provides further confirmation that NATO, in its essence, has little to do with defending the nations and peoples of Europe. Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, NATO is purely an instrument of imperial hegemony, proven by its unbroken track record of offensive, not defensive, actions, universally against prime imperial enemies.
Beyond farming out part of the imperial grunt work to willing satraps, NATO has also been an ideal promoter and defender of the military industrial complex, clothing highly profitable policies in a context of defense and peace preservation. The overflowing money tap of twenty years of incredibly expensive war in Afghanistan may have ended, but it curiously has been almost immediately replaced by another defense budget bloating war in Ukraine. It has been particularly effective in this task due to a huge presence in the Western media, with both a council of the incredibly connected, and their own mainstream magazine manning their militarist bullhorn.
All of which benefits the Empire, with NATO extending its reach and filling its coffers with military arms sales of all kinds. It is now purely an imperial cat’s paw, with its apparently collective and democratic nature serving to conceal and excuse the real power behind its machinations.
Which makes these NATO fake good guys just another facade for the greatest of fake good guys, the fading American Empire that controls it.