2006-12-24
NATO Movements
A major milestone has been reached recently. Serbia has been admitted into NATO's Partnership for Peace. You can read about Serbia's reaction to this here. Click on "daily news" and then you can click on "archive" and read the last couple of weeks. So in 1999 we bombed them, and shortly after that they asked to JOIN NATO. And now they've reached the first milestone. Just 7 years. Iraq has made noises about wanting to join NATO too. The best foreign aid you can give someone is to bomb them. It fixes the underlying ideological infrastructure, which in turn means the people finally get a chance to help themselves.
I had an interesting conversation with a Serb yesterday. He was a rare find. He supported NATO's bombing of Serbia because of the Serb actions against the Albanians. A little later in the conversation he said that Kosovo was lost. I told him it wasn't lost yet. He said that the US seemed determined to split Kosovo from Serbia. I asked him why the US would want to do such a thing. He admitted he didn't know. So I explained to him about the US not being pro-Albanian or pro-Muslim but simply anti-racist and anti-religious-bigotry. And that since the Serbian government has changed from being racist and religiously bigotted to non-racist, non-religious-bigot, while the Kosovar Albanians are the ones who are now racist and religious bigots, that the situation has reversed. It is now Serbia that is an ally, and while I strongly supported the NATO bombing myself, I now support Serb troops returning to Kosovo.
I also believe we need NATO to change. When there was actually a serious threat in the form of the USSR, NATO needed to be a serious military fighting force, structured along the best lines we knew of. And that meant the competent Americans in charge. But NATO no longer has any challenger at all. No-one stands a snowball's chance in Hell against NATO militarily. NATO now faces a different challenge. How to get Russia to adopt NATO's values, and thus join NATO. At the moment Russia knows that it is not part of the club, and not accepted by the club. All it sees is a hostile alliance seemingly trying to encircle it. The most strategic thing to do at this point in history is to placate Russia (while still expanding NATO). Here is what I propose to do to placate Russia.
Put ethnic Russian Estonians in charge of both NATO's military command and political command. This means that the US needs to stop being arrogant about not letting its troops fall under foreign command. Everyone else puts their troops under US command, now it is time for the US to do the same. There is no need to tell the ethnic-Russian Estonians what to say or do. Let them decide what they would like. It will significantly change the nature of the battlefield by having ex-Soviet Russians talking to other Russians about cooperation between NATO and Russia. They can even talk in Russian. The Russians (in Russia) will probably be flabbergasted that the Americans aren't controlling these Estonians at all. Which is exactly what is required. The Russians need to have a deep understanding that the US doesn't control ANYONE. The Europeans are all INDEPENDENT ACTORS who ally with the US (just as I do) of their OWN FREE WILL.
I was thinking of maybe putting France in charge of the military command (so long as they promise to speak English), which would have made them less miffed about being seen as inferior to Americans (which they are). But I think it is more important to placate Russia than France. Note that in the unlikely event of a challenger to NATO emerging, I would support the US taking back military command. But at the moment, US leadership of NATO is a hindrance. It is feeding into the "US imperialism" carnard. And it's completely unnecessary to do so. Which is exactly why I wrote this letter to the Australian government, asking them to unilaterally declare war on Iran. To make it clear that Australia is an independent actor. And I spend my time on IRC, without much success, trying to get foreigners, such as Filipinos, to write a similar letter to their government. It would be great if an independent actor like the Philippines were to take leadership of the free world. No-one's going to accuse them of being imperialists. Or racist white supremacists.
It is amazing how novel a concept this is for people. It appears that I am genetically tuned for war, like no other. To me it is plain as day. I see weapons systems and I see the motives of those controlling the weapons and I assess risk to me personally. My goal is to get those weapon systems on my side, and to see a threat in any weapon that isn't on my side. And I seek to find a way to eliminate that threat. It's basic survival instinct. It wasn't me who coined the phrase "the price of freedom is eternal vigilence", but it appears that I am the only person in the world who actually takes that saying seriously. The most obvious was in the Iraqi blogs. Anyone who took freedom seriously should have been there trying to figure out the motives of Arabs/Muslims/Iraqis so that we could assess and deal with the threat. Quite apart from all the people who should have turned up to protect the Iraqi people's human rights. Out of both security and human rights, a measley 100 people in the entire world bothered to show up, almost all of them Anglophones. Non-Anglophones were presumably too busy yodelling or something to engage in the most important scientific endeavour in the history of mankind - threat analysis and elimination.
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I had an interesting conversation with a Serb yesterday. He was a rare find. He supported NATO's bombing of Serbia because of the Serb actions against the Albanians. A little later in the conversation he said that Kosovo was lost. I told him it wasn't lost yet. He said that the US seemed determined to split Kosovo from Serbia. I asked him why the US would want to do such a thing. He admitted he didn't know. So I explained to him about the US not being pro-Albanian or pro-Muslim but simply anti-racist and anti-religious-bigotry. And that since the Serbian government has changed from being racist and religiously bigotted to non-racist, non-religious-bigot, while the Kosovar Albanians are the ones who are now racist and religious bigots, that the situation has reversed. It is now Serbia that is an ally, and while I strongly supported the NATO bombing myself, I now support Serb troops returning to Kosovo.
I also believe we need NATO to change. When there was actually a serious threat in the form of the USSR, NATO needed to be a serious military fighting force, structured along the best lines we knew of. And that meant the competent Americans in charge. But NATO no longer has any challenger at all. No-one stands a snowball's chance in Hell against NATO militarily. NATO now faces a different challenge. How to get Russia to adopt NATO's values, and thus join NATO. At the moment Russia knows that it is not part of the club, and not accepted by the club. All it sees is a hostile alliance seemingly trying to encircle it. The most strategic thing to do at this point in history is to placate Russia (while still expanding NATO). Here is what I propose to do to placate Russia.
Put ethnic Russian Estonians in charge of both NATO's military command and political command. This means that the US needs to stop being arrogant about not letting its troops fall under foreign command. Everyone else puts their troops under US command, now it is time for the US to do the same. There is no need to tell the ethnic-Russian Estonians what to say or do. Let them decide what they would like. It will significantly change the nature of the battlefield by having ex-Soviet Russians talking to other Russians about cooperation between NATO and Russia. They can even talk in Russian. The Russians (in Russia) will probably be flabbergasted that the Americans aren't controlling these Estonians at all. Which is exactly what is required. The Russians need to have a deep understanding that the US doesn't control ANYONE. The Europeans are all INDEPENDENT ACTORS who ally with the US (just as I do) of their OWN FREE WILL.
I was thinking of maybe putting France in charge of the military command (so long as they promise to speak English), which would have made them less miffed about being seen as inferior to Americans (which they are). But I think it is more important to placate Russia than France. Note that in the unlikely event of a challenger to NATO emerging, I would support the US taking back military command. But at the moment, US leadership of NATO is a hindrance. It is feeding into the "US imperialism" carnard. And it's completely unnecessary to do so. Which is exactly why I wrote this letter to the Australian government, asking them to unilaterally declare war on Iran. To make it clear that Australia is an independent actor. And I spend my time on IRC, without much success, trying to get foreigners, such as Filipinos, to write a similar letter to their government. It would be great if an independent actor like the Philippines were to take leadership of the free world. No-one's going to accuse them of being imperialists. Or racist white supremacists.
It is amazing how novel a concept this is for people. It appears that I am genetically tuned for war, like no other. To me it is plain as day. I see weapons systems and I see the motives of those controlling the weapons and I assess risk to me personally. My goal is to get those weapon systems on my side, and to see a threat in any weapon that isn't on my side. And I seek to find a way to eliminate that threat. It's basic survival instinct. It wasn't me who coined the phrase "the price of freedom is eternal vigilence", but it appears that I am the only person in the world who actually takes that saying seriously. The most obvious was in the Iraqi blogs. Anyone who took freedom seriously should have been there trying to figure out the motives of Arabs/Muslims/Iraqis so that we could assess and deal with the threat. Quite apart from all the people who should have turned up to protect the Iraqi people's human rights. Out of both security and human rights, a measley 100 people in the entire world bothered to show up, almost all of them Anglophones. Non-Anglophones were presumably too busy yodelling or something to engage in the most important scientific endeavour in the history of mankind - threat analysis and elimination.
# posted by Paul Edwards @ 11:10 
