NATO chief says forces to stay in Afghanistan to finish job … NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen vowed to keep the alliance's troops in Afghanistan for the time needed to finish its mission, in an interview with a Spanish newspaper published Sunday. "Defeat is not an option, we will win. The Taliban will never win, nor will they return to power. Never will we allow Al-Qaeda to have refuge Afghanistan," the newspaper ABC quoted Rasmussen as saying in its Spanish translation. … Rasmussen also stressed that Western forces would not withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011, but undertake a gradual process of transferring responsibility for maintaining security to the Afghans as conditions allow. – AFP
Dominant Social Theme: It is much better to have an international army.
Free-Market Analysis: We recently wrote about how a takeover by Brussels of Britain's financial centers was actually in our view nothing more than a real-estate transaction. British finance may move to Belgium, but the Anglo-American axis will still maintain control of it, just as the Anglo-American axis is the real power behind the European Union. We think this is part of a larger pattern and will suggest in this article how that pattern is developing, focusing mostly on the military.
There have been some articles written lately that advance this logic in other ways, specifically via US indebtedness. We would argue that the undermining of American military power by debt is not actually undesirable from the point of view of top American strategists. Shifting at least some of the burden of global military responsibility to NATO is probably something that is ongoing though it has not much been remarked upon. In a 2006 LA Times article, "NATO's Afghanistan Challenge," Foreign Affairs Senior Fellow Max Boot made the following comment:
In 2003, NATO took command of the International Security Assistance Force, which had been created to supplement the efforts of a U.S.-led coalition in stabilizing the onetime lair of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. At first, the ISAF was limited to Kabul, but it gradually expanded to assume control of the relatively peaceful northern and western provinces. This August, it will take control of the far more dangerous areas in the south, where a major Taliban offensive is underway. If all goes well, the ISAF could take over the equally insecure eastern provinces as early as this fall. This would give NATO the lead role throughout Afghanistan, although more than 10,000 U.S. troops would continue to operate independently in the country as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
The resurgence of NATO and its high-profile role in Afghanistan is one of that sad war's most startling occurrences from our point of view. When NATO chief Rasmussen says Western forces would not withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011, he is not making a point about a timeline but about who controls the war effort, its strategy and prosecution. Read various Pentagon releases regarding the war, and one is struck by how the American military goes out of its way assert NATO's authority and prerogatives within the larger war theatre.
Why the willingness to promote NATO? The main reason to do so, in our view, has to do with the growing anti-war movement in America. While Europe has been fairly anti-war since World War II, America's anti-war movements have waxed and waned depending on the degree of alarm that the political elite has been able to generate. The clever shift away from a draft to an all-volunteer army has exacerbated American passivity. On the other hand, the current economic crisis has concentrated American activism and the Internet has continually pointed out Pentagon corruption.
While the mainstream media has run stories pointing out that the anti-war movement in America seems most subdued, we think we see considerable anti-war sentiment on Internet threads. As the libertarian movement of Ron Paul (R-TX) continues to gain strength in America, the military-industrial complex's ongoing adventurism will come under sustained attack. The speech that Donald Rumsfeld made prior to 9/11 pointing out that the Pentagon had mislaid some US$2 trillion and could not account for it, is bound to continue to haunt the larger political conversation. It is too much money to ignore.
The best way to be done with America's reoccurring and resurgent anti-war, anti-adventurism sentiments is to move authority for prosecuting wars out of the country. (Europe may be anti-war, but Brussels is not.) NATO is based in Brussels and shifting the West's war-making authority from the Pentagon to Brussels likely has many advantages. We think we detect this trend as regards the IMF as well. Wikipedia reminds us that at the 2009 G-20 London summit, leaders "increased the IMF's supplemental cash tenfold to $500 billion, and to allocate to member countries another $250 billion via Special Drawing Rights."
These SDRs have been mentioned as the building blocks of an international currency (via the as-yet non-existent bancor) and while the headquarters of the IMF remain in Washington DC, there are obviously ongoing efforts on the part of the elite to remake the IMF as a more fully global entity from a currency standpoint.
The United Nations itself is another world-spanning entity that was initially developed out the Anglo-American victory in World War II. While it seems to be a thoroughly international body, in reality power and control lies mostly with the Anglo-American axis via the Security Council and the British Commonwealth which includes some 60 member states. Here is libertarian writer Joan Veon on the UN and the British Queen via NewsWithViews.com:
First let's take a look at the queen herself. According to Who Owns the World by Kevin Cahill, the queen is the legal owner of 6,600 million acres of land that equals one sixth of the earth's non-ocean surface. She is the only person on earth who owns whole countries and who owns countries that are not her own domestic territory. This land ownership is separate from her role as head of state and is different from other monarchies—like Norway, Belgium, and Denmark, where no such claim is made. The value of her holdings is approximately $33T, more than the estimated value of all of the earth's natural resources which is estimated to be $25T.
Secondly, the physical structure of the United Nations and its agenda represents the completion of the dream and aspirations of British aristocrat Cecil Rhodes to return the United States and the rest of the world back under British rule. He felt that "too little of the globe was British territory…and if we had retained America…there would be millions more of English living." …
It should be noted that from 1946-1989 the British Empire gave "independence" to many of their former colonies. How they did this was to allow them to have their own parliament with representative government and their own prime minister. Lest you think they can do as they please, the queen has her own appointed representative called the Director-General that reports to her everything going on in the country and who reads her instructions after the prime minister provides his report at the opening of their parliament.
As each country obtained independence, they also got a vote at the United Nations. Today the Commonwealth has the potential of 54 votes to America's one vote. You will find if you look at the number of Commonwealth countries that are members of the other UN agencies like the IMF, World Bank, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, etc., the U.S. is outvoted.
In three separate interviews with representatives from three Commonwealth nations in 2002, I was told by each of them who looked at me with fear and terror when I challenged them to leave the Commonwealth that they could not …
It is the Anglo-American axis that spins the ties that bind the world. And more and more we see that these ties are putatively international, while control is retained (sub rosa) by the Anglo-American power elite. The IMF, NATO, the UN and other agencies seem to be internationalist in scope but in reality control is exercised in Washington and London. It's our opinion this same programmatic element affects the European Union as well.
In this article we've tried to draw a picture about how the power elite is engaged in a larger push to make various entities less parochial and more international. This has the dual advantage of removing domestic constitutional and regulatory constraints while making Anglo-American-controlled institutions seem global in scope. What is striking to us is not where the control is exercised but in how deliberately the process analyzed in this article is occurring and how little attention is being paid to it, certainly in the mainstream press.
