Last time I looked both North Korea and Israel had higher percentages of their GDPs going to "defense spending" than either Turkey or Greece. I suspect that there are some other countries as well that beat both of those NATO members on this wonderful measure. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Elias.Karagiannis at spg.org <Elias.Karagiannis at spg.org> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 5:43 PM Subject: RE: Democratic Left: after the war
>
>This is an excerpt from today New York Times article by Thomas Friedman.
>
>"This shift from NATO to BATO -- the Balkan-Atlantic Treaty
> Organization -- has been driven both by humanitarian demands and
> institutional imperatives. "In order to survive, an international
>organization
> can't just have a conceptual mission," the official said.
>"Organizations seek
> out action. They need to do things. That's why NATO needs the
>Balkans
> as much as the Balkans need NATO.
>
> "The Balkans is one security issue that NATO can actually do
>something
> about," he added. "We talked about dealing with drugs, terrorism,
> proliferation and the mafia, but the truth is there is not much
>we can really
> do about them. The thing about the Balkans is that what NATO has
>to
> offer is exactly what they need. We have a product that they want
>--
> peacekeeping and providing security."
>
> And there are a lot of customers. Once NATO forces are fully in
>place in
> Kosovo, NATO's Balkan deployment will involve nearly 100,000
>troops --
> 30,000 in Bosnia, 57,000 in Kosovo, 7,000 in Albania, 2,000 in
>Macedonia
> and 1,000 in Croatia. Many of those troops are committed
>indefinitely.
> Indeed, the poor Albanians have quietly told NATO they hope its
>troops
> never leave. "
>
>The best thing that will ever happen to the Balkans is to get NATO out of
>the region as soon as possible. No need for intergovernmental Balkan
>councils,- wasn't this called Imperial councils before NATO?. Now it sounds
>as if the whole region has been occupied by the neonazis.
>It is really criminal to argue that NATO needs the Balkans to survive. This
>then explains why the attack on a sovereign state, why international law
>was disregarded. It also explains why a small group of armed bandits with
>major interests in drug trafficking was turned to a "liberation army".
>In the meantime, a NATO country can ,with the blessings of Brussels and
>Washington, ethnic cleanse millions of people, burn around 3,500 villages,
>and kill about 40,000 people because they demand the right to speak their
>language.NATO's deafening silence on the plight of Kurds in Turkey earned
>it the right to proclaim itself as a protector of human rights on a
>selective basis and in countries other than its own.
>Those who argue for self-determination of any group in the Balkans should
>extend this right to every group not just to the one that at present, seems
>to satisfy the interests of the US. And then it will be evident what will
>resurt from such a policy.
>The history of the Balkans is the history of federal states, two of them
>being the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. It is not a history of
>nation-states. Yugoslavia was in a sense, a microcopy of the federal states
>that have governed the region for thousands of years.
>The countries with the highest share of defence spending in the world are
>Greece and Turkey. The NATO attack on Yugoslavia intensified fears of
>insecurity in the Greek public and soon, we will see another major
>expansion of military spending. The fear of a greater Albania will increase
>the pressure even more. Turkey will follow suit and I am sure the
>neighboughring counties will do the same.
>The Americans and the rest of the war makers will be happy that they now
>found new markets for their arms. Meanwhile, everybody will wonder why
>there will be no development in the Balkans.
>The only sensible proposal is to hold the level of defence spending of all
>Balkan countries
>at its current level, level not share. But this is as unrealistic as my
>dream of a Balkans free of NATO.
>
>elias
>
>