This article doesn't even mention the issue of the extension of the U.S. missile defence system to Poland and the Czech Republic. NATO declared it was in favor of the system. Certainly the Czech public is not in favor of the system. I don't know about the Polish public. It doesn's seem to matter what the public thinks anyway except to measure the temperature of the great beast at election time.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> He da man.
>
> Three Faces of Infantilism: NATO’s Bucharest Summit
> by Anatol Lieven
>
> 04.04.2008
>
> The Bush administration’s push for an immediate
> offer
> of a NATO membership action plan to Georgia and
> Ukraine at the NATO summit in Bucharest has been
> blocked, which is good. Not so good is the fact that
> this was only thanks to the opposition of Germany
> and
> France; that NATO leaders like the organization’s
> Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer continue to
> insist that an offer in the fairly near future is
> inevitable; that since both the U.S. parties and all
> the U.S. presidential candidates favor this course,
> they may well be right; and that in the United
> States
> and most of Europe, a question of immense importance
> for the security of the West was not even seriously
> debated in public.
>
> What was also not so good—no, why engage in
> diplospeak? What was virtually criminal in its
> strategic irresponsibility and intellectual fatuity
> was the fact that this push took place against the
> background of three developments, any one of which
> should have counseled the greatest caution in
> assuming
> new and dangerous responsibilities.
>
> The first is obviously NATO’s and America’s growing
> difficulties in Afghanistan, which provided the
> other
> major issue at the summit. And what a success the
> summit was! What a tribute to NATO’s commitment to
> the
> common effort in Afghanistan, and spirit of
> collective
> self-sacrifice! France came up with 700 new
> soldiers,
> which makes approximately one for every 400 square
> miles of Afghan territory or for every 40,000
> Afghans.
> The richest group of countries on earth came up with
> 18 new helicopters for Afghanistan; a fraction of
> the
> numbers it takes to ferry millionaires to their
> European ski resorts on any given day.
>
> The way things are going, NATO will either have to
> fight on in Afghanistan for a decade and possibly a
> generation, or the war there will be lost; and if it
> is lost, what credibility will the alliance retain
> when it comes to guaranteeing anyone else’s
> security?
> And can anyone guarantee on today’s evidence that
> the
> Canadians or Europeans will in fact have the will to
> go on fighting there indefinitely?
>
> Secondly, there was the new crisis in Iraq, and
> especially in Basra, which appears to have been
> brought to an end in a draw largely thanks to
> Iranian
> influence. This casts severe doubt on the lasting
> success of the Bush administration’s “surge”
> strategy
> and rips to shreds whatever was left of the
> ludicrous
> British claim that we are withdrawing from southern
> Iraq because we have succeeded in stabilizing that
> area.
>
> However, quite apart from the hostility of British
> public opinion to the entire Iraqi operation,
> Britain
> simply had to withdraw most of its troops from
> Afghanistan if it was to increase its essential
> troop
> presence in Afghanistan. In Britain as in the United
> States, there is now nothing left for any other new
> and sustained military deployment. So: a U.S. and
> British force to defend Georgia, anyone? From where
> exactly? The cast of Dad’s Army?
>
> Finally, there is the global economic downturn. We
> do
> not know how deep this will go, and must hope for
> the
> best. Some of the predictions from sober and
> reliable
> experts are however very gloomy indeed; and
> already-impeccably free-market commentators like
> Martin Wolf of the Financial Times are writing that
> some of the key economic ideas that have guided
> Western policy in the past 20 years will have to be
> abandoned or radically changed.
>
> It is not just that such an economic situation cries
> out for caution when it comes to the assumption of
> new
> and possibly very costly responsibilities; it is
> that
> if God forbid we end up in a really severe global
> recession, many of the political and cultural
> assumptions that have underlain Western policy, and
> EU
> and NATO enlargement, may come into question, not
> forever, but for a critical few years. Chief among
> these is that democracy too is on a fixed and
> inevitable path of expansion.
>
> In circumstances of sharp economic decline, I
> wouldn’t
> give ten cents for the survival of democracy in
> Georgia or Ukraine. If these countries have been
> made
> members of NATO, we will all be faced with a
> horrible
> embarrassment—something that may already be around
> the
> corner in Turkey, if the military establishment, via
> the courts, presses ahead with its apparent desire
> to
> ban and disempower the ruling Islamist party.
> Indeed,
> if living standards worsen drastically, democracy in
> parts of Eastern Europe, relations with immigrant
> communities in Western Europe, and the attraction of
> the entire Western democratic model could be called
> into question, at least for a while.
>
> In these circumstances, it is hard to see what
> conceivable rational calculation could support the
> extension of NATO membership to two new countries,
> one
> of them (Georgia) involved in unsolved civil war,
> and
> the other (Ukraine) with a population a large
> majority
> of which opposes NATO membership. And this is called
> “spreading democracy”?
>
> Leaving aside domestic political calculations in the
> United States, what this whole process reflects is
> the
> profound infantilism of many of the Western
> attitudes
> concerned. In the United States, the infantile
> illusion of omnipotence, whereby it doesn’t matter
> how
> many commitments the United States has made
> elsewhere—in the last resort, the United States can
> always do what it likes; in much of Western Europe,
> the infantile syndrome of dependence on the United
> States, nurtured by a profound desire not to have to
> think and act in an adult fashion concerning the
> needs
> and costs of European defense; and in Eastern
> Europe,
> an infantile obsession with historical grudges
> against
> Russia.
>
> If this process continues, then we will find
> ourselves
> in a situation where NATO has made an Article 5
> commitment to fight if necessary for a Georgian
> Abkhazia and a Ukrainian Sevastopol. Mr de Hoop
> Scheffer has been urging NATO expansion to these
> countries, and has even—unconscionably—sought to
> preempt democratic debate within the organization of
> which he is supposed to be the servant by declaring
> that the discussion is over and that Ukraine and
> Georgia will definitely be admitted soon whatever
> happens. Scheffer is Dutch. Is he suggesting that
> the
> Dutch army—to give it that name—would fight to
> defend
> Ukraine or Georgia? Having given the absolutely
> obvious answer to that question, does anything more
> really need to be said?
>
> Anatol Lieven is a professor in the War Studies
> Department at King’s College London, a senior editor
> at The National Interest and a senior fellow of the
> New America Foundation in Washington, DC. His latest
> book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role
> in
> the World, coauthored with John Hulsman, is
> published
> by Vintage.
>
>
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=17298
>
>
>
>
=== message truncated ===
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html