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The operational expression of the myth is most evident regarding relations with Russia. According to the dominant narrative (that a sycophantic news media obediently circulate) is that NATO’s addition of new members in Eastern Europe during the post-Cold War era posed no threat to Russia’s security. Even the extensive efforts to turn Ukraine into an alliance military asset supposedly did not constitute dangerous provocations. Those actions included multiple weapons sales to Kyiv, the training of Ukrainian military forces, joint NATO-Ukraine war games, and apparently joint cyberwarfare operations against Russian targets.
All of these moves occurred against the background of Washington’s withdrawal from both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Agreement, even though the preservation of both measures was a high priority for the Kremlin. Despite that long pattern of belligerent behavior, Western officials continued to insist not only that Ukraine has every right under international law to join NATO, but that Moscow would have no reason to consider such a move a menace to Russia’s security.
Washington is trying to foster a similar narrative with respect to policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the last two NATO summits, much of the discussion has focused on how to deal with China. That orientation might seem a bit odd for an alliance whose official name is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. However, the United States clearly is pushing its European allies to enlist in an increasingly hardline policy toward Beijing. It is a transparent effort to include NATO as a player in an anti-PRC containment policy, including a willingness to help defend Taiwan.
Even if one ignores those most recent moves, the assertion that NATO is a defensive alliance is absurd. NATO conducted an air war against Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and against Serbia itself in 1999, even though neither entity had attacked or even threatened any NATO member. The alliance similarly launched air and missile strikes against Libya in 2011 to help oust Muammar Qaddafi from power. Even though NATO justified using military force in Afghanistan as a response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks on an alliance member, it was a great stretch of logic to justify the subsequent two-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan as a defensive mission.
In addition to NATO’s official missions that clearly were not defensive in nature, there have been other warlike actions involving some or most members of the Alliance. Both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War fit that description. In both conflicts, the vast majority of the anti-Iraqi forces came from NATO countries, mostly from the United States and Great Britain. Those offensive operations were Alliance missions under U.S. control in all but name.
Most foreign governments and populations also are unlikely to believe the related mythology that NATO members are peace-loving democracies. Indeed, even the alliance’s democratic credentials have failed to live up to that standard on several occasions. Portugal, one of NATO’s founding members in 1949, was a fascistic dictatorship. The military junta that took power in Greece in 1967 ruled that country for seven years. Turkey has maintained a democratic faรงade throughout most of NATO’s history, but the military and other authoritarian players have held sway most of the time. That is certainly the case with respect to the current government.
Finally, there have been the acts of flagrant aggression that individual NATO members have committed over the decades. Washington’s war in Vietnam may be the largest and best-known example, but it is hardly the only one. The U.S. military interventions in Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama also belong in that category.
Nor is the United States the only NATO member to engage in flagrant aggression. France has intervened in Chad and its other former colonies in Africa on several occasions. Indeed, Paris is threatening to support a new mission to overthrow the junta now ruling Niger. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and seized nearly 40 percent of the island. Ankara’s forces routinely operate in both Iraq and Syria despite the objections of the governments in those countries.
The West’s twin propaganda images should be greeted with derisive laughter. NATO is not a purely defensive alliance, and its members are not peace-loving democracies. NATO is an aggressively offensive alliance looking for new opportunities around the world.
As the proxy war in Ukraine continues raging, people are being killed and wounded by cluster bombs at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world including Syria, according to the Cluster Munition Coalition.
The coalition – which is a network of non-governmental organizations that support banning the controversial weapons – released an annual report showing 2022 was the deadliest year on record globally for cluster bomb related killings.
Cluster bombs open up in the air and scatter scores of small bomblets and submunitions across large target areas, these often kill non-combatants for decades prior to the conclusion of conflicts where the arms are used. More than 120 countries have signed on to a United Nations convention prohibiting the munitions which kill indiscriminately. However, Washington, Kiev, and Moscow are not signatories.
Both Kiev and Moscow have been firing the weapons during the war. In July, the White House announced the US would be providing Ukrainian forces with cluster bombs, even though evidence already existed that Kiev had used the munitions to kill civilians before and after the Kremlin launched its invasion.
Alex Hiniker, an independent expert with the Forum on the Arms Trade, complained that he and other researchers are “baffled by the fact that [Washington] is sending totally outdated weapons that the majority of the world has banned because they disproportionately kill civilians.”
Over 300 people were killed, and in excess of 600 were wounded, by these bombs in Ukraine last year per the coalition’s report. In Syria, which was until recently the site of the most yearly cluster bomb casualties, saw 15 people killed and 75 wounded. In Iraq, where the US military has used cluster bombs during the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion, 15 people were killed and 25 were wounded.
In Yemen, where Riyadh has used US provided cluster bombs to kill civilians during its genocidal war against northern Yemen’s Houthis, there were five deaths and 90 people wounded by the bomblets last year. In 2022, there were no cluster bomb attacks reported in either Iraq or Yemen.
The primary victims of the unexploded, so-called duds – bomblets which look like metal balls – are children who pick them up to play with them unaware of what they actually are. The submunitions also often shepherds and scrap metal collectors – a not uncommon post-war source of income – explains Laura Persi, an editor of the coalition’s annual report.
During the Vietnam War, US forces dropped hundreds of millions of cluster bomblets on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. People still die in Laos on a yearly basis as a result of the tens of millions of unexploded ordinances left behind after US bombing campaigns.
The Hindu far-right’s actions in Nuh, in India’s Haryana, echo Israel’s policies of trying to delete histories and legacies of the Palestinian people.
Al Jazeera, 4 Sep 2023
In early August, the world watched in horror as authorities in the northern Indian state of Haryana demolished more than 300 Muslim-owned homes and businesses in Nuh – the only Muslim-majority district in the state.
Hindu right-wing groups in Haryana followed up the violence with calls to boycott Muslim businesses and for Hindu-owned businesses to fire Muslim employees. Before the demolition drive, clashes broke out between Hindu and Muslim groups in Nuh when a procession led by the far-right Hindu organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad reached the district.
What we are witnessing is undoubtedly a consequence of the hateful rhetoric encouraged under the current Hindu nationalist regime.
Yet, the large-scale destruction of Muslim homes and properties in parts of the country like Nuh, where the community has lived for centuries, points to something even more sinister: a concerted effort to erase all evidence of Muslim presence and heritage in the country.
Is it paranoid to worry that this, in turn, could be a first step to triggering a full-fledged genocide?
Over the years, under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, we have seen India increasingly cosying up to Israel. And the Hindu right has been explicit in its aspiration to emulate Israel’s approach to Palestinians.
Specifically, they appear to be inspired by Israel’s effort to systematically erase Palestinian history, legacy and culture from the landscape. They are inspired by the way more than 530 Palestinian villages were systematically destroyed during and after the Nakba of 1948, as well as the way Palestinian homes continue to be demolished across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem to make way for Israeli settlements considered illegal under international law.
Much like Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport stands adamantly on the remains of Palestinian communities forced from their homes, a new temple to the Hindu god Ram has been built over the debris of the historic Babri Masjid mosque in India, destroyed in December 1992 by extremists gathered by Modi’s party.
There’s more that they probably want to pick up from Israel, such as the way Israeli museum exhibits insistently refused to mention Palestinians or acknowledge Palestinian existence as a distinct national community.
How about laws like Israel’s that deny Palestinians even the right to mourn the loss of ancestral homes and land or seek to reclaim them? This includes Amendment 40 to the Budget Foundations Law that criminalises the commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba.
