Recent statements by the defense ministers of Germany and Canada
reveal that the globally-oriented Western military consortium
that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
plans not only to continue
but broaden
the wars and military occupations it has conducted over the past twenty years.
The bloc’s primus inter pares – in fact its ringleader – the United States,
has with its Alliance partners spent the past generation at war almost with respite:
The first war with Iraq in 1991,
bombing campaigns and large-scale troop deployments in the Balkans
(Bosnia in 1994-1995, Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999 and Macedonia in 2001),
Afghanistan for the past decade
(with military deployments to Pakistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
as part of the larger war theater),
Iraq again from 2003 onward,
the Horn of Africa
(bases in and operations from Djibouti for attacks inside Somalia and Yemen
and the maintenance of navy war groups in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden),
airlift operations in western Sudan and Uganda,
and the current 108-day air assault against Libya …