New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
Rick Rozoff, Global Research, Jul 12 2009 (extracts)
When Germany was united in 1990, it was for many in Europe and the world as a whole a heady time, fraught with hopes of a continent at peace and perhaps disarmed. Despite US pledges to Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward, what German reunification achieved was that the former GDR joined not only the FRG but NATO, and the military bloc moved hundreds of kilometers nearer the Russian border, over the intervening years to be joined by twelve Eastern European nations. Five of those twelve new NATO members were republics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union itself, neither of which any longer exists. Far from issuing in an era of disarmament and a Europe free of military blocs, or even of war, the merging of the two German states and the simultaneous fragmentation of the Eastern Bloc and, a year later, the USSR was instead followed by a Europe almost entirely dominated by a US-controlled global military alliance. Within mere months of reunification Germany, then governed by the CDU/CSU-led Kohl government, set to work to insure the fragmentation of the FRY would parallel that of the USSR, with each broken down into all of its constituent republics. The Kohl government’s Foreign Minister Genscher immediately pushed for recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. By the end of 1991 Germany had browbeaten the other members of the EU into recognizing the secession of both republics. As the above pressure was being applied by Berlin, Deputy Foreign Minister of Serbia Vezovic warned:
This is a direct attack on Yugoslavia, which erases Yugoslavia from the map of the world.
Germany was now back on the road to redrawing the map of Europe, and would shortly embark on the use of military force outside its borders for the first time since WW2. Berlin deployed 4,000 troops to Bosnia in 1995, its largest mission abroad since WW2, but its return to direct military aggression would occur with NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999. The standard Western rationale for that war, Operation Allied Force, is that it was an intervention to prevent alleged genocide in the Serbian province of Kosovo, a crisis that had flared up almost instantaneously. The separation of Kosovo from Serbia and the further dissolution of the former Yugoslavia to the sub-federal republic level was the final act of a decade-long drama, but one envisioned before the lifting of the curtain on the first one. In Jan 1991, former US Congressman Joseph DioGuardi, in his capacity of the President of the Albanian American Civic League, wrote to Kohl demanding that:
The European Community, hopefully led by the Federal Republic of Germany, recognizes the Republic of Kosova as a sovereign and independent state as the only logical and effective solution to protect the Albanian people in Kosova from their Serbian communist oppressors.
Five months earlier, in Aug 1990, DioGuardi had escorted six US Senators, including Robert Dole, on a tour to Kosovo. A year before the war began, German newspapers ran headlines on the order of “Mr. Kinkel threatens a NATO intervention in Kosovo,” referring to then German Foreign Minister Kinkel, who is also quoted in 1998 as saying:
Of course you have to consider whether you are permitted from a moral and ethical point of view to prevent the Kosovo-Albanians from buying weapons for their self-defense.
In Kosovo, Germany, which had deployed troops to Bosnia and run a military hospital in Croatia earlier in the 1990s, crossed the post-WW2 red line when the Luftwaffe, with its Tornado multirole combat fighters, engaged in combat operations for the first time since 1945. Germany followed up the bombing by military occupation as over a thousand of its troops accompanied their NATO allies into Kosovo in Jun 1999. A German general assumed command of the 50,000-troop NATO force KFOR. Quoting from memory an account by a US reporter of the words of an older ethnic Albanian witnessing the arrival of the first German troops in Kosovo:
Where have you been? We missed you. The last time you were here you drew the borders the right way.
As a Der Spiegel feature put it this past February:
The phase of German military intervention that began 10 years ago during the Kosovo war is in no way coming to an end, despite the fact the majority of Germans wish it would. On the contrary, the era of foreign deployments for Germans and their military forces has just begun.
By 2007, according to Germany`s Defense Ministry, roughly 8,200 soldiers were serving in missions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bosnia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kosovo and Sudan, making Germany one of the top contributors to international missions. Following its military interventions in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, Germany sent troops to Macedonia in 2001 after armed continents of the Kosovo-based National Liberation Army led by Ali Ahmeti invaded the country in the summer of 2001. In connivance with the 50,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, Ahmeti’s brigands brought fighters, arms and even artillery past US checkpoints on the Kosovo-Macedonia border to launch deadly raids against government and civilian targets. In one incident, 600 Bundeswehr soldiers were caught in the crossfire between the NLA marauders and government security forces. Years later Benjamin Schreer, military expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, reflected on the consequences:
The decision of the SPD and the Greens to send German troops into Kosovo in 1999 has transformed the Bundeswehr. The Bundeswehr is now operating on a global scale.
The press wire report from which the quote was taken provides these details:
The mission in Afghanistan had German troops, roughly 100 special forces who, for the first time since WW2, took part in ground combat. The Kommando Spezialkraefte, known by its acronym KSK, is a highly trained and well-equipped special unit that has successfully been assigned to Kosovo and Afghanistan. Most of their operations, however, are classified. After 9/11, German military missions and deployments were expanded exponentially, and in addition to Germany deploying AWACS to the US in Operation Eagle Assist, it also took part in Operation Active Endeavor, which has German units monitor the Mediterranean waters. In Afghanistan and East Africa, German troops battle with sea units, ground troops and special forces. The Bundeswehr, once restricted by the German constitution to exclusively domestic protection, can now send armed troops to foreign countries.
Having exploited as well as in an integral way engineered the breakup of Yugoslavia, Berlin was now free to play the role assigned to it by NATO: that of an international military power operating on four continents, a far wider range of deployment and engagement than had been achieved by either Bismarck or Hitler. In a feature called “Preparing Germany’s Military for War,” it was reported in 2005:
German Defense Minister Struck is proposing that his department considers missions other than peace-keeping and stabilization for the Bundeswehr. The Bundeswehr could be asked to play a stronger role in Africa in the future.
While visiting German troops in Uzbekistan on his way to Afghanistan, Struck was quoted as saying:
For those of us who were born after the war this is an unfavorable idea, but we must be realistic. It is possible that we will consider going to other countries and separating warring parties by military means. The Bundeswehr must be prepared to carry out peace enforcement missions anywhere in the world.
In late 2006 Struck’s successor, Defense Minister Jung, released a 133-page White Paper which stated:
The Bundeswehr is to be thoroughly restructured into an intervention force.
In an article entitled “Germany plans to remake its Army into a rapid-reaction, humanitarian-intervention force,” Newsweek commented:
The pace of change has indeed been unsettling. It took a constitutional court ruling in 1994 to permit German soldiers to be deployed abroad at all. Today, close to 10,000 Bundeswehr troops find themselves stationed in places as far-flung as Bosnia, Djibouti and southern Sudan.
Germany has become so comfortable with its current global military status that last week Chancellor Angela Merkel conferred the first combat medals on German soldiers since WW2:
The new Cross of Honour for Bravery is the military’s first such medal since the end of WW2, when it stopped awarding the Iron Cross, tarnished by its use in Nazi Germany. Some see this as another sign of Germany emerging from its post-WW2 diplomatic and military shell since the country’s reunification in 1990.
A column in the Times of London embraced this further reemergence of a militarized Germany, and one moreover of an expeditionary and aggressive nature – the soldiers awarded by Merkel were veterans of the Afghan war – with this panegyric:
When Germany once again has the confidence proudly to parade its military heroes, its journey from the darkness of diplomatic and military purdah, via reunification in 1990, is surely complete. Germany’s new medal, the Honour Cross, stands as a bold response to the growing role played in the world by German military. The presentation by Chancellor Angela Merkel marks a potent moment in Germany’s return to the heart of the community of nations.
Last November German Defense Minister Jung laid the foundation stone for:
… the first national memorial to soldiers killed serving in the country’s post-World War II military. Germany has emerged gradually from its postwar diplomatic and military shell, and increasingly puts soldiers in the line of fire in places such as Afghanistan.
The process of German reunification, the first effect of which was to place the entire territory of the nation in NATO, had been consummated with the rebirth of a major military power thought by many to have reached its final quietus in 1945. The mainstream weekly Der Spiegel wrote in 2005 in a feature aptly named “Germany’s Bundeswehr Steps out on the Global Stage”:
With reunification, the nation had not just regained full sovereignty: it also became subject to rules that had effectively been put on ice during the Cold War. On the new international stage, political influence was reserved for those who were willing and able to assert their interests in concert with their partners. If need be, by force. If need be, by military means. Today the Bundeswehr has become one of the most powerful tools available to German foreign-policy makers. The German government is in the process of fostering a totally different breed of soldier. The elite members of the Kommando Spezialkrafte (Special Forces Command) are highly trained professionals who can hold their own with their colleagues from the British SAS or American Delta Force. Germany has finally reached a state of normality, and its democracy will now be defended directly wherever threats arise. That could be anywhere, soon even in Africa.
In the culmination of almost twenty years of German and allied efforts to subvert and tear apart the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, its truncated successor the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia, almost on the first anniversary of the Western-supported secession of Kosovo in February of 2008 Berlin announced that it was donating 200 vehicles to the newly formed Kosovo Security Force, a revamped Kosovo Liberation Army headed up by a KLA commander who has already proclaimed his intention to join NATO. The German offering is a substantial contribution to the build-up of the fledgling army of an illegal entity not recognized by over two-thirds of the world including Russia, China and India. In an interview with Radio Kosova this February Colonel Dieter Jensch, senior official of the German Defense Ministry, said:
The Bundeswehr is helping the Kosovo Security Force through material assistance, which includes the donation of 204 vehicles and other technical equipment, and we have assigned a team of 15 professional military officers to help in building the KSF structures. The assistance is valued at 2.6 million Euros. Germany will also send 15 military personnel to help build KSF structures and to train the members of this force. The building of the Kosovo Security Force and its professional training is expected to cost 43 million Euros. Germany is among the first countries to help in building this force. It has already sent 15 military officers to help in building the structures of this force and to train its members.
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
Rick Rozoff, Global Research, Jul 15 2009 (extracts)
The reunification of Germany in 1990 did not signify a centripetal trend in Europe but instead was an anomaly. The following year the Soviet Union was broken up into its fifteen constituent federal republics and the same process began in Yugoslavia, with Germany leading the charge in hastening on and recognizing the secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the nation that grew out of the destruction of WW1 and WW2. Two years later Czechoslovakia, like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia a multiethnic state created after WW1, split apart. With the absorption of the former GDR into the Federal Republic, which since 1949 had already claimed an exclusive mandate to govern all of Germany, the entire nation was now subsumed under a common military structure and brought into the NATO bloc. Wasting no time in reasserting itself as a continental power, united Germany inaugurated its new claim as a geopolitical and military power by turning its attention to a part of Europe that it had previously visited in the two World Wars: the Balkans. With military deployments and interventions in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia from at least as early as 1995-2001 onward, the German Bundeswehr had established a new precedent that paralleled the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 in flagrant contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
With the NATO Alliance, which in recent years has come to refer to itself routinely as Global and 21st Century NATO, encroaching upon contemporary Russia from most all directions, the prospect of a transformation of WW2 into WW3 is not so far-fetched. The leaders of Britain, the US and Soviet Russia agreed in the summer of 1945 at the Potsdam Conference to the total demilitarization of Germany. All indications were that once that systemic disarming of the nation was completed Germany would never militarize again. Instead in 1950, while fighting a war in Korea which included troops from most of its new NATO allies which escalated into armed conflict with China, the US started the process of forcing the rearming of West Germany and its eventual incorporation into NATO. Members of the US-led military bloc pushed for the creation of a European Defence Community with an integrated army, navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of all its member states. A European Defence Community treaty was signed in May of 1952 but defeated by Gaullists and Communists in France. With that nation in opposition, the EDC was dead, but the US and Britain found other subterfuges to remilitarize the Federal Republic.
With the creation of the Western European Union in 1954 West Germany was permitted, for which read encouraged, to rearm and was given control over its own armed forces, the Bundeswehr. The following year the FRG was inducted into NATO. The Soviet Union and its allies responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact later in 1955. Two of the fundamental purposes in launching NATO in 1949 were to base nuclear weapons, which the US had a monopoly on at the time of the bloc’s founding, in Europe and to rearm Germany as a military bulwark on the continent and for use abroad. Anyone still in thrall to the notion that NATO was planned as a defensive alliance against a Soviet military threat in Europe would do well to recall that the Warsaw Pact was formed six years after and in response to NATO, especially to NATO’s advance into Germany. The Warsaw pact, already long moribund, officially dissolved itself in 1991. Eighteen years later NATO still exists without any pretense of a Soviet or any other credible threat. In the past decade alone it has expanded from 16 to 28 member states, all of the twelve new ones in Eastern Europe and four of those bordering Russian territory. During the same ten year period it waged its first air war, against Yugoslavia, outside the bloc’s own defined area of responsibility, and its first ground war, in Afghanistan, a continent removed from Europe, half a world away from North America and nowhere near the North Atlantic Ocean.
That NATO officially expanded into the former Warsaw Pact by admitting the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland at its fiftieth anniversary summit in 1999 while in the midst of its first war, the 78-day bombing onslaught against Yugoslavia, ten years after the end of the Cold War, is an irrefutable retroactive indictment of its true nature and purpose since inception. The bloc continues to maintain nuclear warheads in Europe, including on air bases in Germany, with long-range bombers and missiles able to deliver them. NATO recently renewed the commitment to its nuclear doctrine, which continues to include the first use of nuclear weapons. The world’s largest and only surviving military bloc, one which now takes in a third of the planet’s nations through full membership or various partnerships, was born out of the last days of WW2 in Europe. Its fundamental purpose was to unite the military potential of the countries of the continent’s west, north and south into a cohesive and expanding phalanx for use at home and abroad. Victors and vanquished of the most mass-scale and murderous conflict in history, Britain, the US, France, Germany and Italy, were gathered together under a joint military command. If the transition from WW2 to a far deadlier, because nuclear, WW3 was averted, an argument nevertheless exists that WW2 never ended but shifted focus. As an illustrative biographical case study of the seamless adaptation, the NYT ran a reverential obituary three years ago from which the following is an excerpt:
Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German Panzer division officer during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces in Central Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in Bonn. He was 99 … By the start of WW2, he was commander of a Panzer armored division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France, sweeping around the Maginot line’s obsolete fortifications in eastern France and rushing to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian front, he joined the General Staff in Berlin. Restored to tank duty, he fought the US Army in western Germany …
It would be intriguing to learn what Count von Kielmansegg thought at the end of his nearly century-long life about the return of his homeland to the ranks of nations sending troops to and waging war against others both near and far. It would prove equally edifying to hear whether he thought that his career as a military commander ever truly changed course or rather pursued a logical if not inevitable path from the Wehrmacht to NATO. It doesn’t seem unjustified to believe that the Count might at the end of his days have been proud of a Germany that had become the third largest exporter of weapons in the world, one which has arms agreements with 126 nations, over two-thirds of all countries, and that had troops deployed to war and post-conflict occupation zones in at least eleven countries at the same time and would soon, at this year’s NATO summit, use its army at home again.
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