Someone emailed me this today:
Insight Magazinehttp://www.insightmag.com/5/24/99The Arrogance of NATO's Power
By James P. Lucier Contributing Editor
In 1964 the shadowy Bilderberger group met in Williamsburg, Va., and held
their first press conference. Organized shortly after World War II by Prince
Bernhard of the Netherlands and David Rockefeller, the Bilderbergers were a
group of movers and shakers in both the public and private arenas who had
been meeting quietly every year, ostensibly to discuss ways to improve
cooperation between the United States and Europe. The group was a favorite
of conspiracy buffs, who saw the closed meetings as a kind of football
huddle where the plays for the coming year were tossed to the Masters of
the Universe. This writer, who was then on the staff of a major daily
newspaper in Virginia, had suggested in a series of articles that public
confidence would be enhanced if the meetings simply were opened to the public.
So, lo and behold, the Bilderbergers -- who had never announced their
presence in previous meetings -- had that first (and perhaps last) press
conference. Bernhard, replete in striped pants, white boutonnière and looking
more like a floorwalker in an old-fashioned department store than a Master of
the Universe, explained that they had never met the press before because
"no one was interested."
Among the power brokers that weekend was the then-senior senator from
Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. Amazingly, his entire speech was reprinted shortly afterward in
the pages of the New York Times, the first and only time the code of silence
was breached. Fulbright spoke of "old myths and new realities." The old myth
was that "every Communist state is an unmitigated evil," and the new reality
was that "insofar as a nation is content to practice its doctrines within its
own
frontiers, that nation, however repugnant in its ideology, is one with which we
have no proper quarrel."
Two years later Fulbright turned against Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy,
publishing his book The Arrogance of Power. In that same year, Fulbright
took a 20-year-old Arkansan under his wing, hiring Bill Clinton to be an
assistant clerk in his Senate office.
Now fast-forward 33 years, and Clinton is presiding over the 50th anniversary
of NATO in Washington. Fulbright is all but forgotten, having been so wrong
about communism, so wrong about the Evil Empire, so wrong about
everything. But Clinton imbibed those wrong lessons well, and the arrogance
of power was on splendid display at the NATO summit.
Thanks to Ronald Reagan, not Fulbright, the Evil Empire is no more, and
NATO no longer has a reason for being. NATO was set up in 1949 for one
purpose and one purpose only: to repulse an "armed attack" against any
NATO member. But there isn't a single power anywhere near Europe that is
capable of mounting an armed attack or is interested in doing so. Besides,
the European nations presumably have grown up since 1949.
The European Union, or EU, has half again as many people as the United
States and a correspondingly larger combined gross domestic product. By
now these Europeans should be big boys capable of handling anybody in the
schoolyard. The only problem is that most of the European nations are
bogged down in socialist regulations and massive welfare entitlements that
block dynamic development, as was evident in the G-7 Economic Ministers'
meeting that followed NATO. It is no coincidence that 13 of the 16 EU
countries are run by Socialist governments.
So it is not surprising that countries that are stuck on central bureaucratic
control over the lives of the individual citizen also believe that, as a group,
they have a right to abrogate the sovereignty of individual non-NATO states
that do bad things. Not wanting the good NATO bureaucracy comfortably
ensconced in Brussels to go to waste, the NATO members decided to turn
the 1949 NATO treaty on its head. They invented a "new strategy."
Instead of NATO remaining a defensive organization intended to protect
against armed attack, the new design is for it to become a knight-errant
wandering about attacking others who don't recognize its authority. Even
though the new strategy effectively obliterates the 1949 treaty, there is no
talk
of drafting a new treaty to submit to the relevant bodies, such as the U.S.
Senate, for ratification.
So as the NATO ground troops landed in Washington and secured the
center city behind Jersey barriers, co-opting every limousine in town as
personnel carriers, they talked excitedly about the success of the new
strategy which was then in its 32nd day. Clinton, whose idea of conflict
resolution was first honed at Waco, was jubilant, even though he recklessly
had blown up the embers of the most dangerous instability in Europe. There
was none of Fulbright's desire to let Communists just be Communists. No,
indeed. As Tony Blair, using the new set of code words, put it in his speech
to the Chicago Board of Trade on the eve of the summit, "We are witnessing
the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community . . . the explicit
recognition that today more than ever before, we are mutually dependent,
that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international
collaboration.
It is loosely based around the notion of the Third Way, an attempt by center
and center-left governments to redefine a political program that is neither old
left nor 1980s right. In the field of politics, ideas are becoming
globalized."
Or, to put it another way, American soldiers are to be used as shock troops
to make the world safe for international socialism.
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