This article was e-mailed to me today. This is a "must" read for those of us who do not trust Clinton.
The Arrogance of NATO's Power
By James P. Lucier Contributing Editor
Insight Magazine
insightmag.com
5/24/99
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.
Posted for discussion and educational purposes only. Not for commercial use.
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