Sweden, One of the Most Censorious Countries on Earth, Continues to Bizarrely Claim They Burn Korans Because of Free Speech

ANDREW ANGLIN • JULY 28, 2023 

The obvious thing to do here is to give Andrew Anglin a permit to burn a Talmud in front of a Stockholm synagogue.

I’m serious.

Right now, it is very obvious that the Swedish government is specifically targeting Islam for reasons no one can even explain beyond some inexplicable hatred for the people they inexplicably flooded their country with.

Reuters:

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is “extremely worried” about the consequences if more demonstrations go ahead in which the Koran is desecrated, he said on Thursday, amid growing Muslim anger at a series of attacks on Islam’s holy book.

Attacks on the Koran in Sweden and Denmark have offended many Muslim countries including Turkey, whose backing Sweden needs to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a goal of Stockholm’s following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Kristersson told Swedish news agency TT that further requests had been filed with police for permission to hold protests where desecration of the Koran was again planned.

“If they are granted, we are going to face some days where there is a clear risk of something serious happening. I am extremely worried about what it could lead to,” he said.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson

Sweden’s embassy in Baghdad was stormed and set ablaze on July 20 by protesters angered by a planned Koran burning.

Kristersson said the decision whether to grant permission for the demonstrations was up to the police.

Sweden’s security service, SAPO, has kept its assessment of the threat level at 3 on a scale of 5, signifying an “elevated threat” during the crisis, but its head said there had been a strong reaction to recent events.

Yeah, I mean – people are obviously going to die because of this.

“Sweden has gone from being seen as a tolerant country to being seen as an anti-Islamic land,” Charlotte von Essen told reporters on Thursday.

Denmark and Sweden have said they deplore the burning of the Koran but cannot prevent it under rules protecting free speech.

That is just such a stupid, obvious, known lie that I just don’t even know how to respond to it. It is so bold, to make a claim so false, which everyone knows is false.

We could list six million examples of people being prosecuted for speech in Sweden, but how about the guy who was gay-raped by brown people and then prosecuted for doing a sieg heil in court?

Or how about prosecuting the 70-year-old woman for posting on Facebook about invaders shitting on the street outside her house?

Sweden was one of the first countries to do this crap.

All the way back in 2005, Sweden sentenced a pastor to prison for reading Bible verses about gays.

What are you supposed to say when a Swede says “we have free speech in Sweden”?

I just literally can’t even.

They have free speech… but only against Moslems?

Only against the one group which will actually kill you for insulting them?

If you were just being pragmatic, Koran burning would be the one kind of speech you wouldn’t allow, as it is the one kind of speech you know for sure is going to result in violence.

(For the record, I think that in a Western society, you have to allow this kind of speech, but you have to allow all of it – and you also don’t have to encourage it by issuing permits for public performances.)

I’ve said it and I am going to keep saying it: if Sweden actually did have free speech, there is no way the Moslems would be this mad. Everyone knows that Sweden does not have free speech, and is therefore specifically targeting Moslems for reasons that no one can explain.

Sweden is also the country that brought the most Moslems into their country to live on welfare. So it’s not like they’re big time Moslem haters.

This is just totally schizophrenic.

The most frustrating thing for me personally is that the media is not pointing out that literally every form of “offensive speech” is banned in Sweden.

(Republished from The Daily Stormer by permission of author or representative)

https://www.unz.com/aanglin/sweden-one-of-the-most-censorious-countries-on-earth-continues-to-bizarrely-claim-they-burn-korans-because-of-free-speech/

Staggering Towards the Abyss

 

written by william schryver

saturday july 29, 2023

General Mark Milley — a man who knew but said nothing as his country slouched towards Armageddon.

I have long asserted, and I continue to be convinced, that the US could NOT establish air superiority against Russia, China, nor even Iran — not in a week; not in a year. Never. It simply could not be done.

American air power would prove substantially inferior to the extremely potent and abundantly supplied air defenses arrayed against it in any of those three countries.

American suppression of enemy air defenses would prove woefully inadequate to the task.

And even if any of the US's aerial wunderwaffen were to prove, in ideal circumstances, to be potent weapons, US air power as a theater-wide undertaking could not be sustained in the context of a non-permissive regional and global battlefield.

In a high-intensity combat scenario in either eastern Europe, the China seas, or the Persian Gulf, the maintenance requirements for US aircraft could not be met. Mission-capable rates would plummet even lower than their notoriously abysmal peacetime standards.

The US would, quite literally after only a few days, see sub-10% mission-capable rates for the F-22 and F-35, and sub-25% rates for almost every other platform in the inventory.

It will be a huge scandal for the Pentagon ... but hardly a huge surprise.

And this is hardly hyperbole. It is more or less common knowledge among those who think about these aspects of war — the only aspects that really matter in the final analysis.

US supply lines would be severely attrited on both a regional and a global scale.

Russian and Chinese submarines and long-range anti-ship missile systems would wreak havoc on US seaborne logistics.

I repeat: The US could not fight an overseas war in a non-permissive environment against a peer adversary. It doesn't have the means, let alone the experience and competence, to do so.

In eastern Europe, Russia would savage NATO bases and supply routes. The Baltic and Black seas would effectively become Russian lakes where NATO shipping could not move.

And anyone who believes I am making unfounded hysterical assertions is either ignorant of the simple military, mathematical, and geographic realities of the situation, or so blinded by American exceptionalism and its attendant ills that they are unable to discern things as they really are.

I have come across relatively little discussion of the crescendo pace with which Russia, China, and Iran have been conducting military coordination in general and naval drills in particular over the past few years.

Russia and China are now engaging in joint naval patrols of the western Pacific!

Russia, China, and Iran are engaging in regular joint exercises in the Arabian Sea.

This is not meaningless posturing. These are the actions of countries who intend to engage in mutual defense in the event of an existential attack on any one of them.

I am increasingly persuaded that, if the US chooses to make direct war against either Russia, China, or Iran, it will result in a war against all three simultaneously.

As I wrote in a previous article:

Building the Perfect Beast

Even more significantly, in a development I and many others have predicted for several years now – in the face of almost universal ridicule, I might add – the empire’s seemingly endless string of hubris-driven blunders has rapidly accelerated the formation of what is quite arguably the single most potent military / economic / geostrategic alliance seen in modern times: the tripartite axis of Russia, China, and Iran.

In its misguided and short-sighted gambit to thwart the long-dreaded Russo-German rapprochement — incomprehensibly punctuated by the late September 2022 sabotage of the Nordstream gas pipelines — the empire has astoundingly managed to jump from the frying pan of a regional proxy war against Russia into the fire of a global conflict all three of its steadily strengthening adversaries now view as existential.

In my considered opinion, this is almost certainly the single most inexplicable and portentous series of geopolitical blunders in recorded history.

For the time being, the fighting will remain confined to Ukraine. But the entire complexion of this war has been irreversibly altered.

In conclusion, I return again to my initial argument: the US could NOT establish air superiority against Russia, China, nor even Iran — not in a week; not in a year. Never. It simply could not be done.

And that, amazingly enough, is just one of multiple hard truths that the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult, and those acquiescing to its delusional designs, ought to give more serious consideration as they continue staggering towards the abyss of a war they cannot win.

Reprinted with permission from imetatronink
Subscribe and support here.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/july/29/staggering-towards-the-abyss/

The Iraq War Was a Systematic Atrocity

 

written by james bovard

saturday july 29, 2023

Media coverage of the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War mostly portrayed the war as a blunder. There were systematic war crimes that have largely vanished into the memory hole, but permitting government officials to vaporize their victims paves the way to new atrocities.

On the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, former First Lady Barbara Bush announced: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant, so why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

The Pentagon quickly institutionalized the Barbara Bush rule. Early in the Iraq war, Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, asked about tracking civilian casualties, replied, “It just is not worth trying to characterize by numbers. And, frankly, if we are going to be honorable about our warfare, we are not out there trying to count up bodies.”

Congress, in 2003 legislation funding the Iraq War, required the Pentagon to “seek to identify families of non-combatant Iraqis who were killed or injured or whose homes were damaged during recent military operations, and to provide appropriate assistance.” The Pentagon ignored the provision. The Washington Post reported: “One Air Force general, asked why the military has not done such postwar accounting in the past, said it has been more cost-effective to pour resources into increasingly sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering equipment.” Acquiring more lethal weapons trumped tallying the victims.

The media blackout on the death count begins

After the invasion progressed, Bush perennially proclaimed that the United States had given freedom to 25 million Iraqis. Thus, any Iraqi civilians killed by US forces were both statistically and morally inconsequential. And the vast majority of the news coverage left out the asterisks.

A 2005 American University survey of hundreds of journalists who covered Iraq concluded:

Many media outlets have self-censored their reporting on the conflict in Iraq because of concern about public reaction to graphic images and details about the war.

Individual journalists commented:

- “In general, coverage downplayed civilian casualties and promoted a pro-US viewpoint. No US media show abuses by US military carried out on regular basis.”

- “Friendly fire incidents were to show only injured Americans, and no reference made to possible mistakes involving civilians.”

- “The real damage of the war on the civilian population was uniformly omitted.”

The media almost always refused to publish photos incriminating the US military. The Washington Post received a leak of thousands of pages of confidential records on the 2005 massacre by US Marines at Haditha, including stunning photos taken immediately after the killings of 24 civilians (mostly women and children). Though the Post headlined its exclusive story, “Marines’ Photos Provide Graphic Evidence in Haditha Probe,” the reporter noted halfway through the article that “Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish.” The Post suppressed the evidence at the same time it continued deferentially reporting official denials that US troops committed atrocities.

In 2006, the US military imposed new restrictions on the media, decreeing that “Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member’s prior written consent.” This effectively guaranteed that Americans would never see photos or film footage of the vast majority of American casualties. (Dead men sign no consent forms.) The news media did not publicly disclose or challenge the restrictions.

In 2007, two Apache helicopters targeted a group of men in Baghdad with 30 mm. cannons and killed up to 18 people. Video from the helicopter revealed one helicopter crew “laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians, including two Reuters journalists.” “Light ‘em all up. Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one guy on the recording declared. Army Corporal Chelsea Manning leaked the video to Wikileaks, which disclosed it in 2010.

Wikileaks declared on Twitter: “Washington Post had Collateral Murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT to the public.” Wikileaks also disclosed thousands of official documents exposing US war crimes and abuses, tacitly damning American media outlets that chose to ignore or shroud atrocities.

A mid-2008 New York Times article noted that “After five years and more than 4,000 US combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead US soldiers.” Veteran photographers who posted shots of wounded or dead US soldiers were quickly booted out of Iraq.

The Times noted that Iraqi “detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the US Defense Department, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.” Privacy was the only “right” the Pentagon pretended to respect — since the vast majority of detainees received little or no due process.

The collateral damage of innocent dead civilians

As the number of Iraqi civilians killed by American forces rose, the US military increasingly relied on boilerplate self-exonerations. In September 2007, after US bombings killed enough women and children to produce a blip on the media radar, US military spokesman Major Brad Leighton announced: “We regret when civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism.”

The vast majority of the American media recited whatever the Pentagon emitted in the first years of the Iraq war. This was exemplified in the coverage of the two US assaults on Fallujah in 2004. The first attack was launched in April 2004 in retaliation for the killings of four contractors for Blackwater, a company that became renowned for killing innocent Iraqis.

Bush reportedly gave the order: “I want heads to roll.” He told Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez during a video conference:

If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!… Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!

US forces quickly placed the entire city under siege. The British Guardian reported:

The US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

The city was blasted by artillery barrages, F–16 jets, and AC–130 Spectre planes, which pumped 4,000 rounds a minute into selected targets. Adam Kokesh, who fought in Fallujah as a Marine Corps sergeant, later commented:

During the siege of Fallujah, we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.

Rather than change the rules of engagement to limit civilian carnage, the Bush administration demonized media outlets that showed US victims. On April 16, a few days after Kimmitt’s comment, Bush met British Prime Minister Tony Blair and proposed bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar (a staunch US ally). Blair talked Bush out of attacking the television network offices. A British government official leaked the minutes of a meeting, creating a brief hubbub that was largely ignored within the United States.

Bush had previously talked to Blair in 2003 about attacking the Al Jazeera television transmitter in Baghdad. A few days/weeks later, the US military killed one Al Jazeera journalist when it attacked the network’s headquarters in Baghdad, and several Al Jazeera employees were seized and detained for long periods of time.

The Bush administration decided to crush the city — but not until after Bush was safely reelected. Up to 50,000 civilians remained in Falluja at the time of the second US assault. At a November 8, 2004, press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that “Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Myers said three days later that Fallujah “looks like a ghost town [because] the Iraqi government gave instructions to the citizens of Fallujah to stay indoors.”

Supposedly, Iraqi civilians would be safe even when American troops went house to house “clearing” insurgents out. However, three years later, during the trials for the killings elsewhere in Iraq, Marines continually invoked the Fallujah Rules of Engagement to justify their actions. Marine Corporal Justin Sharratt, who was indicted for murdering three civilians in Haditha (the charges were later dropped), explained in a 2007 interview with PBS:

For the push of Fallujah, there [were no civilians]. We were told before we went in that if it moved, it dies…. About a month before we went into the city of Fallujah, we sent out flyers…. We let the population know that we were coming in on this date, and if you were left in the city, you were going to die.

The interviewer asked: “Was the procedure for clearing a house in Fallujah different from other house clearing in Iraq?”

Sharratt replied: “Yes. The difference between clearing houses in Fallujah was that the entire city was deemed hostile. So every house we went into, we prepped with frags and we went in shooting.” Thus, the Marines were preemptively justified in killing everyone inside — no questions asked. Former congressman Duncan Hunter admitted in 2019, “I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians … probably killed women and children.”

The US attack left much of Fallujah looking like a lunar landscape, with near-total destruction as far as the eye could see. Yet, regardless of how many rows of houses the United States flattened in the city, accusations that the United States killed noncombatants were false by definition. Because the US government refused to count civilian casualties, they did not exist. And anyone who claimed to count them was slandering the United States and aiding the terrorists.

Commas, not corpses

In September 2006, Bush was asked during a television interview about the ongoing strife in Iraq. He smiled and replied, “I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.” To recognize the importance of civilian casualties would have marred his story about the conquest of Iraq as a historical triumph of democracy.

The Pentagon spent more money bribing Iraqi journalists than counting Iraqi victims. As long as there were enough cheerleaders in Iraq and on the home front, the bodies of US victims did not exist — at least in the American media.

Pentagon contractors offered strategic advice on how to keep victims off the radar screen. In 2007, the RAND Corporation released “Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reaction to Civilian Deaths in Wartime,” explaining how to best respond to bombing debacles. The study concluded that “the belief that the US military is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties is the key to public support for US military operations.”

The RAND report was more concerned about bad PR than dead children. RAND’s experts asserted that “Americans and the media are concerned about civilian casualties, and pay very close attention to the issue.” This is the charade that provides a democratic sanction for the US government’s foreign killings.

In reality, most Americans are clueless about the foreign toll of their government’s policies. An early 2007 Associated Press poll found that Americans were well-informed about the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq. But the same poll found that “the median estimate for Iraqi deaths was 9,890.” Actual fatalities were at least 15 times higher — and perhaps 60 times higher.

In December 2005, Bush said that 30,000 people “more or less” had been killed in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion. In October 2006, a reporter asked him: “Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?” Bush replied, “You know, I stand by the figure.” The United Nations estimated that 34,000 civilians were killed in 2006 alone. Regardless, Bush “stood by” his estimate from the prior year. This was the Fallujah methodology on amphetamines: It was impermissible to recognize or admit the deaths of any Iraqis who perished in the 10 months after Bush publicly ordained the 30,000 number.

Iraq’s Health Minister estimated in November 2006 that “there had been 150,000 civilian deaths during the war so far.” The Iraqi Ministry of Health had kept track of morgue records but ceased its tabulation after arm-twisting from US authorities.

It is folly to pay more attention to Pentagon denials than to piles of corpses and flattened villages. The greater the media’s dependency on government, the less credible press reports on official benevolent intentions become. When the official policy routinely results in killing innocent people, it will almost always also be official policy to deceive the American public about the killings. It is naive to expect a government that recklessly slays masses of civilians to honestly investigate itself and announce its guilt to the world.

Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans. Permitting governments to make their victims vanish profoundly corrupts democracy. Self-government is a mirage if Americans are denied information to judge killings committed in their name.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/july/29/the-iraq-war-was-a-systematic-atrocity/

Moscow names condition for withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Belarus

 

America’s arsenal should be removed from Europe, a senior Russian diplomat has said

Russia's Iskander missile system. ©  Sputnik

Russia could consider withdrawing its tactical nuclear weapons from Belarus if the US and NATO end their hostile policies toward Moscow and Minsk, a senior Foreign Ministry official has said.

In an interview with RIA Novosti published on Monday, Aleksey Polishchuk, who is in charge of the department that handles relations with Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, described Russia’s decision to station nuclear weapons in Belarus as a necessary measure to buttress the security of both Moscow and Minsk.

Polishchuk said that Russia sent nuclear weapons to Belarus “in response to years-long destabilizing nuclear policies by NATO and Washington, as well as the fundamental changes that have recently taken place in key areas of European security.”

However, the weapons could potentially be withdrawn if the US and NATO reverse their destructive course and remove America’s nuclear arsenal from Europe and dismantle the infrastructure for it, Polishchuk said.

Read more

 Putin warns of Poland’s intentions in Ukraine and Belarus

The decision to station nuclear weapons in Belarus was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin in late March, who said it was in response to the UK’s plans to provide Ukraine with depleted uranium munitions – a move slammed by Moscow as reckless and irresponsible.

Putin also said that the necessary infrastructure would be ready by early July, while promising that Moscow would remain in control of the weapons and noting that Moscow’s actions do not differ much from those of the US.

American tactical nuclear weapons are currently stationed in five European NATO countries – Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Türkiye.

In the months leading up to Putin’s announcement, Minsk repeatedly asked Russia to station nuclear weapons on its territory, citing aggressive Western policies towards Belarus and the perceived threat posed by US nuclear weapons in Europe.

In mid-June, Putin said that the first Russian nuclear warheads had already arrived in Belarus, a statement that was later confirmed by his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, who said that the weapons had been transferred in a way that would conceal their movements from the West.

https://www.rt.com/russia/580583-russia-condition-belarus-nuke-withdrawal/

Medvedev Says Russia Would Use Nuke If Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Was Succesful

The former Russian president says Russian forces are preventing 'global conflict' by repelling the counteroffensive

by Dave DeCamp 

Posted onJuly 30, 2023CategoriesNewsTagsRussia, Ukraine

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, said Sunday that if Ukraine’s struggling counteroffensive was successful, Russia would have to use nuclear weapons.

“By repelling the collective enemy’s counteroffensive, our Armed Forces are defending Russian citizens and our land. It is quite clear to all decent people. Besides that, they are preventing global conflict,” Medvedev, who served as president from 2008-2012, wrote on Twitter.

Medvedev said that if Ukraine’s counteroffensive was successful and “they took away a part of our land,” Russia would have to “use the nuclear weapon.” He referred to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which allows the use of nukes if Russia feels its existence is threatened.

“There would simply be no other way out. That’s why our enemies must worship our warriors. They are keeping global nuclear fire from flaring up,” he said.

Throughout the war, Medvedev has been known for hawkish rhetoric. He recently said British officials were “legitimate military targets” due to the UK’s support for Ukraine and British comments Moscow viewed as encouraging attacks on civilians inside Russia.

https://news.antiwar.com/2023/07/30/medvedev-says-russia-would-use-nuke-if-ukraines-counteroffensive-was-succesful/ 

SCOTT RITTER: Requiem for NATO’s Nightmare

 The dysfunction of the Atlantic military alliance over Ukrainian membership was just the most public manifestation of the debacle that was the Vilnius summit.

President Volodymyr Zelensky during a memorial for fallen Ukrainian soldiers in Lviv in January. (President of Ukraine, Public domain)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky emerges as a tragic figure in the unfolding drama that is the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

He was asked to sacrifice the lives of his countrymen in order to be seen by the U.S. and NATO as worthy of joining their club. But when the sacrifice did not produce the desired result (i.e., the strategic defeat of Russia), the door to NATO, which had been left open a crack to tease Ukraine into performing its suicidal task, was slammed shut.

Despite NATO’s disingenuous machinations to maintain the optics of potential Ukrainian membership (the Ukraine-NATO Council, created during the Vilnius Summit earlier this month, stands as a prime example), everyone knows that Ukrainian membership in the trans-Atlantic alliance is a fantasy.

Ukraine is now left to pick a poison of its own choosing — accept a peace which makes permanent Russian territorial claims while forever foregoing the possibility, however distant, of NATO membership; or to continue to fight, with the likely outcome of the additional loss of territory and destruction of the Ukrainian nation and people.

Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That, does double duty by providing a template for Ukraine as it charts the passing of Europe’s old order — the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance, the European Union, the rules-based international order and all the post-World War II structures, which held the Western world together for nearly eight decades. They are all now crumbling around us.

Graves’ struggle to adapt to post-war England in the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, and his observations of a nation collectively struggling to define itself, is a cautionary tale for what is in store for Ukraine. 

As Ukraine bids farewell to its former self, it must also part with its dreams of becoming one with a European community whose own longevity is very much in doubt. That is largely because of its disastrous involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Ukraine will never be the same after this war ends. Neither will the NATO alliance. Having defined the proxy war it is waging in Ukraine against Russia in existential terms, NATO will struggle to find both relevance and purpose in a post-conflict world.

The Vilnius summit on July 11-12 in many ways represented the high-water mark of Europe’s old order. The summit was the requiem for a nightmare of Europe’s own creation — the death of a nation, the nullification of a continent and the end of an order which had long ago lost its legitimacy.

Strange Isolation

Watching the reporting from the Vilnius summit, I was struck by the strange isolation of Zelensky as he sought to mingle with the leaders of NATO nations that called him friend and ally but treated him and the nation he leads as anything but.  Zelensky had pulled out all the stops to jockey Ukraine into position for NATO membership, only to be scratched at the gate.

Briefed in advance of a proposed NATO communique declaring that Ukraine would be invited to join the alliance “when allies agree and conditions are met,” the Ukrainian president was left to vent his frustration to an accommodating press only too willing to jump on the chance to flame the fires of scandal. “It’s unprecedented and absurd,” Zelensky bemoaned, “when time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine.”

Mollified after being chastised by his NATO masters, Zelensky later changed his tune, speaking of his desire to join NATO, but in a new, non-confrontational manner. “The results of the summit have been good,” Zelensky told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a joint press conference, “but if we had got an invitation [to NATO], they’d have been perfect.”

Later, during a press conference with U.S. President Joe Biden, Zelensky stood mute while Biden continued to pour cold water on the prospects for Ukrainian NATO membership. “We’ve just concluded the first meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council and — where all our allies agreed Ukraine’s future lies with NATO,” Biden said. “Allies all agreed to lift the requirements for the Membership Action Plan for Ukraine and to create a path to NATO membership while Ukraine continues to make progress on necessary reforms.”

One could sense the anger and frustration in Zelensky’s eyes as he listened to Biden add insult to injury by calling him “Vladimir.”

The NATO dysfunction over Ukrainian membership, however, was but the most public manifestation of the debacle that was the Vilnius Summit.

The Fantasy of Unity

While Zelensky was playing the role of someone desperately looking for a date to the prom — on prom night — Turkish President Recep Erdogan was playing hard to get. After agreeing to allow Finland and Sweden to join NATO during last year’s Madrid summit, Erdogan laid down stringent conditions which kept Finland from being ratified as NATO’s newest member until April 2023. He left Sweden in the lurch on the eve of the Vilnius summit.

Just before departing for Vilnius, Erdogan surprised many by linking Turkish ratification of Sweden’s bid to join the trans-Atlantic alliance with Turkey’s desire to join the EU. “First, come and open the way for Turkey at the European Union and then we will open the way for Sweden, just as we did for Finland,” Erdogan declared. Shortly after arriving in Lithuania, Erdogan met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, after which Erdogan reversed course, saying Turkey supported Sweden’s accession to NATO.

 Erdogan, Stoltenberg and Kristersson in Vilnius on July 10. (NATO, Flickr, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

While Erdogan did not get his invitation to join the EU, Sweden promised to actively support the modernization of the EU-Turkey Customs Union and visa liberalization regarding applications by Turkish citizens for visa-free travel to Europe.

But the Stoltenberg-Erdogan-Kristersson meeting was merely window dressing for more substantive behind-the-scenes horse trading between Erdogan and Biden, which saw Turkey green-lighted to buy new F-16 fighters and have its existing fleet of F-16 fighters modernized.

Getting F-16 fighters had been a major goal of Turkey’s ever since the U.S., in 2019, removed Turkey from a U.S.-led international program to develop and produce the F-35 fighter following Turkey’s purchase of the S-400 air defense system from Russia. The F-16 sale, however, had been stalled following the imposition of sanctions on Turkey in December 2020 as part of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) — the first time such sanctions targeted a NATO member.

The U.S.  desire to see Sweden enter NATO as soon as possible appeared to be sufficient justification for the Biden administration to waive the CAATSA sanctions and send the F-16 deal to the U.S. Congress with its blessing. But Sweden’s accession is not guaranteed.

While the U.S. and NATO are pushing for Erdogan to call a special session of Parliament to ratify Swedish membership, Erdogan is holding off until October, when the Turkish Parliament convenes. Erdogan is looking for assurances that the F-16 deal will be approved by U.S. Congress. This is not sure thing, however, given concerns among lawmakers over Turkey’s strained relationship with NATO ally Greece, and the view that deconfliction there is as important as Sweden’s NATO membership.

To sum up: Biden and Stoltenberg highlighted the decision by Erdogan to move the application for Swedish membership to NATO onto the Turkish Parliament for ratification as a symbol of NATO’s “rock solid” unity.

Left unsaid is that Erdogan had to threaten NATO to get the U.S. to articulate a bribe that had the U.S. waiving its prior sanctioning of a NATO ally while at the same time compelling the U.S. to consider the security implications of the deal, given the open hostility that exists between Turkey and fellow NATO member Greece.

Webster’s defines “unity” as “a condition of harmony” and “the quality or state of being made one.” When it comes to the proper usage of that term, I don’t think the contentious relationship between Turkey and NATO qualifies.

Add to this France’s rejection of a proposal to open a NATO liaison office in Japan, and Hungary’s ongoing open disagreement with NATO and the EU over how to respond to Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, and one finds the NATO edifice riddled with fissures of discontent and disagreement which can only deepen as NATO stares the growing probability of a Russian military victory in the face.

Goodbye to All That

If the weeks leading up to the Vilnius summit were defined by the desire on the part of NATO to see the long-awaited and much-touted Ukrainian counteroffensive reach its maximum potential, the days which preceded the NATO gathering have confronted both Ukraine and its Western allies with the reality that the war is not going well for either.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive was formed around a core force of some 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers who received special training by NATO and European militaries on weapons and tactics designed to defeat Russian defenses. Since the counteroffensive began on June 8, Ukraine has lost nearly half of these troops, and a third of the equipment provided — including scores of the Leopard main battle tanks and Bradly infantry fighting vehicles that had been viewed by many as game-changing technology.

Back in 1993, George Soros postulated an architecture for a new world order premised on the United States as the sole remaining superpower overseeing a network of alliances, the most important being NATO, which would gird the northern hemisphere against a Russian threat.

“The United States,” Soros wrote, “would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others. Incidentally, the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential” of any U.S.-led alliance structure “because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act.”

Forty years later, this very scenario is playing out on the bloody battlefields of Russia and Ukraine. The billions of dollars of military assistance provided by the U.S., NATO and other European nations is the living manifestation of the “technical capabilities” Soros spoke about, which are being married to “manpower from Eastern Europe” (i.e., Ukraine) to enhance the military potential of NATO in a way that reduces “the risk of body bags for NATO countries.”

Left unspoken are the hundreds of thousands of body bags that have already been lowered into the dark soil of Ukraine, highlighting the callous disregard for that human tragedy by the Vilnius attendees.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/28/scott-ritter-requiem-for-natos-nightmare/