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“It looks like "The Afghanistan operation was always going to end some time, it was never going to go on forever, but the manner in which it’s been done has been humiliating and damaging to Nato.”
 
“It looks like "The Afghanistan operation was always going to end some time, it was never going to go on forever, but the manner in which it’s been done has been humiliating and damaging to Nato.”
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==History==
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[[File:20180710 NATO Expenditure-3.jpg|right|250px|thumb|NATO spending in 2018.]]
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NATO originally was not part of President [[Franklin Roosevelt]]'s 'Grand Design' for the post-[[World War II]] era, which included the [[United Nations]] and the [[International Monetary Fund]]. Roosevelt's original intention was to institutionalize the military alliance of the Big Three - the United States, the [[British Empire]], and [[Russia]] - to keep the peace after the defeat of the [[Axis Powers]]. The failure of Soviet-communist occupied countries to adhere to the right of [[self-determination]] and hold elections caused the Angelo-American alliance to dust off the 1941 [[Atlantic Charter]] and formalize it into a treaty organization. By 1950, the United Nations was at war with itself, where the UN [[Security Council]] voted to send "UN troops" to combat the Soviet-backed [[North Korean]] regime, a Resolution the Soviet Union could have easily [[vetoed]].
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The NATO alliance is in no way a military adjunct arm of the UN Security Council, which [[progressive]]s in government and [[fake news]] media attempted to create the illusion during the [[Obama administration]]'s [[Libyan War]]. NATO was created to defend Europe, not to wage offensive war in [[Africa]].
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=== Beginning ===
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established shortly after [[World War II]] in 1949. The original members consisted of ten European countries, the [[United States]], and [[Canada]]. These countries formed the alliance to further the goal of security in the North Atlantic region, and they did this by ingraining the principal that an attack against one member would be considered an attack against all.  Therefore, all would respond with support to the attacked nation. In 1952 NATO began its first round of enlargement of the early alliances history, letting in [[Greece]] and [[Turkey]].
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=== Cold War ===
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NATO acceptance of [[Europe]]an countries in 1955 led Soviet Russia to set up a counter organization, The [[Warsaw Treaty Organization]] (or Warsaw Pact). Common defense, the ongoing MAD strategy, and economic crisis led the [[Soviet Union]] and the Warsaw Pact to its demise. NATO's transatlantic relations and prevention were key to the end of the [[Cold War]], and the beginning of an interlinking of United States and European policies, which still remains to this day.
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===Post-Cold War===
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After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its original reason for being, skeptics of the alliance included [[liberal]]s as much as [[conservative]]s.  In 1998, 10 Democratic Senators joined nine Republicans in opposing the first, fateful round of NATO enlargement, which would soon extend the alliance to Russia’s border.
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Among the dissenters was Senator [[Paul Wellstone]] of Minnesota.  In between voting against the first Iraq war in 1991 and the second after Sept. 11, Sen. Wellstone warned that expanding NATO would jeopardize Europe’s hard-won gains. “There is peace between states in Europe, between nations in Europe, for the first time in centuries,” he said. “We do not have a divided Europe, and I worry about a NATO expansion which could redivide Europe and again poison relations with Russia.”<ref>https://quincyinst.org/2021/06/14/sorry-liberals-but-you-really-shouldnt-love-nato/</ref>
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=== Kosovo ===
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[[File:Apartment building burns in Belgrade 1999 after NATO air raids on power grid in Serbia..jpg|thumb|right|250px|Apartment building burns in Belgrade in 1999. The building caught fire as residents were cooking with firewood during a power blackout after NATO air raids on power grid in Serbia.]]
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In 1998, President [[Bill Clinton]] attempted to justify NATO's continued existence as a distraction from the [[impeachment]] movement against him.<ref>https://mises.org/wire/new-kosovo-indictment-reminder-bill-clintons-serbian-war-atrocities</ref>  Under Clinton, the [[United States]] led its NATO allies on a bombing campaign allegedly to stop Yugoslav President [[Slobodan Milošević]]'s ethnic cleansing of the Albanians inside of [[Kosovo]]. The mission in [[Kosovo]] did not go as well as planned. After the air strikes, havoc reigned over [[Kosovo]], abuses continued and human rights organizations listed abuses committed by the Alliance members during the campaign. In an attempt to solve the violence, NATO countries and the [[United Nations]] took on a mission to stabilize and reconstruct the country. The NATO intervention was illegal, destructive, and based on fraudulent claims.<ref>[http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1666 The U.S.-NATO Military Intervention in Kosovo.]</ref>
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<blockquote>
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James Bissett, a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, wrote: "the Central Intelligence Agency assisted by the British Special Air Service were training KLA members in Albania and in the summer of 1998 sending them back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and intimidate hesitant Kosovo Albanians. The aim was to destabilize Kosovo and overthrow [[Serbia]]n strongman Slobodan Milosevic... The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene ..." <ref>[http://www.catholicapologetics.info/modernproblems/currenterrors/unation.htm The United Nations:Chief Instrument of Russia's Errors by Cornelia R. Ferreira.] CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS.</ref>
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</blockquote>
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NATO deliberately bombed the [[People's Republic of China]] (PRC) embassy in Belgrade,<ref>https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/17/balkans</ref> which provoked a militarization of the PRC in subsequent decades.<ref>https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1219579.shtml</ref>
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==== NATO War Crimes ====
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According to Professor Robert Hayden from the University of Pittsburgh:
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<blockquote>
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NATO's attacks have been aimed against civilian targets since literally the first night of the bombing, when a tractor factory in the Belgrade suburb of Rakovica was destroyed by cruise missiles. Since then NATO targets have included roads, railroad tracks and bridges hundreds of miles from Kosovo, power plants, factories of many kinds, food processing and sugar processing plants, water pumping stations, cigarette factories, central heating plants for civilian apartment blocks, television studios, post offices, non-military government administrative buildings, ski resorts, government official residences, oil refineries, civilian airports, gas stations, and chemical plants. NATO's strategy is not to attack Yugoslavia's army directly, but rather to destroy Yugoslavia itself, in order to weaken the army. With this strategy it is military losses that are "collateral damage," because most of the attacks are aimed at civilian targets.
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</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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The level of damage done to clearly non-military infrastructural targets in Serbia would seem to render NATO military commanders and at least some NATO political leaders liable to the same charge that was made against Ratko Mladi and Radovan Karadi by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), "extensive destruction of property:" that they
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individually and in concert with others planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of the extensive, wanton and unlawful destruction of ... property, not justified by military necessity or knew or had reason to know that subordinates were about to destroy or permit others to destroy ... property or had done so and failed to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent this destruction or to punish the perpetrators thereof."
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</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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The war supposedly in defense of human rights has produced war crimes by NATO, and a civilian casualty rate that is at least three time higher than the casualty rate of the "intolerable" violations of human rights that NATO was supposedly acting to correct.<ref>[http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/hayden.htm Humanitarian Hypocrisy.] University of Pittsburgh.</ref>
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</blockquote>
    
==NATO Members==
 
==NATO Members==
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