Towards a New Iron Curtain: The US-NATO Missile Shield Encircles Eurasia

[Ed Jewett]

THE CIRCLE GAME

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev opening a radar station in Kaliningrad,the Russian enclave bordering Poland

• The German news magazine Der Spiegel reports on the growing tensions between the U.S. and Russia in an article called A New Arms Race Looms between Russia and US. Der Spiegel wrote, "Evidence of that new arms race came last Tuesday [Nov 6], with Medvedev's appearance in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders the NATO and EU members Poland and Lithuania. The president pointedly activated a radar station. Medvedev had already announced that Russia would install modern Iskander short-range missiles near the NATO border if the US didn't back down. The missiles can be fitted with nuclear warheads and would be directed at the planned US defense positions in Europe, which are scheduled to be ready by 2020."
  
• The U.S. maintains its (and NATO's) surrounding Russia with "missile defense" systems is directed at Iran. We've been repeatedly told though by award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker that Iran has no nuclear weapons nor any long-range missiles. What do you think is up?
  
• The U.S. has already begun to deploy third-generation Patriot missile offense systems in Poland (PAC-3 they are called). Does Poland really fear they will be attacked by Iran? "If the mullahs have a target list we believe we are quite low on it," Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview with Foreign Policy during his trip to Washington last year. But Sikorski admitted that Poland's real interest in the system is to be an active player in the new emerging security infrastructure in Europe, which includes NATO's endorsement of missile defense. "Our part of Europe has so far very few NATO installations," he said. "This is the game that seems to be the next project, so we decided to get involved."
  
• So NATO then is driving this new arms race across Europe, surrounding Russia. But who controls NATO? Who is driving the NATO military expansion to surround Russia? It's a circle, you always come back to U.S. foreign policy and the military industrial complex that stands to make alot of money by signing up all the NATO countries as partners in the missile offense program because all NATO systems must be "interoperable" which means they must all be linked together technologically. The technology flows from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, etc..... It's a dangerous and expensive circle game - clouded by the rhetoric about an exaggerated nuclear threat from Iran.
  

posted by Bruce K. Gagnon | 11:37 AM