Afghan woman rages at NATO air strike

NATO: 60 YEARS OF A MURDER MACHINE

Demonstrators have converged on Strasbourg to oppose the 60^th anniversary of NATO. A delegation from the Irish Anti-War Movement has joined
them, conscious of the fact that if the Lisbon Treaty is pushed though in a
second referendum Ireland’s ties with this murder machine will increase.

NATO is a creature of the Cold War and should have been
abolished when it ended.

Its official military doctrine reserves for itself the right
to use nuclear weapons. Three NATO members (US, Britain and France) have more
than 9,000 nuclear warheads in active service.

The same three NATO members are responsible for 70 percent
of the world’s arms trade.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall,
NATO had to change its language about ‘defending democracy against communism’.
Instead it re-branded itself as a military force involved in ‘humanitarian
interventions’.

One of the first of these
interventions was in the former Yugoslavia where it embarked on a murderous
campaign to bring the region back into the Western ‘sphere of influence’.

NATO forces used 1,200 warplanes
and helicopters to fly 35,000 combat missions against Yugoslavia. It dropped 20,000 bombs and missiles containing 80,000 tons of explosives.

Afterwards, Amnesty International
issued a damming report accusing NATO of war crimes because of its use of cluster
bombs and depleted uranium. It specifically sighted the bombing of the Serbian
television and radio station as a deliberate act of murder where 16 civilians
died.

NATO’s wider agenda in the region
is to gain control over energy resources such as oil from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia.

In 2007, it unilaterally announced
the creation of a missile shield in Poland and Czech Republic which triggered
off a new arms race with Russia.

The Afghan war is the NATO’s first armed
conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the sixty years of its
existence. It has been waged with the participation of armed units from all 26
NATO member states and twelve other European and Caucasus nations linked to
NATO, including Ireland..NATO forecss have murdered countless innocent
villagers in its dirty and bloody war.

Later this year, the Irish people will be asked to endorse
this murder machine by allowing the EU to forge greater ties with it. Protocol
4 of the Lisbon Treaty asserts that ‘a more assertive European Union role in
security and defence matters will contribute to the vitality of a renewed
Atlantic Alliance’

We should say NO.