http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/us-furthers-reagan%e2%80%99s-star-war-plans-with-global-nato/
Interview with Rick Rozoff, the manager of the Stop NATO website and mailing list and a contributing writer to Global Research.ca. conducted on September 4
They tried to shut you down over the weekend. Can you tell us what happened?
Yes, thank you for asking. The Stop NATO website was shut down by its host, WordPress, on Friday without any plausible explanation, with just a vague statement about “concern over some content on your site.” The site is a reputable news one and it took 24 hours and a good deal of pressure from sources around the world before WordPress relented and allowed the site to be reactivated. They didn’t close it down, they just prevented me from posting any new material. Of course, by the nature of these things it’s hard to determine whether it was a conscious political decision, but one has to allow for this possibility. Anyway, we are back online for the time being and thank you for asking.
Turkey has recently agreed formally to host NATO anti-ballistic missile elements on its territory.
From what I understand, the agreement by Turkey is that they are going to station what’s called a Forward-Based X-Band Radar-Transportable of the sort that was installed in Israel three years ago by the U.S., in the Negev Desert, which has by the way a range of 4,300 km (2,700 miles) and if aimed in the proper direction could take in the entirety of Western Russia and a good deal of Southern Russia. That is an equivalent of what is to be based in Turkey, in theory aimed exclusively against Iran, but I think only the credulous would believe that.
This has to be seen, of course, in the context of the decision reached at the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, last November to incorporate all NATO nations into the U.S. Missile Defense Agency plans for a global anti-ballistic missile system. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has recently clarified that we are not only talking about regional or even European continent-wide interceptor missile systems but one that is international in scope. And bringing it into Turkey – there have, incidentally, been discussions going back ten or more years from respective heads of the Missile Defense Agency of the U.S. Defense Department about situating interceptor missile facilities not only in Turkey, but also in nations like Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan. So, there are plans to extend a U.S.-dominated interceptor missile system from Europe to the east and south, that is into the Middle East and presumably into the South Caucasus and all the way to Central Asia.
Launch of ship-based Standard Missile-3
Of those countries that you’ve mentioned, which are in the process of soon signing formal agreements with NATO that you know of?
Every one of them has an advanced partnership program with NATO except for Turkey, which is, of course, a member. But I think another important consideration is that Romanian President Traian Basescu said last week that the U.S. and Romania will soon sign an agreement for the stationing of 24 Standard Missile-3 interceptors in Romania, which is part of what the Obama administration terms its Phased Adaptive Approach.
There are actually four phases of the SM-3, and last week Lockheed Martin announced it is establishing a testing facility near Huntsville, Alabama for what will be the most advanced, the SM-3 Block IIB, to go online in 2020. There will be an intermediate version going ready for deployment in 2015, and SM-3s will be based, estimates are 24 each, in Romania and Poland. And we have to recall that last year the U.S. moved the first Patriot Advanced Capability-3, an advanced version of the Patriot interceptor missile, into the Polish city of Morag, which is only some 35 miles away from the Russian border, with Kaliningrad.
I would like to add that accompanying the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles in Poland are a hundred or more US servicemen, which are the first foreign troops to be stationed on Polish soil since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, and the Forward-Based X-Band Radar set up in Israel is staffed by something in the neighborhood of a hundred U.S. military personnel as well, which are the first foreign troops stationed in Israel for a prolonged period in its history, and with the deployment of SM-3s in Romania a hundred U.S. troops will also be stationed in that nation, we are seeing the export of U.S. military forces and equipment to the east and to the south. I think it’s noteworthy that the announcement regarding Turkey was made by new State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who from 2003 to 2008 was U.S. permanent representative to NATO. This is the person who announced that Turkey is going to host a U.S.-NATO interceptor missile radar facility.
NATO is making overtures to India and India looks like it are considering working with them as well.
The actual announcement was made by another very significant person, the current U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, who incidentally six years ago co-authored a piece in Foreign Affairs, the monthly publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, with the intriguing title of Global NATO, the opening sentence of which states that NATO has “gone global,” and openly advocated at that point that NATO incorporate as full members, not simply as partners, what he deemed to be the world’s democracies, amongst which was India. The latter country would link interceptor missile capacities in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf with those in the Asia-Pacific region: Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan.
We are talking about people pursuing a long-term agenda. What the U.S. is reactivating now with the inclusion of NATO is the realization of the Ronald Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” plan, the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative out of which the current Missile Defense Agency developed; that is, one that allows the U.S. and its allies to be impenetrable to retaliation or any capability of retaliating by other countries that might be subjected to attacks by the U.S. and its allies. That is, nations like Russia and China will effectively lose their deterrence capabilities.
Targeted nation’s ballistic missiles can be destroyed in the boost, ascent, midcourse and terminal phases through a stratified series of constantly enhanced Patriot Advance Capability-3, sea- and land-based Standard Missile-3, Ground-based Midcourse Defense (with its Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors. A 280-foot-tall, 50,000-ton Missile Defense Agency Sea-Based X-Band Radar is home based in Adak, in the Aleutian Islands, menacingly close to Russia’s Pacific coast.
Sea-Based X-Band Radar, part of Ground-based Midcourse Defense system
To cap it all off, the Pentagon has been hell-bent in pursuing the militarization of space, a threat that China and Russia raise each year in the United Nations.
We have to recollect that the head of state of the U.S. currently, President Barack Obama – ironically, paradoxically, distressingly – on the occasion of delivering his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December of 2009 openly boasted that the U.S. was “the world’s sole military superpower.”
And I think that to maintain that status in the face of a weakening U.S. economy, with the rise of the BRICS nations and so forth, with trends that suggest that the U.S. is in decline internationally, that Washington is intent on maintaining its military supremacy – its one trump card if you will, its ultima ratio regum – and to ensure that no other country has the ability to retaliate, particularly in strategic terms. And when we talk about the latest proposed model of the SM-3 we are talking about one that could threaten Russia as well as China. I would argue that North Korea and Iran are pretexts for developing a global Star Wars system that would place both Russia and China within a circle of U.S. and allied interceptor missile system.
NATO missile elements in India would protect against or annul what threat for NATO?
There is no threat to NATO at all in my estimate, so that’s a fictitious claim. What in fact you are seeing is consolidation of what observers have warned about for a decade – the emergence of an Asia-Pacific NATO.
