Wayne Madsen

France and Greece were the only NATO nations to successfully quit the military structure of the Western «defense» organization. In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO’s military command structure and expelled NATO’s headquarters from outside of Paris. France has been a full-fledged member of the military wing of NATO since 2009 when Nicolas Sarkozy, with only verbal grandstanding from the French Socialist Party, reversed de Gaulle’s nearly four-decade old policy. In fact, in 1966, the French Socialist Party moved to censure de Gaulle for pulling France out of NATO’s military structure. Socialist President Francois Hollande has shown no inclination toward re-adopting de Gaulle’s policy and withdraw France from NATO’s military command. Hollande, like Sarkozy and the last Socialist President Francois Mitterand, is a committed Atlanticist.

In 1974, Greece withdrew from NATO’s military command structure in protest over the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus. However, conservative New Democracy Prime Minister Konstantine Karamanlis, a fervent supporter of NATO, rejoined NATO’s military command structure in 1980.

Declassified Central Intelligence Agency documents point to a major program by the United States to woo leaders of European NATO countries to support the alliance, even though they may have been committed left-wingers and, at least in public, against NATO policies.

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Patrick Martin

The opening night of the Democratic National Convention provided a grossly distorted picture of the Obama administration, presenting a right-wing, pro-corporate, anti-working-class government as though it was the second coming of the New Deal.

Speaker after speaker bashed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as the candidate of wealth and privilege and portrayed Obama as the advocate of working people and his reelection as the key to social and economic progress.

The utter cynicism of this claim was demonstrated by the continual references to Obama’s bailout of the auto industry as the high point of his concern for the working class. This action supposedly “saved a million jobs,” but there was no examination of the actual impact of the government intervention into General Motors and Chrysler on autoworkers.

Using the threat of imminent liquidation of the two companies, Obama’s auto task force, drawn from the top circles of investment banking, cut the wages of new hires by 50 percent, released the auto bosses of their obligation to pay healthcare benefits to retirees, and even stole dental and optical care from retired workers and their families.

White House officials—themselves largely drawn from Wall Street—spoke with contempt about the “unsustainable” pay and “gold-plated” benefits for which autoworkers had fought over two generations.

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Philip Giraldi

A guarantee of support for a strike against Iran overlooks the lessons of the First World War.

Israel’s attempt to steer American foreign policy has been nowhere more evident than in the sustained campaign to move the United States in the direction of war with Iran, a war that serves no American interest unless one believes that Tehran is willing to spend billions of dollars to develop a nuclear weapon only to hand off the result to a terrorist group.

The most recent overtures by the Israeli government have pushed the United States to make a declaration that negotiations with Iran have failed and will not be continued. For Israel, this is a necessary first step towards an American military intervention, as failed negotiations mean there is no way out of the impasse but by war, if the Iranians do not unilaterally concede on every disputed point.

Two recent op-eds have elaborated the argument, promoting the necessity of convincing the Israelis that the United States is absolutely serious about using military force against Iran if the Iranians seek to retain any capacity to enrich uranium. One might note in passing that this new red line, sometimes also called the abstract “capability” to create a nuclear weapon, has been achieved by moving the goal posts back considerably. At one time Iran was threatened with a military response if it actually acquired a nuclear weapon (which is still the official position of the Obama administration), but earlier benchmarks within that policy saying that enrichment should not exceed 20 percent or that the enrichment should not take place on Iranian soil have been abandoned in favor of what now amounts to zero tolerance. Those who note that Iran, which is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is under IAEA inspection, has a clear legal right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes have been ignored in favor of those who believe that Iran is somehow a special case.

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