Daniel Fried, US Assistant Secretary of State
In an interview with the Voice of America, the US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said that NATO plays a positive role in supporting European stability, and that in all of Russia’s history its borders have never been so reliably protected as they are at present owing to NATO and the European Union.
The US diplomat said that he voiced his opinion as a historian, not a politician. If so, he missed the target… his statement was made exactly 9 years after NATO launched its aggression against former Yugoslavia. At that time, NATO and US strategists also assured the world that one of their aims was to ensure stability and security in Europe. Yet, the NATO operation titled Merciful Angel had devilish consequences for the Yugoslav population. Bombardments and missile strikes which continued for 78 days ruined that country’s economy, power engineering, infrastructure, churches, and schools, pushing Yugoslavia ten years back in its development. The damage has been estimated at 100 billion US dollars. Two and a half thousand people fell victim to the devilish operation. Let’s hope that the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo is the last act of so-called mercy committed by the US and NATO in Europe.
Russia is not Yugoslavia or Iraq; it is not a country that the United States and NATO can bully from a position of strength. Yet, Moscow clearly sees and analyses the methods and means they use to promote their interests in the world. Bearing this in mind, Russia sees NATO’s expansion to the east as a threat to its security. Certainly, it is foolish to claim that new NATO bases in Bulgaria and Romania and US anti-missile facilities in the Czech Republic and Poland will ensure Russia’s national interests.
Americans and NATO member-states are very clever at giving nice names to their military and foreign policy operations. They say they bring to other nations freedom, democracy, and prosperity… as if NATO is not a military bloc, but, a charity society with global responsibility. It is well to remember that, in the years of the cold war, the United States called its most powerful nuclear missile the Peacekeeper. You can imagine what kind of peace its ten warheads could bring to other nations, and they were much more powerful than those that were dropped on the heads of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Probably, Mr Fried, as a politician and historian, wants to forget it, but, he must understand that Russian leaders shall be guided by the realities of geopolitics and not by the supposedly benevolent declarations coming from Washington and Brussels.
25 March 2008
Viktor Yenikeyev
Voice of Russia World Service
http://www.ruvr.ru/main.php?lng=eng&q=24732&cid=58&p=25.03.2008 (in Russian and English)
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