Macedonia will probably become a member of the US-NATO anti-Russia military alliance, along with Ukraine, and the confrontation with Russia will continue to escalate in the new US-NATO Cold War [...]
General James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, visited Macedonia on September 17 and declared that “We do not want to see Russia doing [in Macedonia] what they have tried to do in so many other countries. No doubt that they have transferred money and they are also conducting broader influence campaigns.”
His observations were made in the run-up to the referendum to be held on September 30 in which Macedonians will vote on a deal reached in June with Greece that would change the country’s name to the Republic of Northern Macedonia. The referendum question is “Do you support EU and NATO membership by accepting the agreement between Macedonia and Greece?” and the outcome will be interesting, but Mattis failed to see the supreme irony in the fact that his visit to Macedonia was specifically to conduct a “broader influence campaign” by standing next to its prime minister Zoran Zaev as he announced that “There is no alternative for the Republic of Macedonia than integration into NATO and EU.”
Influence, anyone?
Although Macedonia (population two million) is not a member of NATO it has 244 soldiers in Afghanistan as part of the futile US-NATO-“coalition” mission and Washington wants the military bonds to be closer. It isn’t exactly a great military power, with an army of about 8,000, and it isn’t close to the border with Russia, along which there is an increasingly confrontational US-NATO military presence, but the Pentagon and its sub-office in Brussels always welcome more members to their alliance. And who better than General Mattis to exercise “broader influence” on Macedonia to encourage it to join the team confronting Russia.
While in Macedonia Mattis declared the vote to be the “most important” in Macedonia’s history, and assured everyone that a pro-NATO result would result in “economic prosperity and increased foreign investment.” It would “unlock the Nato accession process and allow you . . . to determine your own future in institutions made up of like-minded countries.”
Predictably, Mattis was in line with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who also visited Macedonia in September and announced that “We are ready to welcome your country as NATO’s 30th member,” telling its people that the referendum “is a once in a lifetime opportunity to join the international community . . .” Was he trying to influence anyone?
General Mattis is rabidly anti-Russian and hostile to a great many other countries, people and organisations. It is now almost forgotten that he is the man who replied to a question in 2005 about the US war in Afghanistan by uttering the psychotic pronouncement that “Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.” He is obviously a person who can bring balance and sympathetic understanding to international affairs.
As recorded in the New Yorker, “on January 22nd, two days after President Trump was inaugurated, he received a memo from his new Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, recommending that the United States launch a military strike in Yemen.”
Yemen was then and still is in a state of civil war. The country has nothing to do with the United States, but in 2017 the intelligence community in the US said they had discovered that a group of alleged anti-American terrorists were in a small village called al-Ghayil and it was decided by the Best and the Brightest in Washington to attack the place.
The operation Mattis wanted the president to authorise was intended to kill people, of course, and specifically a supposed leader of Al Qaeda; so Mattis and the National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford had dinner with President Trump, who then decided to go ahead with what turned out to be a totally disastrous military operation.
It was a tragic farce. As reported in the Washington Post, instead of a clean quick special forces’ attack on the village, “a massive firefight ensued, claiming the life of an American sailor and at least one Yemeni child, and serving as an early lesson for President Trump’s national security team about the perils of overseas ground operations.”
“An elite Special Operations air regiment was then sent in to pull the team and its casualties out of the fray, banking into the night under heavy fire to link up with a Marine quick-reaction force that had taken off in MV-22 Ospreys from the US ship Makin Island floating offshore.” In the course of the operation, Chief Petty Officer Ryan Owens, a navy commando, was killed, and one of the $75 million Ospreys was destroyed.
In other words, the whole thing was an utter shambles.
But the spin doctors in Washington couldn’t admit that their operation had failed, and Trump announced that Mattis had told him it had been a “highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.” The brawl had been a ball.
Thank you, General Mattis, the man who declared “It’s fun to shoot some people” and alleges that Russia carries out “broader influence campaigns” and then does his best to influence Macedonia by declaring to its citizens that “You would join an alliance in which countries large and small work together to uphold shared principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and freedom from coercion, while others seek to diminish these very values, sowing discord from Syria to the Ukraine.” This is from the defence secretary of a nation that has sowed catastrophic discord in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and through the whole Middle East, to Libya which the Pentagon and NATO bombed and blitzed to a state of utter chaos in what General Mattis might call a “broader influence campaign.”
Macedonia will probably become a member of the US-NATO anti-Russia military alliance, along with Ukraine, and the confrontation with Russia will continue to escalate in the new US-NATO Cold War. And who knows what else might be planned by those attending a future military dinner with Trump. After all, “It’s fun to shoot some people.”
Originally published on 2018-09-14
About the author: Brian Cloughley is British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Churchill’s famous dictum about the Soviet Union, that it was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” is arguably just as applicable to Srebrenica. July 11 this year will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of that landmark event of the Yugoslav wars which the late Prof. Edward Hermann, speaking somewhat less poetically than Churchill, had called “the greatest triumph of propaganda at the close of the twentieth century.”Whether we choose to view Srebrenica as a criminal investigation to sort out who and at whose direction executed prisoners of war, or as a political provocation to lay the groundwork for ...
With a general election looming in the United Kingdom and Spain possibly following Greece’s revolt against austerity later this year, we need to think, not just who or what we are voting for, but why we should vote at all.People are suffering from a deficiency which is as unbalancing as a hormone or vitamin deficiency. What we are severely lacking in is democracy. Many of those pondering on the state of politics feel unhappy and somehow depleted. They haven’t yet realised it is democracy that’s lacking because they have believed what so many politicians have told them, over and over ...
There was international jubilation when Montenegro seceded from its union with Serbia in 2006 after a controversial referendum. The Referendum Law prevented Montenegrins living and registered in Serbia from voting in the referendum, ensuring that tens of thousands of Montenegrins, in a country of only 622,000, who would have voted to remain the union could not vote in favour of maintaining it.It must be remembered that state-paid workers like teachers and police were told by the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) leader Miodrag Vuković before the referendum May 2006, that someone “cannot work for the state and vote against it,” something objectively ...
Because this article states so many things that might be likely to contradict what most people in Western countries have been led to believe, readers here are especially strongly encouraged to click onto any allegation which seems at all questionable, in order to get to the sources behind any given questionable allegation. And wherever a clicked-onto source turns out to be another article, one is encouraged similarly to do the same there, so that the reader will be able, in this way, to probe down to the ultimate sources, which are the sources upon which this article is finally based.After ...
On 4th of April 2019 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) “celebrated” the 70th Anniversary of its murderous existence. This horror organization was born sort of as a “Rosemary’s Baby”, signed into life in Washington DC, as the North Atlantic Treaty. Its creation was absolutely unethical but also absolutely “legal” – meaning what we, the west, have made the law, a man-made law for war, was applied by the Washington-Pentagon driven NATO. Estimates have it, that NATO and its ‘allies’, cronies, proxies and mercenaries killed more than 20 million people since NATO’s existence, basically since the end of WWII. Compare this with ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
A scholar shares the true story of two men who stood up and spoke out against the murder of American Indians, and how they are celebrated today. Native American tribal members pay their respects at the headstone of Union Officer, Capt. Silas Soule, at the Riverside Cemetery Dec. 03, 2014 in honor of the 150th Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre.Every Thanksgiving weekend for the past 17 years, Arapaho and Cheyenne youth lead a 180-mile relay from the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to Denver.The annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run opens at the site of the Sand ...
If the danger of the anti-Putin, anti-Russian disinformation propaganda campaign out of the Pentagon and promoted by the US corporate media weren’t so serious, the effort itself might be laughable. I did laugh.In fact, listening last night to a discussion by an NPR host with a government spokesperson about the latest propaganda effort to blame the downing of a Malaysian jumbo jet over Ukraine on July 17, 2014 on Russia. After hearing the government official, whose name I didn’t catch, say that Dutch prosecutors had found “solid evidence” that it was a “Russian-made” BUK antiaircraft missile launched from “pro-Russian” rebel ...
Never has US intentions in Asia been so obvious. Attempts to portray America’s role in the region as constructive or necessary have been ongoing since the end of World War II, however, recently, with Asia able to begin determining its own destiny for itself, the tone from Washington has become increasingly curt and direct.US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s remarks during the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore were all but a proclamation of US hegemony over Asia – a region of the planet quite literally an ocean away from Washington.In Reuters’ article, “U.S. flexes muscles as Asia worries about South China ...
TerminologyA meaning of the term Great Power(s) (GP) in global politics from the beginning of the 16th century onward refers to the most power and therefore top influential states within the system of the international relations (IR). In other words, the GP are those and only those states who are modelling global politics like Portugal, Spain, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, united Germany, the USA, the USSR, Russia or China. During the time of the Cold War (1949−1989) there were superpowers[1] as the American and the Soviet administrations refered to their own countries and even a hyperpower state – the ...
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created 70 years ago in 1949 it was formed as a blatant military instrument for waging the Cold War, a war that the US, Britain and other European allies had newly embarked on. NATO’s public relations cant about “peace and security” is but Orwellian rhetoric.The supposed allies of the Soviet Union hastily went from an ostensible joint purpose of defeating Nazi Germany during the Second World War to initiating hostility towards Moscow. Already in 1946, British war-time leader Winston Churchill was fulminating about “an Iron Curtain” descending across Europe, in language adapted from ...
Historical research into the Nazi era rarely throws up many surprises any more. German historian Stefan Ihrig, however, is an exception to this rule. By studying long-published sources, he has uncovered the fascination that Ataturk's modern Turkey held for the German far right, which has been seriously underestimated until now and which set an example for Hitler and the National Socialists.From a right-wing viewpoint, what Ataturk had achieved was an unattainable goal for Weimar-era Germany. Using force of arms, he had managed to reverse the Treaty of Sevres, which had been forced on his country by the Entente in 1920, ...
On August 9 [2020], presidential elections were held in Belarus with five candidates bidding to be head of state. According to the Central Election Commission, the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, won in the first round with over 80% of the votes. Mass protests began in Belarus right after the announcement of the preliminary election results. People went to the streets, expressing their dissatisfaction with the results of the elections that they believe were unfair. Mass protests turned into riots and there were clashes between rioters and the police. Many people were detained and injured, and two protestors died.Representatives of the ...
Editor’s note:This article was written and originally published in January 2015. „God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle is our way, and death for sake of God is the highest of our aspirations“Jihadi credoWest Europe before the 2014 Christmas became once again a target of several mini-terrorist acts by the radical Islamists among whom the Wahabbies are the most active and dangerous. On Tuesday, December 23rd, Germany’s security service warn of the highest terrorist threat in decades as the German participation in the anti-ISIS struggle became the reason for potential terrorism. ...
Despite the lack of evidence linking Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen to Daesh (ISIS) in any operational (direct) sense, the first inclination of U.S. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was to renew American bombing of Syria, Iraq and Libya— the very nations that were destroyed by U.S. bombs directed by Mrs. Clinton and from whence Daesh arose. In so doing Mrs. Clinton made it evident that she is an unrepentant militarist whose bloodlust, combined with her longstanding interest in promoting American business interests, ties her to the U.S. imperial project of the last century and one-half. The precise moral difference between ...
On the occasion of 20th anniversary of the aggression of NATO Alliance against Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the FRY), on 22nd and 23rd March 2019 Belgrade was the venue of the International Conference under slogan NEVER TO FORGET, and title “Peace and Progress instead of Wars and Poverty”. The organisers of the Conference are the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals, the Federation of Associations of Veterans of the National Liberation War of Serbia, the Serbian Generals and Admirals Club, the Society of the Serbian Hosts, in cooperation with the World Peace Council. Besides the participants from Serbia, the Conference ...
In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a bizarre Obama Administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will “help” Kosovo to join NATO as well as the European Union. She made the pledge after a recent Washington meeting with Kosovan Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Washington where she praised the progress of the Thaci government in its progress in “European integration and economic development.”1Her announcement no doubt caused serious gas pains among government and military officials in the various capitals of European NATO. Few people appreciate just how mad Clinton’s plan to push ...
Here it comes again. As the enemies of peace continue to pressure a new US President into deeper war commitments overseas, and as Washington’s Deep State works relentlessly opposing Russian moves in Syria at every turn, the war drums have started again – beating harder than ever now, clamouring for a new US-led attack on Syria. This morning we saw the familiar theme emerge, and just in time to provide a convenient backdrop to this week’s Brussels’ ‘Peace Talks’ and conference on “Syria’s Future”.The US-led ‘Coalition’ prepares to make its end-run into Syria to ‘Retake Raqqa,’ and impose its Safe Zones in order ...
On March 11, 2006, President Slobodan Milosevic died in a NATO prison. No one has been held accountable for his death. In the 12 years since the end of his lonely struggle to defend himself and his country against the false charges invented by the NATO powers, the only country to demand a public inquiry into the circumstances of his death came from Russia when Foreign Minister, Serge Lavrov, stated that Russia did not accept the Hague tribunal’s denial of responsibility and demanded that an impartial and international investigation be conducted. Instead, The NATO tribunal made its own investigation, known ...
The current Ukrainian crisis and in fact civil war which stared at the very end of 2013 are grounded in for decades lasting internal interethnic antagonisms primarily on the Ukrainian-Russian relations including above all the “Crimean Question” as an apple of discord from 1954 between Ukraine and Russia.[1] The crisis came from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius were in November 2013 an Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine had to be signed. Lithuania at that time (July 1st−December 31st, 2013) presided the European (Union) Council and formally had full political responsibility for the breaking out of the crisis as being the ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
Macedonia will probably become a member of the US-NATO anti-Russia military alliance, along with Ukraine, and the confrontation with Russia will continue to escalate in the new US-NATO Cold War. And who knows what else might be planned by those attending a future military dinner with Trump. After all, “It’s fun to shoot some people.”
