US exploiting NATO for global warfare, arms sales: Analyst

The Pentagon chief’s call on members of the so-called US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL) shows that the United States is exploiting NATO to advance its global warfare and arms sales, according to an international lawyer and analyst.

“The United States cannot seem to make up its mind whether it wants a political solution in Syria and Iraq or a full military confrontation,” Barry Grossman said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday.

“Of course, bearing in mind the way the United Nations-sponsored Syria talks have been engineered to fail, a person could be forgiven for assuming that any prospect for a political solution stands no chance given the US-led coalition’s demands, its myriad objectives in the region which are inconsistent with peace and its unqualified commitment to escalating the use of force,” he continued.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter criticized some members of the so-called coalition against Daesh on Friday for doing “nothing at all” to destroy the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria.

“Many of them are not doing enough, or are doing nothing at all,” Carter said in an interview with CNBC on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In a speech at the forum, Carter singled out Turkey as a country the US wants to see play a more effective role, especially by tightening its border. "Turkey is a longtime friend of ours. It's a NATO ally. We're strongly in support of it. We stand with it in terms of defense of its own territory."

Grossman said that Carter’s comments “need to be understood in the context of another agenda which has been quietly playing out for some time now.”

“While not so long ago, conventional wisdom considered NATO to be a relic of the Cold War that should be relegated to the dustbin of history, but its quite recent usefulness to US hawks as a tool for advancing belligerent US foreign policy cloaked with the legitimacy of multilateral support at times when the United Nations has been less than perfectly compliant, has given NATO a second lease on life which has now made it all but indispensable to the US-led war program,” the analyst explained.

“Apart from creating the impression of broad-based multilateral support,” Grossman said, “NATO also provides a convenient mechanism for the US to spread the cost of its now continuous global warfare and, at once, market its overpriced weapons technology to member countries.”

Carter has spent the past week in Europe, primarily in Paris, where he urged allies to step up the fight against Daesh.

The United States has carried out the bulk of nearly 9,800 airstrikes launched in Iraq and Syria since the summer of 2014. The air campaign has done little to dislodge the Daesh terrorists from their territories.

“The last thing the US wants is a bunch of coalition member states from NATO or from the Saudi-owned Arab League, getting overly involved in this contrived conflict except, perhaps, by putting boots on the ground filled with expendables from other client states or by sharing the cost of expensive US manufactured hardware,” Grossman noted.

“Those who have been listening already understand that during the past couple of years, there has been no shortage of public commentary by US officials calling on recalcitrant NATO member states to make good on their financial obligations, while Arab League countries are expected to purchase their weaponry from a US armaments industry which is only too happy to sell them the latest military technology,” he added.

“Ashton Carter’s comments, in my opinion, are little more than a marketing campaign for America’s weapons producers and a terse reminder to NATO member countries that they need to ramp up their spending on weapons of mass destruction,” Grossman concluded.

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