Payback time for America's allies

Hunble

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Wow, when I talked to my German friends on this website, I have mentioned a personal preference for the American military to depart Germany.

Often, I have mentioned Poland and Bulgaria as possible countries where the American military could be deployed. Today, Germany no longer serves any military purpose for the protection of Europe.

As I look at a map of Europe and considered the political situation, I felt that Poland would be a good option to protect the Baltic countries and other former USSR countries.

Bulgaria would be an outstanding choice for many reasons.

1) Protection of the fragile Baltic regions such as Serbia and Kosovo.
2) Rapid deployment to Iraq and other Arab nations if needed.
3) Economical support of a new East European friend.

Seriously, this was my own personal opinion, and I had no idea the United States was actually doing it!

I was very surprised to read this today:

------------------------------

Payback time for America's allies as GIs set up camp in the new Europe
The Guardian (U.K.) | 03/04/03

Bulgaria finds itself in the frontline of US military build-up

On a beach by the grey waters of the Black sea, scores of young American airmen are racing against the clock to get ready for war. Surrounded by Kalashnikov-toting Bulgarian military police, fenced in by red corrugated iron, and shrouded by a pine grove, the men of the US air force's 409th air expeditionary group are pioneers in a mission that is reconfiguring decades of the US military presence in Europe and redrawing Europe's military map.

"We're in a rush," said Sergeant Jason Smith, just arrived from Charleston in North Carolina. "Our main role is to support the global war on terror. And we're preparing for future operations."

Since last Tuesday night when two US Hercules transport aircraft dropped out of the sky from Ramstein base in Germany on to Bulgaria's Burgas airport, 200 metres from the Americans' beachside encampment, the airmen, many barely out of their teens, have been working frantically to get Burgas fit for the US war machine.

The battleship-grey transports - huge C-5 Galaxies, C-141s and the C-130 Hercules - have been landing almost every day over the past week, disgorging hot dogs and Coke, computers and secure phone systems, huge tarpaulins for a "tent city", showers and tanks of water, and more troops and pilots.

Yesterday afternoon a brace of KC-10A Extender jets, the biggest air tankers in the USAF, landed at Burgas to play a key role in the campaign against Saddam Hussein. The two tanker jets, capable of carrying more than 160,000kg of fuel, are to be followed by at least 14 others.

Orders


"No one asks us whether we like it or not," said Mincho Minchev, the Bulgarian airport's technical director. "We're just under orders to service the US aircraft. We're not told what's going on, just on a daily basis what will be arriving." The Americans on the beach at what has been dubbed Camp Sarafovo are the first foreign military to commandeer Burgas airport since the Luftwaffe seized it in 1943.

But they are the thin end of a wedge of a US military project that is appropriating strategic assets in a vital area that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, terms the "new Europe".

"If things go on as they are right now, there will be a lot more of this," said Sgt Smith, at 27 a nine-year veteran of the USAF.

Just up the Black sea coast in neighbouring Romania, hundreds of US troops as well as planes and helicopters have been pouring into an air base beside the port of Constanta over the past 10 days. Last November Washington invited Bulgaria and Romania to join Nato. With war looming, it is, perhaps earlier than expected, payback time for the impoverished, corrupt Balkan states whose proximity to the Middle East have boosted their value to Pentagon planners. Suddenly the talk of eastern Europe is of the Americans snubbing pacifist Germany and of redeploying their vast military presence there to the cheaper, more welcoming, and more passive "new European" countries of Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

With not a single vote cast against the decision in parliament in Sofia, the Bulgarian government last month offered the US the Burgas base, the Sarafovo camp (a holiday complex for Bulgarian army officers), and more in the pipeline. "We're ready to negotiate over locating American bases in Bulgaria," said Lubomir Todorov, the foreign ministry spokesman. "Our territory could be a very good place for new bases because it is close to the Middle East."

A senior western diplomat in Sofia said: "There's going to be a lot of activity here. It's a convenient location."

Just back from Washington last Thursday, the Bulgarian defence minister, Nikolai Svinarov, announced: "There's a possibility of providing four or five bases to the United States." The Romanians have already offered the port of Constanta, the centre of the national oil industry, as well as the country's air bases.

In Poland, derelict Warsaw pact garrisons are being dusted down by enthusiastic locals who think the GIs are coming their way after spending a couple of generations in Germany. In Stuttgart yesterday, the top US commander in Europe, General James Jones, confirmed that Washington was looking at bases in Bulgaria, Romania and Poland for mobile and more flexible deployments of US forces in about a year's time.

He denied that the move was a "kneejerk reaction" aimed at punishing Germany for its anti-war stance, but was part of a reordering of US strategic planning. "This is not about building up eastern Europe in the same way we built up western Europe after world war two," he said

Public support for the Americans is soaring in Poland and Romania. In Bulgaria, which was so cravenly loyal to the Kremlin in the Soviet era that it was nicknamed the Soviet Union's 16th republic, opinion is more ambivalent.

There was a small anti-American demonstration in Burgas a couple of weeks ago and locals fear that the US airmen will wreck the Black sea tourist business that is its lifeblood. "Everyone's afraid. Who wants this?" said Mr Minchev.

Oil


But the opposition is passive. The government is committed to backing the Americans. Burgas is only an hour's drive from the Turkish border, a couple of hours' flying time from Baghdad, and home to the country's largest oil refinery with big money to be made from supplying the fuel that the Stratotankers will use.

The base is also to be used for secret operations. "It will be mostly refuelling operations. But I expect a more intense exploitation of this base," Mr Todorov said.

Bulgaria is additionally valuable to the US. It is the only one of the 13 east European countries that have signed declarations of support for Washington to be currently sitting on the UN security council. The declarations infuriated France and Germany - old Europe in Mr Rumsfeld's description.

Washington can count on Bulgaria, as well as Britain and Spain, to support it on the new UN resolution on Iraq which aims to unleash a war. If Germany and France deride the east Europeans as the "new vassals", take the view that once a (Soviet) satellite, always a satellite, and Paris warns Bulgaria that it is imperilling its chances of joining the EU, the east Europeans are sulking but unrepentant.

Their history is that of being squeezed and invaded by the rival big powers. Just when they thought they were safe within the shelter of the west by getting entry tickets to Nato and the EU, they are being squeezed yet again between Europe and America over Iraq. "It's not fair," Mr Todorov said. In Burgas, the young Americans appear to be digging in for the long haul, the vanguard of a new stage of the Pax Americana.
 

Hunble

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Now what was this about?

02,property=Bild.jpg


Böse! Angela Merkel schaut als Papp-Figur aus dem Papp-Popo

And you wonder why Americans are getting a little upset with Germany?
 

Don

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Kleinlich oder nicht, das ist der deutschsprachliche Teil des Forums daher wundere Dich nicht wenn die Antworten auf Deutsch kommen.


Don

PS:

Ich finde das Bild genial! Es drückt exakt das Verhalten von Merkel aus!
 

Hunble

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Here in northern Iraq, they're getting impatient for freedom.


ASLA AYDINTASBAS IRBIL, Northern Iraq--It is hard to imagine another place where Americans are more popular these days. "We like the son of 'Haji Bush,' because he will fight Saddam for us," a young Kurdish driver tells me plain and simple. Others--young and old, Kurdish or Turkmen, shopkeepers and politicians--echo similar sentiments about ending the reign of brutality in Baghdad.

Iraqis inside government-controlled areas have quietly nicknamed President Bush "Abu Abdallah," an endearing name, or "Abu Jinan"--a pun on "Father of Jenna"--meaning "Father of Paradises." A well-known religious leader at the central mosque in the regional capital, Suleimaniyah, says "I welcome even the Jew Sharon if he can liberate us from Saddam." In fact, just about the only people who oppose a war on the Iraqi dictator here seem to be the Western journalists who have flocked to the Irbil Towers Hotel to await its arrival. Why are the Iraqi voices still so distant for the chattering classes in the West?


Iraqis once exiled in various corners of the world met here last week to launch their long-awaited opposition conference. Much of the media has focused on whether or not Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy, would make it to the event. But that almost seems irrelevant. With or without American participation, the Iraqis here say they are ready to reclaim their country in the final war of liberation.

This is not simple rhetoric. After all, these people were effectively fighting Saddam Hussein and designing a democratic transition long before Washington warmed to the idea. The roughly seven million Iraqis who live outside the regime's control--in exile, or in the Kurdish safe havens in the north--have developed strong democratic traditions which they now want to transplant inside the country. In the smoke-filled meeting rooms, conferences and workshops in London, Washington or northern liberated Iraq, they have been discussing Iraq's new constitution, the "de-Baathification" of its institutions, truth and reconciliation, and disarmament. One exile admits that they are looking at Germany's de-Nazification, and even at the Federalist papers.

"Despite what many in the West say, the Iraqis are largely in agreement about the fundamental issues of transitional democracy," says Kanan Makiya, the Brandeis University professor and Iraqi author. "Sure, there are still some who rely on the army and see change as a top-down process, perhaps a coup that maintains the repressive institutions of the regime, rather than the rebuilding. But these people are not here and in any case constitute a minority at this point."

Along with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, Mr. Makiya is one of the architects of the transitional period. Here in the northern part of the country where he has been living for a month, it is amusing to watch the Cambridge intellectual interact with Shiite clerics, resistance fighters, and tribal leaders. But everyone has a unique role within the resistance and Mr. Makiya's moral authority, and Mr. Chalabi's leadership skills, are apparent to a passing observer.

An exuberant force exudes from the Iraqis braving for the final push. At the main conference hall in the Kurdish town of Selahaddin, where the opposition meeting is taking place, all talk is of post-Saddam life. "I am dreaming of Baghdad," a giant of a man, a former member of the elite Republican Guard who joined the opposition in 1993, tells me. The other day, there was a homecoming party for resistance fighters who are secretly returning from Detroit, London, and the Netherlands for the final day of reckoning. Every little scene--old friends embracing; a debate about the national anthem of free Iraq; the arrival of a secret envoy from a large tribe in the government-controlled areas--is strangely touching. The mountain air is brisk with confidence.

The mood of the street is not too different. Outside Baghdad's reach, the two self-governing Kurdish enclaves here have established relatively free societies. There is all you cannot find in Baghdad--freedom from Iraqi intelligence, satellite TV, Internet cafes, cell phones and a lively media environment. Yet so long as Saddam remains in power, the experiment here will remain vulnerable. There will also be no justice done for the millions killed or scarred by Saddam's aggression. The images of antiwar demonstrations across Europe could not look more meaningless in this context. The other night, a young hotel employee asked me emphatically: "Why do people in Europe want Saddam?" It was not a rhetorical question.


To understand the level of devastation caused by Baghdad, one need only walk in any major city in the U.S.-patrolled enclave in Northern Iraq. Every conversation beyond a few pleasantries ultimately unearths the story of a lost brother, or son, or relatives killed in one of the regime's many purges--or a brush with death during a chemical attack. The level of violence once unleashed here, and currently endured by many Iraqis in government areas, is surreal by Western standards. The Anfal campaign of 1988-89 alone claimed more than 100,000 lives in a year of organized ethnic cleansing.

Last week in Suleimaniyah, the former headquarters of the Iraqi secret police reopened as a museum dedicated to human rights. There, a Kurdish woman in her 30s whispered that she does not want Americans to liberate Baghdad. She was the only one to say so in my two weeks here. "My father was taken away in 1988 with all other men and we are still hoping that one day he might come. If Americans kill Saddam and father does not come back at the end, we will have no hope to keep going."

But of hope and healing, there is also plenty. I visited a Turkmen family, forced to leave its ancestral hometown of Kirkuk in 1991 as part of Iraq's "Nationality Correction" campaign, ethnically cleansing the city of Turks and Kurds. The couple and their nine kids live in a shack with a plastic sheet for a roof. "We are hoping to go back to our home very soon," the father told me defiantly. Once well-off, the family has secured their property deeds with relatives who managed to escape deportation by either agreeing to be registered as Arabs or having sons enter the Baath Party.

The steadfastness and yearning for freedom here may not make its way into the news stories, but it will ultimately reshape this nation. Policy makers in Washington should stop worrying about every little detail that might go wrong in the war or post-Saddam period; for it is abundantly clear to anyone here on the ground that Saddam's house will be dismantled by Saddam's citizens, and army, and bureaucrats, and scientists. In fact, during my time here, free Iraqis in the north and the occasional visitors from the yet-to-be-liberated parts kept asking the same question, "When are the Americans coming?" Really, when will they come?

Ms. Aydintasbas, a writer for the Turkish daily Sabah, is an adjunct fellow at the Western Policy Center in Washington.
 

dkR

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Ms. Aydintasbas, a writer for the Turkish daily Sabah, is an adjunct fellow at the Western Policy Center in Washington.
Allein deshalb schon weigere ich mich, diesen Propagandatext durchzulesen :evil:

Das die Army jetzt die Kurden bewaffnen will ist ja wohl das idiotischste was ich mir vorstellen kann! Dann dürfen die USA wieder den Türken gegen kurdische Terroristen helfen undsoweiter....
Ich meine auch irgendwo gehört zu haben, die USA wollen die Kurden unter türkischer Aufsicht bewaffnen!
 

orbital

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die jungs sorgen scon dafür das sie nicht arbeislos werden, bis jetzt sind alle probleme selst geschaffen worden saddam bin laden sind alle irgendwann eimal von den usa unterstüzt worden.

wenn ich mir deren cia foltereinheit nur anschaue - vollbart sonnenbrille handschuhe psydouniform mit dem erlass die feinde hinzurichten wie in einm schlechten film!
 

JohnDiFool

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G.W.Bush said:


"I'm the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President.
Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation...."

"I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace."

"I view our nuclear arsenal as a deterrent, as a way to say to people that would harm America, don't do it. That's a deterrent, that there's a consequence. And the President must have all options
available to make that deterrent have meaning."

...and you wonder why "old europeans and the whole rest of the world" get a little upset by american policy....... :twisted:

CARPE DIEM

JohnDerNarr
 

truth-searcher

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@ hunble

Why Bulgaria and Poland?

For the same reasons that America settled down in Central Asia:

To achieve the main American geostrategical goal of preventing the unification of Eurasia !!

A few american bases between Europe and Russia (Poland, Bulgaria) and a few between Russia and China (Central-Asian republics like Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan), to keep those three major forces apart!

But those little bases will not keep Europe from building new alliances in the coming decades with Russia and China!

Oh, and before I get ridiculed as talking nonsens, this was the idea of Zbigniew Brzezsinski, former presidential adviser of Carter. Read his book " The Grand Chessboard" about american geopolitical challenges for the next century! It is all in there!

The USA as we know it, will not survive such a struggle in the long run!

Too bad!

Well, enjoy killing and destroying almost defenseless countries like Afghanistan and Iraq as long as you can!

The rest of the world knows what you are up to, and if you dont turn around from this world-domination-trip, you are gonna get your asses kicked big time!

truth-searcher
 

TERRANER

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1) Protection of the fragile Baltic regions such as Serbia and Kosovo.
Serbia & Kosovo Baltic regions......?!?!

Baltic...?????

do you know what u are talking about?

go to school!,then come again!

greetings from a turkish "friend"

bush=

:oops:

:x :twisted:
 

truth-searcher

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@ Terraner

LOL

Baltic, Balcan, it is all the same for our strong american friends!

Who cares, right? :twisted:

They wanna control the world without even knowing it! Maybe they are planning to reshape the region by transferring all the Serbs and Kosovarians to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia? ;-)

Greetings,
truth-searcher
 

truth-searcher

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@ Eskapismus

LOL, WOW! So that is why the top powerful 11% of Americans are fucking around with other peoples countries: They cant find their own country!!

:p

truth-searcher
 

JohnDiFool

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Yeah, they just point the Finger anywhere on the worldmap and say "so thats my country" and if they realize that they pointed Afghanistan or maybe Iraq or anything else, they just go out and bring it "back home"............. :evil:

CARPE DIEM

JohnDerNarr
 

JohnDiFool

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YEAH....alter aber guter Joke....gabs schon unter dem Titel "The World according to Mr. Reagan"!

Einfach klasse!

CARPE DIEM

JohnDerNarr
 

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