In Hands Off Protest, Democrats Protest To Protect NATO.

The Hands Off Movement Is Protesting Some legitimate Issues, But the Support for NATO isn't One Of them.

Recently, protests have been sparked across the United States against Donald Trump and Elon Musk, called the “Hands Off” protests.

I agree with Many of the protests' demands, such as the demand for the Trump administration to keep their “hands off” Medicare and social security.

However, on foreign policy, the protests do not demand that Trump keep his hands off of Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon or Iran but do include a demand that he keep his hands off NATO.

Pictured Above: Poster For the “Hands Off” movment’s demands.

The longtime anti-war activist Medea Benjamin- who is sympathetic to the protests overall- noted that she was “deeply disturbed to see NATO on the list of items that we are rallying to protect”.

Benjamin noted that:

Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, leaving villages bombed, infrastructure destroyed, and countless dead

In this article, I will review the actual history of NATO in the former Yugoslavia, Libya, and Ukraine and explain why the organization should not be protected by protestors.

The 1999 Bombing Of The Former Yugoslavia.

Despite the fact that NATO is portrayed as a defensive military alliance, they have actually conducted multiple offensive military operations.

In 1999, NATO countries dropped bombs on the former Yugoslavia for 78 days.

As journalist Kit Klarenberg wrote, “NATO’s March - June 1999 aerial assault on Yugoslavia was ostensibly waged to prevent an impending mass slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo.”

However, Klarenberg noted that “as a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded, all purported abuses of Albanian citizens occurred after the bombing began”.

As Noam Chomsky said, “the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians” but instead was done because “Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself”.

This was the central thesis of the book “Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo,” which Chomsky points out was endorsed by Strobe Talbott who “ran the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing”.

NATO’s official excuse for the bombing - to save Albanians in Kosovo from Serbian atrocities- was an “event to justify this massive self-adulation”.

Chomsky noted that “up until January 1999 a majority of killings came from the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army ) guerillas who were coming in to try to incite a harsh Serbian response which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians to bomb”.

It turns out, as Chomsky said, that the KLA “were being supported by the CIA in those months”.

Despite NATO’s “humanitarian” justification for the bombing, Chomsky noted that Turkey, a NATO member, had “driven probably several million Kurds out of their homes” and “destroyed about 3500 villages,” killing “tens of thousands of people” shortly before the NATO bombing to which NATO had “not a word” to say.

As Chomsky noted, NATO later used atrocities that took place against Albanians after the bombing to try to paint its campaign as dropping humanitarian bombs (an oxymoron on its face). As Chomsky said, “There were atrocities… After the bombing. The way it’s presented is: the atrocities took place and then we had to bomb to prevent genocide, just inverted.”

Far from being ‘humanitarian bombs, “Amnesty International, among others, reported that NATO committed serious violations of the rules of war during its campaign, and numerous human rights groups concur and document various war crimes.”

As Chomsky noted, NATO bombed a “TV station” and “radio station,” which they justified by saying they were “propaganda outlets, so therefore it was right to bomb”.

Chomsky noted that “A group of international lawyers did appeal to the International Tribunal on Yugoslavia” who “cited reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and admissions by the NATO command” which proved “NATO war crimes”.

Chomsky noted that Justice Goldstone, a “very respected South African jurist,” even concluded that the NATO bombing was “illegal,” which “makes it a war crime”.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill, writing about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, noted that “Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure para-states” due to the bombing.

He noted that when Bill Clinton initiated the bombing, “Like Bush with Iraq, Clinton had no UN mandate (he used NATO)”.

Scahill reported that the “humanitarian” impact of the bombings included “the bombing of the studios of Radio Television Serbia where an airstrike killed 16 media workers; the cluster bombing of a Nis marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the deliberate targeting of a civilian passenger train; the use of depleted uranium munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic chemical waste to pour into the Danube River.”

Scahil also noted that NATO states, particularly the United States, lied about what was actually happening in Kosovo, initially claiming that “100,000 military-aged men” were murdered, then moving the number down to “50,000” yet later on “The International Tribunal itself reported that just over 2,000 bodies were recovered from postwar Kosovo”.

Scahil also noted that:

Following the NATO invasion of Kosovo in June of 1999, the US and its allies stood by as the Albanian mafia and gangs of criminals and paramilitaries spread out across the province and systematically cleansed Kosovo of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and other ethnic minorities. They burned down houses, businesses and churches and implemented a shocking campaign to forcibly expel non-Albanians from the province. Meanwhile, the US worked closely with the Kosovo Liberation Army and backed the rise of war criminals to the highest levels of power in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo has become a hub for human trafficking, organized crime and narco smuggling. In short, it is a mafia state.

NATO’s Alliance With ISIS In Libya.

Another phony “humanitarian intervention” by NATO was the NATO intervention to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya in 2011.

The intervention was done on the grounds that Gaddafi was fighting moderate, pro-democracy rebels and the intervention was done to stop a supposed massacre Gaddafi was about to commit, including by pumping his troops full of viagra to rape women.

Even early on, there were signs that these claims from NATO states were bogus.

Early on, human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch came out to debunk the claims that Gaddafi was giving viagra to his troops to commit rape.

However, it wasn’t until 2015 that it came out that the entire intervention and its justifications were bogus.

A 2015 UK parliament report on Libya found that the claim that Gaddafi was about to commit a massacre against civilians was bogus, noting that “Qaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians. This myth was exaggerated by rebels and Western governments, which based their intervention on little intelligence.”

The report also found that the NATO intervention to remove Gaddafi was not actually due to humanitarian concerns but that “France, which initiated the military intervention, was motivated by economic and political interests, not humanitarian ones.”

Furthermore, the report found that the rebels were not “moderate” but that “The threat of Islamist extremists, which had a large influence in the uprising, was ignored — and the NATO bombing made this threat even worse, giving ISIS a base in North Africa.”

It also found that “The uprising — which was violent, not peaceful — would likely not have been successful were it not for foreign military intervention and aid.”

Finally, the report found that “The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.”

The so-called “humanitarian intervention” turned Libya- a country that previously provided free housing, healthcare, education, and electricity- into a failed state rife with ISIS bases and open slave markets.

Aside from the fact that the regime change operations turned one of the most successful states in Africa into a failed state, it also had consequences beyond its border.

Journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in 2012, the CIA created a “rat line” that “was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition.”

Hersh reported that “Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.”

How NATO Provoked And Prolonged the Ukraine War.

NATO was also instrumental in provoking and prolonging the war in Ukraine.

Going back as far as 1997, the well-respected U.S. diplomat George Kennan warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

Kennan noted that NATO expansion towards Russia’s borders would:

be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

Kennan wrote that this view “is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters.”

Despite this warning from experts, NATO continued to expand its country membership eastward under the Clinton administration and later the Bush administration.

By 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns (who later became Biden’s CIA director) gave another warning about this policy.

In a leaked memo, Burns warned that “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region”.

Burns wrote:

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Despite this prophetic warning, NATO refused to take Ukrainian membership off the table.

In Noam Chomsky’s latest book, he noted that NATO states “Refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO.” He also noted that “In fact, in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate Ukraine.”

Chomsky compares this to “the U.S. attitude toward the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s,” referring to the strategy of intentionally provoking a Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan by arming the Mujahideen “with the intent of “increased the probability that” the Soviets would invade in order to “give the USSR its Vietnam war.”

After provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, NATO prolonged the war.

The Ukrainian outlet Pravda reported that UK prime minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv in April of 2022 in order to block a peace deal that was being negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Turkey.

The outlet reported that Johnson told Ukraine, “the collective West felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that there was a chance to "press him."

He said that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”

The outlet reported that “Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine "had turned into a dead end"

Oleksandr Chalyi, a Ukrainian diplomat who took part in the peace talks, said that “we were very close” to ending “our war with some peaceful settlement” and that Russia “tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement”.

The lead Ukrainian negotiator at the peace talks, David Arakhamia, also said that:

Russia's goal was to put pressure on us so that we would take neutrality. This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, as Finland once did. And we will give a commitment that we will not join NATO. This is the main thing

He also said, “Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and (said) "let's just fight.”

To summarize, after provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO states blocked a peace deal that could have ended the war 2 months in.

It is also hard to argue against the fact that taking the Istanbul deal would have been a far better result for Ukraine than the current situation.

The former Zelensky advisor Oleksii Arestovych said:

The Russian side still insisted on peace initiatives. And the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good, an intermediary document... Now 200-300 thousand would be alive, probably, and half of Ukraine would not be destroyed and mined... They agreed to political discussions on Crimea... We made concessions, but the amount of their concessions was greater. This will never happen again, it won’t, they will push more and more

Pro War Liberals

Just looking at some footage of the Hands Off protests, it is clear that pro-war Democrats are certainly taking part in it.

The marches have included numerous Ukrainian flags - a signal of support for the Ukraine proxy war, which has actually been destructive for Ukraine.

I have even seen signs with slogans such as “Trump is a Russian agent” at the protests.

While there are certainly many legitimate demands, and I am sure that many of the protests have noble goals, it is clear that a large part of them are made up of and co-opted by the pro-war, neoliberal democratic establishment.

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