NATO's Chickens are Coming Home to Roost

In 2011, the Obama administration declared that it was not going to war. Instead, it declared that it would be using funds from the counterterrorism budget to attack the forces of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, to level the city of a foreign country. NATO took part in that non-war, with Europeans helping to disable the very military equipment they had sold to Gaddafi's regime. 

I know of no terror group that has an air defense system, but Obama was never tried by the Senate for violating the War Powers Resolution, so this will stand as precedent, and indeed it is a precedent that is being followed in Syria. NATO powers continue assisting the United States in bombing multiple countries in the Middle East.

From Afghanistan to Lybia, NATO has taken part in bombings which have killed countless civilians in the past 14 years of continuous war. This is, make no mistake about it, a century of war. The Pentagon itself has admitted that the fight against Islamic extremism is to last as long as the American Indian wars: more than a generation. 

It is inconceivable that military planners could not have foreseen that destabilizing two stable regimes, creating failed states, would lead to the rise of extremist groups, and of large waves of refugees. The fact is: they did. And they also knew that this was a political crisis which could be used to give relevancy to a dying world order.

Though NATO points to the annexation of Crimea on the part of Russia as the most destabilizing act by a large power in this century, it is plainly clear that NATO planners wanted to antagonize Russia, to renege on promises made after the fall of the Soviet Union, by encircling the former Cold War power. They did so by planning to bring Ukraine into NATO, virtually guaranteeing that Russia would lose its last naval base in the Black Sea. 

If NATO's planners could not foresee that Russia would interpret their loss of that base as an act of aggression, they clearly cannot read the Russian military mind, or they have forgotten that Russia has been brutally invaded from Europe by Napoleon to Hitler. 

NATO
After the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO risked irrelevancy, and many predicted that it would disband. The attacks of September the 11th, and the state-approach which the United States took to Al-Qaeda and the tribal Afghan government of the Taliban, meant that NATO was obligated to go into war mode along with the US. Since that time, few have doubted the relevancy of NATO, while many have criticized its overreach.

If NATO had not leveled Libya, there would be no ISIS there. If NATO had not leveled Libya, the mercenaries employed by Gaddafi would not have fled with his arsenal to Mali to establish an oppressive Islamic government, and France would not have had an excuse to invade and "liberate."

Today, Afghan and Libyan refugees trying to flee the instability rained on them by NATO are being told at NATO's borders: "Go back. We rained fire on you, but now we can't help you, you're a burden to us; our bombing was not a burden to you, it was help, and it's a shame you weren't able to put that help to better use."