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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 6/21/12

Iraq: NATO Forges New Strategic Partnership In Persian Gulf

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Iraq: NATO Forges New Strategic Partnership In Persian Gulf
Rick Rozoff

 

 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced on June 20 that it has opened what it terms a Transition Cell in Iraq "to smooth the path towards strengthened partnership and cooperation."

 

The decision to do so was reached at the May 20-21 summit of the Western military bloc in Chicago.

 

The initiative follows eight years of the NATO Training Mission-Iraq, established in 2004 under the control of NATO's top political body, the North Atlantic Council, and in conjunction with the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. The first commander of both the training mission and the command was David Petraeus, who set up both operations and who subsequently was in charge of U.S. Central Command, then of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

The announcement by NATO that it was continuing and deepening military cooperation with the government and military of Iraq came a day after a Saudi deputy foreign minister visited NATO Headquarters to strengthen strategic relations with the alliance and NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged the Persian Gulf military powerhouse join the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative

 

On June 18 NATO announced that Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow would arrive in Israel for a two-day visit to meet with senior government officials and on June 20 leave for Jordan to meet with Prince Faisal bin Hussein, Prime Minister Al-Tarawnah and Chief of Defense Staff General Al-Zaben and deliver a keynote address at a conference titled "NATO in the new global security era."

 

Israel and Jordan are members of NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue military partnership along with Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, with Libya slated to be the next addition.

 

Ahead of the Chicago summit NATO disclosed a new, geographically unlimited, category of military cooperation it calls partners across the globe, and identified its first eight members as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

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Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
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