http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/37672


Stop NATO
March 4, 2009


Mr. Simmons' Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border
Rick Rozoff


The death of American sociologist C. Wright Mills at 45 years of age in 1962 was
an irreparable loss not only to the United States but to the world, and not only
to his generation but the three that have succeeded it and on into the
indefinite future.

He was as at home quoting Rousseau, Balzac and Jacob Burckhardt, always to good
purpose, as he was formulating such concepts and models as military metaphysics,
mass society, the higher immorality and the cult of celebrity as early as 1955.

Mills did so in his mature, post-university writings with a simplicity of style
and expression matching the profundity and perspicacity of his observations and
conclusions.

In his work of the same name Mills defined the sociological imagination as the
intersection of biography and history.

The same may be said of politics, particularly world politics, and if the word
can still be used in the current 'postmodern' and 'post-historical' epoch,
destiny. Indeed for Mills sociology was no dry discipline, no mere compendium of
data and experimental results but living history, the historical dynamic
captured in the moment, and perhaps the collective human exemplification of
philosophical principles employed in a conscious manner.

History is replete with examples of an individual's personal trajectory
paralleling and illustrating the trends of a historical period and process, for
better or worse, with benign or malignant effects. Sometimes with both.

A standard example is that of Talleyrand-Perigord ("Regimes may fall and fail,
but I do not"), whose diplomatic career both reflected and affected for the 45
years from 1789-1834 the tumultuous developments in France from the fall of the
ancien regime to the abrupt end of its restoration.

A person performing such a role, whether possessed of a more than usual degree
of energy and ambition or of a steadily plodding nature, will be the equivalent
of a tracer bullet or dye injected into the bloodstream for an angiogram. One
can view in the person the intricacy of broader patterns and learn to spot the
presence and trajectory of the second by that of the first.

A person matching the description offered, though not likely to be discussed
centuries later like Talleyrand or even decades afterward like Mills, is Robert
F. Simmonds, Jr.

Biographical information on him is scant and basically reducible to the official
sketch provided for him on the NATO International website dated December 14,
2007 at:

http://www.nato.int/cv/scr/simmons-e.htm

Dates aren't often provided, but the NATO site mentions that Simmons was US
State Department Deputy Director of the Office of Regional Political and
Security Issues in the Bureau of European Affairs at some point presumably in
the mid-1990s.

The entry in question mentions that in the above position "[H]e managed U.S.
policy in connection with NATO, the OSCE, and European security architecture.
The issues he covered included NATO enlargement; NATO adaptation, including the
creation of EAPC and PfP; and the development of the role of the OSCE.
Previously he was assigned as Deputy Political Advisor to the U.S. Mission to
NATO and U.S. Representative to the NATO Political Committee."

PfP is the Alliance's Partnership for Peace transitional program to full
membership and was inaugurated in 1994. In the intervening years it has absorbed
all fifteen former Soviet republics, recently completed grabbing all six former
Yugoslav federal republics and every once neutral state in Europe - Austria,
Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta - except for Cyprus, although
the European Union has of late applied pressure on the island nation, now that
it's in the EU, to join the Partnership for Peace.

The EAPC is the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, which subsumes all current
NATO members with all candidate and other PfP nations as well as assorted
bilateral partnerships, conceivably as many as a third of the countries in the
world.

The PfP and EAPC have prepared twelve (with Macedonia thirteen) states for full
NATO integration and ten have already become members - the Czech Republic,
Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and
Slovenia over the past decade, with Albania and Croatia to join next month at
the 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg and Kehl.

In addition, as mentioned above, Simmons was instrumental in determining "the
development of the role of the OSCE," the Organization for Security and
Co-Operation in Europe, the world's largest intergovernmental security
organization with 56 members in Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and North
America, which assumed its current dimensions and name in 1995.

Although in theory a multinational structure for cooperation in providing and
maintaining security throughout greater Europe, the OSCE has evolved into yet
another mechanism which the major Western powers employ to threaten other
nations on the eastern periphery of NATO and the EU.

Simmons' role in establishing and consolidating these four post-Cold War
initiatives - an expanding NATO, the latter's Partnership for Peace and
Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and an Organization for Security and
Co-Operation in Europe under the control of a power not even in Europe, the
United States - alone would make him worthy of attention that his career to date
has somehow not received.

After performing the functions listed, he, again according to the NATO
biographical sketch, "served as Senior Advisor to the United States Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs on NATO. As Senior Advisor,
Mr Simmons played a significant role in developing U.S. policy on the full range
of NATO and European security issues."

In 2003 he was transferred from the US State Department to NATO headquarters in
Brussels, much as every few years American generals are shifted from the
Pentagon to Brussels to assume the mantle of NATO Supreme Allied Commander (the
first being General Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1951-1952) as well as the
complementary position of chief commander of the United States European Command.

His transfer to the European branch office of the US Departments of State and
Defense, as it were, was to take up new duties described on the same NATO page
as "Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO for Security Cooperation and
Partnership in September 2003. As Deputy Assistant Secretary General, he is
responsible for NATO-Russia and NATO Ukraine relations, Euro-Atlantic
Integration and Partnership, and relations with other organisations, including
the European Union."

His preceding decade in the State Department had prepared Simmons well for his
new role and for that which would be added to it the following year, 2004.

It was within months of his move to Brussels that the string of so-called color
revolutions commenced in Georgia in November of 2003.

Modeled after the joint CIA, National Endowment for Democracy and Soros
Foundation and Open Society Institute effort to topple the government of
Yugoslavia in September and October of 2000, Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to
the US on a State Department grant in the early 1990s and received his law
degree at Columbia University, seized power from standing president Eduard
Shevardnadze, who was manhandled by young Kmara thugs trained by their Pora
prototypes in Serbia, and introduced a new model of Western-financed putsches in
the former Soviet Union. (1)

In the summer of 1999 a BBC story, 'CIA ordered to topple Milosevic': US report,
detailed the genesis and gestation period of Washington's new and refurbished
coup design:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/387463.stm

Replete with sledgehammer-wielding toughs, rent-a-mobs attacking the parliament
building, ballots in the contested election being burned by Western-controlled
'democracy advocates' and suitcases of domestic and foreign currency provided by
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright smuggled in from Hungary, the 2000
Belgrade coup was the fons et origo of all subsequent 'regime change' campaigns
in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, replicated in Georgia in 2003.

The scenario would be repeated in most every particular a year later in Ukraine,
which readers will recall was one of Simmons' main bureaux at his new NATO post.

The third 'color' coup, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, occurred shortly
after Simmons in September of 2004 added to his NATO portfolio the title and
function of the Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Caucasus
and Central Asia.

The Kyrgyz coup in March of 2005 would emulate to a predictable and even tedious
degree those of Georgia and Ukraine, sixteen and three months earlier,
respectively.

In all three instances, as with the Yugoslav precedent, well-financed and
-organized street demonstrations would accompany and follow national elections
in which Western and Western-funded poll watchers, exit pollsters and media
would cry foul when the incumbent appeared to have won and demands for
unconstitutional - that is unprecedented and illegal - special elections were
put forward as the price for domestic peace.

And in all cases the opposition was a triumvirate of party leaders, two men and
a woman. In Georgia the trio consisted of Mikheil Saakashvili, Nina Burjanadze
and Zurab Zhvania; with Ukraine Viktor Yuchshenko, Yulia Tymoshenko and
Oleksandr Moroz; and in Kyrgyzstan Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Roza Otunbayeva and Felix
Kulov. Zhvania would die shortly after the so-called Rose Revolution's first
anniversary, with the government attributing his death to accidental causes and
his family accusing Saakashvili of ordering his murder.

Such a well-crafted model could not have been created domestically.

Simmons' former colleagues in the State Department no doubt led the charge, but
he himself was no bit player in the new drama, having donned the mantle of
NATO's special envoy to the South Caucasus and Central Asia in the interval
between the Georgian prototype and its replication in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

His position was one of several initiatives unfolded at NATO's summit in
Istanbul, Turkey in June of 2004.

Indeed never in history had a military bloc at one time expanded so broadly both
in terms of new members and partners and in the breadth of its geographical
sweep.

The Istanbul summit issued in

- The incorporation of all former Warsaw Pact members outside the ex-Soviet
Union not already brought into NATO, adding Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia to
the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, inducted in 1999, and eastern Germany
which was brought into the Alliance in 1989 with the nation's reunification

- The accession of the first former Yugoslav federal republic, Slovenia

- The hitherto unimaginable absorption of three former Soviet republics:
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

- Under the rubric of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, the upgrading of
NATO's seven Mediterranean Dialogue members - Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan,
Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia - to a heightened partnership status and the
introduction of a formal military alliance with the six Persian Gulf Cooperation
Council states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates. Growing out of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative were Individual
Cooperation Programmes with Egypt and Israel

With the three Baltic states and the Black Sea nations of Bulgaria and Romania
joining NATO, only Georgia and Ukraine remained to complete a full military
cordon along Russia's entire Western flank. (As will be seen later, Simmons has
had a role to play with those two countries' NATO integration also.)

Simmons' appointment would extend that presence along Russia's complete southern
one.

His purview includes eight of fifteen former Soviet federal republics and in
2004 two-thirds of the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States members:
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the Caucasus; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

The three Caucasus nations are all members of NATO's Partnership for Peace;
Azerbaijan and Georgia have both had troops gaining combat experience in Iraq
and Afghanistan and Armenia deployed troops to the first.

After Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were brought into the NATO fold and the
eight nations assigned to Simmons to soften up are added to the column, only
Belarus and Moldova remain of the Soviet Union outside of Russia itself.

Moldova sent troops to Iraq under Partnership for Peace obligations and both it
and Belarus are now targeted by the European Union's Eastern Partnership for
further distancing from the Commonwealth of Independent States and Russia and to
be corralled into the EU-NATO-US paddock.

Though the lion's share of the task remains with Simmons.

His objective and the underlying geostrategic exigencies actuating it are clear.

"[T]he only alternative [to Kyrgyz] routes into Afghanistan are from the north,
through the Central Asian countries...Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
are pivotal.
"NATO’s greater strategic interest is in the South Caucasus East-West
Corridor, which, some commentators have said for years, is much more than three
energy pipelines.
"With NATO allies Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey on the western and southern
shores of the Black Sea, Georgia, on the eastern shore, is the natural gateway
to a corridor that connects Europe to Afghanistan."
("From Peshawar to Batumi: Time to Realize the East-West Corridor," Georgian
Daily, December 29, 2008)

A Turkish analyst traces the intended trajectory as follows:

"The recent struggle around the Black Sea region has now reached Georgia, having
moved from Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria and Romania, one by one.
"Poland and the Czech Republic could be added to this list, since the clash over
the missile shield has led to the perception of an encirclement policy.
"The U.S. is gradually directing its resources away from Europe towards the
Middle East, the Caucasus and its neighboring regions."
("The new battle zone for global hegemony: the Caucasus," Turkish Daily News,
October 22, 2008)

In conjunction with the State Department's Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried (2) and its Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (and previously Special
Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy
Diplomacy) Matthew Bryza (3) - who arrived at their current posts in May and
June of 2005, respectively - reviewing Simmons' travels and actions over the
past year is the best manner in which to examine how his and his superiors' plan
is progressing.

He continues to hold two top NATO posts, that of Deputy Assistant Secretary
General of NATO for Security Cooperation and Partnership as well as Special
Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, and as such his range is broad
though his projects are integrally related.

In January of last year, seven months before the Georgia-Russia Caucasus war and
the near US/NATO-Russian showdown in the Black Sea, Simmons was paraphrased as
advocating that "NATO is ready to contribute to resolution of conflicts in the
Black Sea region."

In his own words,“NATO can play a significant role in the establishment of
stability in the region.”
(PanArmenian.net, January 14, 2008)

Two days later he was in the capital of Moldova, one of the few post-Soviet
nations he's not directly tasked to draw into NATO, where "According to the
Moldovan Foreign Ministry, Robert Simmons will have meetings with Moldovan
officials to discuss the current relations between Moldova and NATO, the head of
state’s initiatives aimed at solving the Transdniestrian dispute and the
implementation of the NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan."
(Reporter.MD, January 16, 2008)

"Solving the Transdniestrian dispute" alludes to NATO intervening in one of the
four so-called frozen conflicts in the ex-Soviet Union. He would attempt to
intrude the Alliance into the other three after his trip to Chisinau.

In Azerbaijan in March of the same year, Simmons announced that "NATO is
prepared to provide aid to South Caucasus and Central Asia countries to protect
energy facilities."
(Trend News Agency, March 7, 2008)

The above report added "There are large energy facilities in Azerbaijan,
including oil and gas terminals in Sangachal, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil
pipeline and the Baku-Novorossiysk and Baku-Supsa and South-Caucasus gas
pipelines."

While in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku he also said that “NATO is ready to
consider the membership of Azerbaijan,” as he oversaw the second part of the
Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) for the nation.
(Interfax, March 8, 2008)

Azerbaijan had recently withdrawn its contingent of troops serving with NATO's
Kosovo Command because it feared that the Western-engineered secession of the
Serbian province might serve as a precedent for Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku
still insists it will regain by military means.

But the position of the local government, president and parliament alike, meant
nothing to Simmons, such is NATO's contempt even for its partners, who averred
"I think the situation on the withdrawal of Azerbaijan’s peacekeeping forces
from Kosovo can change."
(Azeri Press Agency, March 8, 2008)

His main goal was achieved, though, as he had delivered the second phase of the
Individual Partnership Action Plan.

"Simmons said that the key issues in the Plan are training of Azerbaijan’s
army for participation in the joint operations with NATO forces, the holding of
trainings, as well as military training and support by the Azerbaijani Defence
Ministry."
(Trend News Agency, March 10, 2008)

A few days earlier Simmons had stirred up a controversy by claiming that
Uzbekistan had agreed to turn the Khanabad base it had evicted US military
forces from almost two years before back over to the Pentagon for the war in
South Asia, which elicited this reaction from an Uzbek official: "Farkhad
Murtazayev bristled at comments made earlier by NATO special envoy to Central
Asia and the Caucasus Robert Simmons, who insisted that Uzbekistan was ready to
give its go-ahead."
(Voice of Russia, March 7, 2008)

And this from the Russian Defense Ministry:

"The Defence Ministry of the Russian Federation has...reported that any notices
from the military establishment of Uzbekistan about permitting the US to use the
Uzbek airbase didn’t come to the Russian Defense Department.
"'It, maybe, was 'a trial balloon', a sort of probe,' said a spokesman of the
Ministry, meaning the utterances of the representative of NATO."
(WarAndPeace.ru, March 7, 2008)

Later in March Simmons would repeat his plan for a NATO military buildup in the
Caspian Sea, an Alliance complement to former US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's proposed Caspian Guard:

“Establishing a military-marine fleet in the Caspian is part of our
co-operation with Central Asia and the Caucasus.
"It mostly deals with the defence of infrastructure in
the Caspian.
"We are holding talks with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan with regards
to the defence of energy facilities, and the issue of establishing a
military-marine fleet remains open.”
(Trend News Agency, March 21, 2008)

Another Azerbaijani press source added "He said secure transportation of
hydrocarbon resources to Europe is what NATO is concerned about."
(AzerTag, March 27, 2008)

The following month Simmons reprised his intentions, saying "the issue of
protecting energy infrastructure belonging both to NATO members and their
partners was on the agenda."
(The Financial [Georgia] April 5, 2008)

Later in April he was in Kazakhstan promoting the accession of Ukraine and
Georgia to NATO and taunting Russia with "“Russia protested against the
admitting of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO as
well and the enlargement of the Alliance into the Balkan Peninsula. But, these
countries became NATO member states.”
(Trend News Agency, April 12, 2008)

Not longer afterward in Georgia, Simmons met with the nation's State Minister
for Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili - the person who would help prepare the
invasion of South Ossetia and a five-day war with Russia less than four months
later - and in reference to a reported Russian overflight the minister said "If
Georgia had been a member of the program, then NATO, not just Georgian radars
would have registered the April 20 attack of the Russian fighter in Georgian air
space and it's departure to Russian territory."
(Interfax, April 25, 2008)

This is no record that Simmons did anything other than nod willing agreement to
the comments, especially with his statement that "I think it's fair to say that
a number of allies believe that recent Russian actions, which we condemn, do
call into question Russian neutrality as an arbitrator or facilitator of the
[South Ossetian and Abkhazian peace] process."
(Associated Press, April 24, 2008)

While in the Georgian capital Simmons also consulted with the Georgian Defense
Minister and the ambassadors of NATO member states in the nation and the "sides
discussed the resources of NATO which can be used in the conflict zones to
improve the peacekeeping process there."
(Rustavi 2, April 25, 2008)

That is to say, Commonwealth of Independent States-mandated peacekeepers must
leave and be supplanted by NATO troops so that the US- and NATO-trained Georgian
armed forces would have a free hand to invade Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania had finished three weeks earlier and
Georgia's full membership bid had been held up for two reasons: Unresolved
conflicts on its soil and foreign (non-NATO) troops in its presumed territory,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Simmons, above, indicated NATO's plans for eliminating those barriers to
complete integration.

Understanding the message that Simmons was delivering, the president of
Abkhazia, Sergei Bagapsh, responded as reported in a dispatch worth quoting in
length:

"'The replacement of Russian peacemakers will lead to a direct conflict. We will
not let foreigners into Abkhazia and all of us will stand at the border.'
"Concerning the recent statements of NATO’s representative the in South
Caucasus [Robert Simmons], who cast doubt on the role of Russian peacemakers in
the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict zone, Bagapsh said:
"'This right is the right of the strong. This is the same right as the one not
to take into consideration of the decision of the Security Council on
Yugoslavia.
"'Well, the Security Council hasn’t reached any decision, so let’s bomb
Yugoslavia!'
"'And once the Council didn’t [resolve] the question, they themselves have
settled the question regarding Kosovo.
"'This is, to our great regret, the right of the strong that now leads to the
fact that such an important institute of the world community as the United
Nations Organization loses its prestige and becomes pointless.'"
(Interfax, April 25, 2008)

The Russian forces didn't leave as Simmons demanded but war in South Ossetia
ensued four months later anyway.

He revisited the issue after Georgia launched an invasion of South Ossetia on
August 8 as will be seen further on.

In May of 2008, though, Simmons headed to Turkmenistan on the Caspian Sea.

With the sudden death of Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov, who had run an
autarkic government since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country
was open to foreign penetration and NATO wasted no time in moving on it, both
for military transit and trans-Eurasian energy projects; Simmons' demand for
NATO naval presence in the Caspian Sea two months before was documented earlier.

Meeting with President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, Simmons pledged that "NATO is
going to continue building up its relations with Turkmenistan" and "the
interlocutors discussed issues related to cooperation within the format of
NATO's Partnership for Peace program, as well as pressing problems related to
strengthening stability in the region."
(Turkmenistan.ru, May 14, 2008)

Turkmenistan is rich, it's not yet determined how rich, in natural gas, and lies
off the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea with Iran to its south.

Securing NATO overflight, basing and surveillance rights in the nation - not to
mention deployment of naval forces inside the Caspian - would be a direct threat
to Iran and part of the general displacement of both Russia and China from the
region and denial of its resources to both.

The succeeding month, June, Simmons returned to Azerbaijan on the eastern side
of the Caspian directly across from Turkmenistan and Iran's neighbor to the
northwest. There he officiated over annual NATO week events.

During the seven days Simmons oversaw a NATO/Partnership for Peace Trust Fund
seminar, "organized for the first time in a partner country" that brought
together "NATO member and partner countries, as well as about seventy
representatives from the Mediterranean Dialogue [Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan,
Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia] countries...."
(AzerTag, June 16, 2008)

Another illustration of NATO's integration of European, Caucasus, Central Asian,
Middle Eastern and North African nations into a rapidly evolving global military
nexus.

Later in the same month, and with the countdown to war in the South Caucasus
nearing, Simmons joined the State Department's Matthew Bryza and Georgia's
Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili in Warsaw, Poland for a meeting of the New
Group of Friends of Georgia, which included the participation of "Top officials
from the foreign ministries of Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Romania,
Sweden, Latvia [and] Bulgaria."
(Civil Georgia, June 24, 2008)

That is, a month and a half before the Caucasus war commenced, top NATO and US
officials orchestrated a meeting of Baltic, Black Sea and other nations to shore
up support for the Saakashvili regime in its impending showdown with South
Ossetia and Russia.

The very next day, June 25, Simmons was in the world's new nation, Montenegro,
which of course is neither in the Caucasus or Central Asia but the Balkans,
where he met with deputy ministers of the ministries of defense and foreign
affairs and initiated "A first round of consultations at staff level [which]
opened the Intensified Dialogue between NATO and Montenegro on 24 June 2008."
(NATO International, June 25, 2008)

Three months later Simmons would host Bosnia's Deputy Minister of Defence at
NATO Headquarters in Brussels in the first staff level meeting to plan the
nation's Intensified Dialogue with the Alliance. Bosnia and Montenegro have
recently been pulled into the Adriatic Charter, a mechanism devised by the US
State Department to initially transition Albania, Croatia and Macedonia into
full NATO Membership.

Simmons' role in the integration of the five former Yugoslav republics not
already in NATO extends and complements that of expanding the bloc into the
Black Sea region, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea Basin, Central Asia and, as the
next paragraph shows, South Asia.

The always mobile Simmons was back in Azerbaijan in late June ordering more
Azeri troops for NATO's Afghan war, in fact doubling them.
(Today.AZ, June 28, 2008)

After the August 8-12 Georgian-Russian war, one which was fraught with potential
for a one-on-one showdown between the world's two major nuclear powers as
Georgia's army is a US proxy creation and US warships were deployed within
kilometers of their Russian opposite numbers in the Black Sea, Robert Simmons
was in the Georgian capital to aid in rebuilding the nation's military
capabilities for a new round of hostilities.

He was quoted in Tbilisi stating, "NATO will help Georgia in seven ways. First
of all this means air defense and the restoration of defensive infrastructure."
(Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 21, 2008)

Meeting with Simmons and NATO Supreme Allied Commander US General John Craddock,
Georgian Defense Minister David Kezerashvili said that "NATO's 26
member-countries will form a special group, which will study the Georgian
defence system" and that "the group will study the country’s need in the
defence sphere and the size of aid the alliance can render to Georgia."
(Trend News Agency, August 22, 2008)

During the same visit and apparently to reward Georgia for triggering the
Caucasus war of only two weeks prior, Simmons asserted, “I can say that
Georgia’s movement towards the action plan for its membership in NATO is
operative and I can confirm that Georgia will become a NATO member for sure.”
(Focus News Agency, August 22, 2008)

In October of last year Simmons was back in neighboring Azerbaijan to attend the
inauguration of the country's reelected president, Ilham Aliev, an
unconventional role for a special envoy for NATO's Secretary General Jaap de
Hoop Scheffer, in the midst of general consultations on Alliance integration.

In January of 2009 after the government of Kyrgyzstan began the process of
closing the US and NATO airbase in Manas that had been employed for the war in
Afghanistan over several years, Simmons was dispatched to that nation to
preserve the base.

Before his departure it was announced that "during the visit a new contact
officer for NATO in Central Asia will be introduced."
(Trend News Agency, January 30, 2009)

An Azerbaijani news source reported on his visit.

"Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said at a news conference in
Moscow that the Manas air base would be shut down.
"NATO Special Representative for the South Caucasus [and Central Asia] Robert
Simmons said during his visit to Kyrgyzstan several days ago that the
organization would like to see the continuation of this agreement...."
(Trend News Agency, February 4, 2009)

Leaving Kyrgyzstan, Simmons led a NATO delegation to the capital of
Turkmenistan.

Within a few days he headed a delegation of NATO experts to Ukraine to craft the
Ukraine-NATO national program for 2009. Note how seamlessly Simmons shifts
between his two NATO posts and roles while always advancing a common
geostrategic agenda, the campaign to gain control of post-Soviet space and
Eurasia as a whole.

Within a few brief months he worked at integrating the former Soviet republics
of Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan into NATO; accelerating the integration of
ex-Yugoslav nations onto the Alliance's conveyor belt to imminent membership;
demanding that Russian peacekeepers leave Abkhazia and South Ossetia, leaving
both open to an onslaught by the Georgian army, trained and armed and advised by
the Pentagon and NATO; failing that, rushing to Georgia after the August war to
provide assistance in upgrading its military including its air defense system;
visiting the Central Asian nations of Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan just as the
new US presidential administration assumed power and began to implement the
intensification of the war in South Asia.

If Simmon's work in the South Caucasus, Ukraine and the Balkans is read in
Russia as completing the process of its encirclement and if his frequent visits
to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan on the Caspian Sea are seen by Iran as efforts to
isolate and besiege it, then his efforts to more tightly bind Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the Alliance and its escalating war in Afghanistan
(and into Pakistan) will be viewed with serious concern by China, which has
borders with the three aforementioned Central Asian nations.

China and Russia have even more reason for apprehension. Roberts Simmons post as
NATO envoy for the Caucasus and Central Asia pits him and the bloc directly
against the post-Soviet Collective Security Treaty Organization (Russia,
Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan).

Armenia is part of Simmons' Caucasus assignment and to the degree he succeeds in
strengthening NATO's grip on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan,
China and Russia both will lose the only collective security partnerships they
have in their own neighborhoods in favor of a Western military bloc, effectively
depriving them of influence even in neighboring nations.

Simmons is his dual capacity at NATO is the main agent in driving the Alliance
from the Balkans and the Black Sea through the Caucasus and into Central and
South Asia, isolating and separating Russia, China and Iran.

Should that scenario develop, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization would cease to exist and with them the
only effective challenges to Pentagon and NATO international military
superiority and impunity in Eurasia and in the world as a whole.

In his 1956 volume The Power Elite in the chapter called The Military
Ascendancy, C. Wright Mills warned that "war has become seemingly total and
seemingly permanent" and that "diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war or an
interlude between wars" in service to "what can only be called a military
definition of reality."

....

1. The cosmopolite billionaire and self-styled philanthropist George Soros may
have postured for eight years as George Bush's arch-adversary, but when it came
to plotting, funding and choreographing multihued coup attempts in the former
Soviet Union, the Middle East and Asia - successfully in Georgia, Ukraine,
Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan, not so yet in Armenia, Belarus, Myanmar and elsewhere -
the two Georges worked hand-in-glove.

Former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze and the last foreign minister of
the Soviet Union, who was deposed in his nation's 'rose revolution,' himself
accused Soros of organizing and funding the uprising.

The following is from a semi-official Georgian website only four months after
the putsch:

Capacity Building Fund (CBF), set up with the financial assistance of the UNDP
and billionaire philanthropist George Soros, to support governance reforms in
Georgia, launches activity and will provide salaries to the Georgian officials.

In a joint news conference with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili at the
World Economic Forum on January 22, UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown and
George Soros announced the creation of a CBF.

“In total, 5 thousand state officials will receive salary from this fund.
However, main attention will be focused on the employees of the law-enforcement
agencies,” Director of the Fund Kote Kublashvili told Civil Georgia.

The President of Georgia, the Parliamentary Chairperson and the Prime Minister
will receive USD 1500 each, while the Ministers, the Secretary of the National
Security Council and the Prosecutor General will have USD 1200 per month.
....
(Civil Georgia, March 22, 2004, http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=6492)

Since Mikheil Saakashvili's March on Tbilisi in 2003 George Bush has celebrated
and evoked it on every possible occasion as the inspiration and model for his
"global wave of democracy."

So involved have the two Georges been in events in Georgia for the past five
years plus that the nation is now doubly eponymous.


2. The State Department web page on Daniel Fried says this about him:


Daniel Fried took the oath of office as Assistant Secretary of State on May 5,
2005. Before taking the helm of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs,
Ambassador Fried served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior
Director for European and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council
since January 22, 2001.

Ambassador Fried was Principal Deputy Special Advisor to the Secretary of State
for the New Independent States from May 2000 until January 2001. He was
Ambassador to Poland from November 1997 until May 2000.

Daniel Fried, of Washington, DC, began his career with the Foreign Service in
1977. He served in the Economic Bureau of the State Department from 1977 to
1979; at the U.S. Consulate General in then-Leningrad from 1980 to 1981; as
Political Officer in the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade from 1982 to 1985; and in the
Office of Soviet Affairs at the State Department from 1985 to 1987. Ambassador
Fried was Polish Desk Officer at the State Department from 1987 to 1989 as
democracy returned to Poland and Central Europe. He served as Political
Counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw from 1990 to 1993.

Ambassador Fried served on the staff of the National Security Council from 1993
until 1997, first as a Director and then as Special Assistant to the President
and Senior Director for Central and Eastern Europe. At the White House, he was
active in designing U.S. policy on Euroatlantic security, including NATO
enlargement and the Russia-NATO relationship.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/46525.htm


3) The State Department page on Matthew Bryza

Matthew J. Bryza assumed his duties as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs in June 2005. In this capacity, he is responsible
for policy oversight and management of relations with countries in the Caucasus
and Southern Europe.

He also leads U.S. efforts to advance peaceful settlements of the separatist
conflicts of Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Additionally, Mr.
Bryza coordinates U.S. energy policy in the regions surrounding the Black and
Caspian Seas.....

In April 2001, Mr. Bryza joined the National Security Council as Director for
Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for coordinating U.S. policy on Turkey,
Greece, Cyprus, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Caspian energy.

Mr. Bryza served as the deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and
Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy from July 1998 to March
2001. In this capacity, Mr. Bryza coordinated the U.S. Government’s
inter-agency effort to develop a network of oil and gas pipelines in the Caspian
region.

During 1997-1998, Mr. Bryza was special advisor to Ambassador Richard
Morningstar, coordinating U.S. Government assistance programs on economic reform
in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Mr. Bryza served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during 1995-1997, first as
special assistant to Ambassador Thomas Pickering, then as a political officer
covering the Russian Duma, the Communist Party, and the Republic of Dagestan in
the North Caucasus.

He worked on European and Russian affairs at the State Department during
1991-1995.

Mr. Bryza served in Poland in 1989-1991 at the U.S. Consulate in Poznan and the
U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, where he covered the "Solidarity" movement, reform of
Poland’s security services, and regional politics.

He joined the United States Foreign Service in August, 1988.

Mr. Bryza graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in
international relations. He received his master’s degree in the same field
from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is fluent in Russian and
Polish, and also speaks German and Spanish.