NATO Bases From the Balkans To the Chinese Border
The Role of Robert F. Simmons, Jr.


by Rick Rozoff
Global Research, March 7, 2009
Stop NATO - 2009-03-04


March 4, 2009
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages

Mr. Simmons' Mission:

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. Simmons, 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 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, 200

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, 200

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.â€