Rick Rozoff: Africa is the new Battleground for NATO

How time flies: Now the war by North Atlantic Treaty members against Libya is in its third month, and has been conducted under the official auspices of NATO for the past fifty days: According to NATO, Alliance military aircraft have flown over 7,200 missions and more than 2,800 combat flights since NATO inaugurated so-called "Operation Unified Protector" on March 31. Recently, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grushko "Pointed out that the operation in Libya is becoming the first actual litmus test for NATO's new strategic concept," a reference to the latest Strategic Concept adopted by the 28-nation alliance at its summit in Lisbon, Portugal last November, the first in this century, and since then endorsed at the Washington summit in 1999, when NATO was waging its first war and incorporating its first war, while including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The war against Libya was also the test case for the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), the first overseas military command launched by the Pentagon since the end of the Cold War. (Its predecessor, Central Command, was created in 1983), whose Joint Task Force "Odyssey Dawn" was created in charge of bombing runs and cruise missile attacks in a naval blockade of Libya from March 19-30.