Rick Rozoff: NATO War Council To Target Syria

On Tuesday, June 26 Belgium time the North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of the US dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization military bloc, will take up the issue of Syria under provisions of its founding document that in the past ten and a half years have resulted in military deployments preparatory to and the subsequent waging of full-scale wars. The ambassadors of the alliance's 28 member states constitute the council, nations whose collective population is 900 million. Its founding members include three nuclear powers, the US, Britain and France, the first the self- proclaimed sole military superpower. Until the day before the meeting, NATO was to take up a request by member Turkey to hold consultations under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty's Article 4, which allows any member state to call on the entire alliance to respond to alleged threats to its territorial integrity and security. On June 25, three days after a Turkish F-14 supersonic fighter-bomber was shot down over Syrian waters, Turkey announced that it was going to ask the military alliance to discuss its Article 5, which states that "an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all" and commits NATO allies to "assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force." Article 5 was invoked for the first and to date only time in October 2001 and is the basis for the deployment of troops from 28 NATO and 22 partner states to Afghanistan over the past decade.