Rick Rozoff: Africa is the next NATO goal http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/rick-rozoff-africa-is-the-next-nato-goal/

My point was that the US European Command launched Africa, it was very much in conjunction with NATO, including the fact that the European Command and the NATO are run by the same person, so there is an organic connection between these two organizations. NATO became involved openly in Africa in 2006. The African stand-by force, nominally under the control of the African Union, is really modeled after the NATO response force. We had NATO first operation in Africa in 2005, when NATO airlifted over 30 000 African Union peace keepers in the west of Sudan. NATO is actively involved in airlifting and sea lifting both troops and suppliers in Somalia. Starting last March, NATO airlifted several thousand Ugandan troops both in and out of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Until now NATO has conducted 2 operations, one of them is “Ocean shield” operation, which has been extended till the end of next year.

So we are seeing the extension of NATO from its Cold War traditional boundaries, between 1999 and 2009, we saw NATO’s expansion to the countries of Eastern Europe. There is also one major European country, excluding microstates like Vatican and Monaco, that is not either a member of NATO or engaged in a partnership program with NATO, and that is Cyprus. Its parliament avoided to bring the country into the NATO partnership for Peace program. Every single nation is either a member of NATO or engaged in a transition program in some sort. So it seems now that NATO is moving onto the next continent.

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