NATO - a multinational military dictatorship

Seems that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just can't get enough of war.

Gates: European aversion to war a danger to peace

Gates warned that Europe’s aversion to war was doing serious harm to assorted US military operations with NATO backing, and was therefore “an impediment” to the lasting peace he envisions those wars eventually creating.

Perhaps it's the memory of two world wars that devastated their countries in the last century that makes Europeans a little wary of militarization and armed conflict. Do you think?

The late British WW1 veteran and later peace activist Harry Patch from Britain didn't find any glory in it.

"Too many died. War isn’t worth one life,” and [he] said war was the “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

WW1 set the stage for WW2. Every war sets the conditions for the next. If you want peace, another war isn't the way to get there. It wastes lives, it destroys families, it squanders resources and destroys economies.

If you're an arms dealer or munitions manufacturer, though, it's definitely the way to go.

An interviewer spoke to a young German woman during a recent antiwar demonstration. The citizens of Germany, like those in all the other countries involved in the Afghanistan mess, want it stopped now. She said that the German constitution prohibits the use of armed forces in war unless the country is attacked from outside. It also prohibits the use of its armed forces against its own citizens. But it seems that the almighty NATO can simply demolish national laws. This makes it effectively a multinational military dictatorship.

Even the Iraqi vice president warned that increased militarization of a society is setting the stage for a military coup.

Too bad our jonesing-for-war government "leaders" still don't get it.