Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms Back Azerbaijan’s War in the Caucasus

The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Nayef Falah Mubarak Al-Hajraf, met with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov in Saudi Arabia. The former stated, “the GCC has always supported the fair position” of Azerbaijan and its Turkish sponsor in last year’s war against Nagorno-Karabakh.

The same GCC that supported the “fair position” of bombing Libya out of existence in 2011 and the attempt to do the same with Syria starting in the same year. GCC members Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (both members of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative) supplied warplanes to NATO for the seven-and-a-half-month air war against Libya, and Qatar also deployed several hundred troops to fight against government forces there.

GCC members and NATO partners Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also supplied troops for NATO in Afghanistan. So GCC members know a thing or two about “liberating” other nations.

The foreign minister of Azerbaijan disclosed that GCC states “are interested in participating in joint projects on creative work in the liberated territories.” How nice of Baku to conquer them for their Persian Gulf partners’ benefit.

Azerbaijan and the GCC also “discussed the possibilities of expanding cooperation between Azerbaijan and the Council, including the development of a joint Action Plan, as well as other issues of mutual interest.”

On a topic completely unrelated to the above (….), of course, the headline for a subscriber-only story on Azerbaijan’s Trend News site today reads Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan transported over 430 million tons of oil to world markets, referring to the Azerbaijani-Georgian-Turkish pipeline.

Another report on today’s Trend is decidedly relayed to the above (and really to both the above) items, one titled The EU should be proud that Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine want to join it, said High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell.

Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are three-quarters of the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development. The fourth member, which provides the last letter in the acronym, is Azerbaijan. The organization was established in Strasbourg in 1997. It was not a local initiative of former Soviet states. For all the window dressing about fostering, nurturing, growing, etc. democracy, its purpose is to bring Caspian Sea oil and natural gas to the Black Sea and Europe bypassing Russia and Iran.

The EU’s Borrell, who in recent months claimed Russia had amassed a vast invasion force on Ukraine’s border only to be compelled to retract the absurd and inflammatory contention, recenty met with the foreign ministers of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, all NATO members; Georgia and Ukraine being Enhanced Opportunities Partners.

He told them: “In each of your countries you know that there are key reform areas which require swift, thorough and sincere improvements. This year is important for Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP). Together with the European Commission we are in the process of finalising the post 2020 agenda which contains concrete deliverables and targets.”

The Eastern Partnership was established in 2008 to wean former Soviet republics in Europe and the Caucasus not already in the EU and NATO – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – from Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Eurasian Economic Community and the Union State of Russia and Belarus and into the EU. And into NATO. It was the rejection of an association agreement under Eastern Partnership auspices that led to the coup and war in Ukraine in 2014.

The door to the EU runs through NATO as Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia can attest to. Borrell and the EU are really recruiting the GUAM nations to that military bloc.

To promote democracy, human rights, transparency and the rules-based international order. NATO has nothing to do with achieving geopolitical domination in Eurasia or monopolizing the provision of oil and gas supplies to Europe. Nothing. To hint so is abject blasphemy.

Rick Rozoff is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the manager of Stop NATO. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum.