News From Antiwar.com
U.S. Army Europe and Africa announced today that during the Swift Response 21 airborne military exercise last month along what is now called NATO’s Eastern Flank – from the Baltic to the Black Sea – troops with the 173rd Airborne Brigade ran a training exercise to practice seizing a decommissioned air base in Bulgaria that went terribly awry. In landing and attacking bunkers and other structures at the site in Cheshnegirovo the American paratroopers also assaulted a building that housed a private business with employees on site.
Nothing daunted, the Pentagon issued a release that stated “We always learn from these exercises and are fully investigating the cause of this mistake.” During the Clinton administration’s and NATO’s 78-day air and missile war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 a comparable “mistake” was made when a NATO warplane fired a missile into a house in a suburb of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. It’s not certain what lesson the military bloc learned from that attack. But when there are no repercussions for random armed assaults and missile attacks then there is little enough incentive to rectify such errors or to prevent their recurrence. NATO’s cause is always noble, we’ve been assured –