French president Nicholas Sarkozy is playing host to Obama and the NATO summit here in Strasbourg. He has ordered a crack down in brutal attempt to end all protest.

He says he supports our “democratic right to dissent under the laws of the Republic”, but then bans “all demonstrations in the centre of Strasbourg".

Sarkozy’s crude attack on the anti war campaigners is an attempt to stop another front of resistance growing in France

Flames in Strasbourg as NATO protests continue - 4.4.2009.

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Strasbourg Civil Unrest As NATO Urges Countries To Send More Troops To Afghanistan 3.4.2009

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Meanwhile top of the NATO agenda is an escalation of war in Afghanistan and a spreading of the war to Pakistan. This has already started with thousands more US troops and many UK troops now going on to Afghanistan. US drones are bombing villages in Pakistan’s border province. Yet Obama agrees with his own generals who say there can ‘be no military solution’. We have heard this sort of double talk before. No wonder in the US they are now saying ‘Afghanistan will be Obama’s Vietnam’.

Across Europe most people are against any increase in war. European electorates do not want their sons and daughters to die in an unwinnable, senseless war in Afghanistan. Talk of ‘remember 9/11’ falls on deaf ears. From the East, in the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine, people do not want the US bases with nuclear missiles, they do not want to be drawn into another conflict between Russia and the West. Especially with NATO’s first strike nuclear rules of engagement.

In 1950’s France President De Gaulle broke from slavish following US leadership of NATO after the Suez debacle. Today Nicholas Sarkozy wants to be at the NATO top table with the Obama. Only then will French arms companies have a chance to win new military contracts from NATO’s expanding wars. Plans are afoot to send NATO troops to Africa where the US has located future oil supplies.

Last month in France millions were on strike and demonstrating against ‘putting banks before the people’. Sakozy’s crude attack on the anti war campaigners is an attempt to stop another front of resistance growing in France. If people make connections demanding ‘jobs not bombs’ and ‘welfare before warfare’ a more generalised opposition to the system that breeds war will grow further.

I do not believe his crack down will succeed in turning the growing tide against NATO and war.

Attempts to break by force the will of the protesters in Genoa in 2003 did not succeed. With the world economy in meltdown, the demand is now not only that another world is possible, but also that another world is necessary.