What is the Message of Massachusetts Debacle?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Massachusetts result showed pellucidly that the American electorate-whites in large numbers-has turned into a shoal of piranhas threatening to tear the flesh of Obama and the Democrats. What it craves for is economic and political stability, the preservation of conservative values, not the ostensibly unstable progressive left-wing policies of a picaresque president. In this context, any implementation of progressive economic policies by the Obama administration will solely employ the gravediggers that will dig its grave.

American Liberal Considers Obama’s Intervention in Copenhagen an “Impressive” Achievement

By Con George-Kotzabasis

 

 What a mockery of prowess Clemons makes when he measures its depth with Obama’s “work-the-situation,” i.e., procedural matters, and “basket ball” games. Obama has irremediably failed in all his major foreign policies; in the Middle East, as Clemons himself hints, in his diplomatic overture to Iran, and now in his Copenhagen Climate Accord sans substance and which is no more than a political statement with no bindings. Yet Clemons considers it to be an “impressive” achievement by Obama. Clemons with his “hybrid” realism, to use his term, which like all hybrids is barren, and with his inexorable wishful thinking politics has yet to realize that Obama is one of the most weak and ineffectual presidents and a crashing failure in the sphere of foreign policy if not totally in domestic policy.

 

And in regards to Copenhagen, Clemons should bear in mind that an alternative to nothing is worse than nothing. Or better still take heed of King Lear that “nothing comes out of nothing.”

 

A healthy, challenging , and happy new year to all readers of this blog.

Con George-Kotzabasis

Engineers of New Versions of Socialism Never Die

Con George-Kotzabasis

Some have noticed, that whenever Clemons posts a ‘provocative’ post such as the present one “Grotesque Nationalism” presumably for the purpose of bringing into port the spiritually and cognitively leaking armada of anti-America Americans and anti-free marketeers, who are too scared and cowardly, and spiritually and intellectually too enfeebled, to be motivated to sail into the Schumpeterian heavy seas of “creative destruction,” and makes a bungle of an apparently serious post he stands to be corrected. And as ever with such posts it’s the resourceful, doughty, and politically and historically savvy American Jewess, Nadine, who corrects him, and so many others, like Dan Kervick, who in another post being intellectually disabled to give a serious answer to Nadine’s unassailable facts that Israel is engaged in defensive wars and not in expansive wars as Kervick claims, and whom Nadine accuses of being a “disgrace” to Western civilization. And to this accusation Kervick deploys a queasy defence by saying that for eighteen years he taught the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Leibniz, Hume, and Russel, as if such philosophic pedigree absolves him from his incompetence to answer cogently Nadine’s argument.

Why Clemons is in need to fall back from the total failure of “high octane socialism” to even the weakest low octane version of socialism in the face of a brilliant constellation of economists, such as Amartya Sen of Britain, who cogently argue that it was capitalism, with all its shortcomings that Adam Smith himself noted, in the last hundred years that has substantially decreased relative poverty in the world and has incrementally increased the standard of living of the masses. In any version socialism has proven to be an irreversibly bankrupt policy.

Afghanistan: How to Mobilize the Tribal Chiefs against the Taliban

By Con George-Kotzabasis

 

There is a great possibility of replicating the Surge in Afghanistan with the following economic-political-military strategy: To shift the estuary of the stream of revenue from narcotics from the Taliban’s and narco-lords’ mouths to the government mouth with the aim to feed the hungry mouths of the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan. That is, to nationalize the poppy industry and make the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan the direct equity holders of the income that accrues from the production of opium. Such a policy will create a powerful self-interest and lead to a Tribal Chief’s awakening that will be more widespread and potent than the Iraqi one, since it will mobilize the whole country, through its tribal chiefs, against the Taliban and the narco-lords. Thus U.S. forces will not have to go to a wild goose chase of serendipity to get “their lucky break.”

This idea was floated by me in a paper of mine on October 2008. The link below will take you to it.

http://kotzas12.xanga.com

Voodoo Magic in Australian Attorney-General’s Department

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Robert McClelland and the denizens of his Department are the direct descendants of Voodoo Magic. In past primitive Africa the Medicine Man would utter a word and evil would disappear. In modern Australia, America, and Europe it appears that most of its politicians believe that by not uttering the word “jihad” or “Islamist terrorist” the evil of terrorism would disappear. The enlightened Attorney-General’s Department by practising Voodoo Magic it might just eradicate Muslim terrorism.

Barbarians Inside the Gates

The following paper was written on October 9, 2004. It’s republished here for the readers of this blog hoping they will find it to be of some interest. 

By Con George-Kotzabasis 

A deadly Trojan horse has been placed in the midst of the metropolises of Western civilization and, like Troy, is threatening its destruction. Throughout Europe, North America, and Australia, the belly of this deadly Horse is already bursting open delivering and unleashing a horde of fanatic barbarians on the cities of the civilized world, whose holy agenda decrees the wiping -out of Western institutions and their open, tolerant and free societies, and the genocide of their peoples by the fire of Allah’s hell. This is the nightmare scenario that countries of the economically developed and free world are facing as a result of their humanitarian and generous, but replete with folly, immigration policies that allowed such vast numbers of mostly unassimilable Muslim immigrants with ‘exponential’ birth rates, to become permanent residents and citizens of their countries. (In the Netherlands almost one third of children under the age of thirteen are Muslim. No wonder that the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis argues, that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century”.) As inexorably, not an insubstantial number of these Muslims of the diaspora will become terrorist – fodder for the likes of bin Laden, as Mohammed Atta, the Western educated ringleader, as well as so many other terrorists who have been also been educated in Western universities, of the murderous group of 9/11 has shown, whose terrorist cell was hatched in Hamburg Germany. This is especially so for many young unemployed Muslims in the West, who have been brought up within the strict confines of their rigid religion and who are therefore psychologically more susceptible to the calls of their fundamentalist imams for a Jihad against the infidels, making them therefore prone to become martyrs in this holy war against them. Hence the terrorist barbarians are not at the gates of civilization but inside its gates.

September 11 was a wake up call to all governments of the democratic world to the mortal threat that Muslim fundamentalists posed to their peoples. However, despite the exploding sound of this call, only a few governments are willing to recognize this great danger -whose gathering dark clouds teeming with lightning bolts are hovering over the cities of the world threatening their peoples with total annihilation -and stand-up against it. Apparently, only a handful of them have the intellectual capacity, imagination, and historical insight to perceive this great danger, and the resolve and moral mettle to take the necessary relentless measures and actions to prevent this catastrophe of biblical proportions from happening. America, Britain, Australia, Italy, Poland and the thirty other countries who have deployed their armed forces to fight global terror in Iraq under their politically and morally strong and historically savvy leaderships, will be acknowledged and renowned by history as the countries that saved Western civilization from this lethal attack by this horde of fanatically necrophilous barbarians. The no quarter given, relentless retaliation of these governments to this existential challenge of global terrorism to the civilized peoples of the world, will be totally justified by future historians, as has been the stand of those nations who fought against Nazi and Communist totalitarianism and who made the necessary and stupendous sacrifices to save the world from these two regimes of evil in the Twentieth century.

DESPITE US ERRORS AN WITHDRAWAL IS UNTENABLE

Even if one concedes that serious mistakes have been made by the Americans post March 2003 after the defeat of Saddam, which was part and parcel of the war against global terror, such as indiscriminately disbanding all Iraqi military units, and not dealing with the incipient insurgency of urban terrorists last April by using overwhelming force against it and nipping it in the bud, instead of ceasing their military offensive, as they did in Fallujah, and passing the control of that city to a former Iraqi general, who proved to be completely inept in disarming the insurgents. The strategic goal of the military planners against the insurgency, should have been the prompt and devastating defeat of the insurgents in this city, either by their mass capture or mass annihilation, which would serve as a deadly example to all other insurgents in other hot-bed provinces in Iraq, with the high probability that this would have led to their complete demoralization and surrender, as I had suggested in a previous paper of mine last April, which was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Canberra. (It seems now that the Pentagon is using exactly this strategy, as the capture of Samarra by American and Iraqi forces and the elimination of the insurgents, has shown.) As the outcome of this erratic implementation of the Pentagon’s military plan, by starting an offensive against the insurgents and then stopping it halfway before achieving its goals, Iraq has now become “the crucible of global terror”, to quote Tony Blair. This is the glaring fact that all governments who have committed themselves to fight global terror are presently confronting.

To turn tail and run now from Iraq would not be merely foolish, it would be the greatest military error against the war on terror, as it would deliver a tremendous victory to the terrorists on a global scale. It would reinforce in the minds of the terrorists, as the withdrawal of US forces from Beirut and Mogadishu had done, as a result of the casualties Americans had suffered in these two cities, by presidents Reagan and Clinton respectively, that America and other Western nations lack the resolve to stand-up to them and fight, and will induce them to be even more lethally aggressive against the ‘cowardly’ West. Hence the critics and opponents of the war, who blame the Bush administration for exacerbating terrorism in Iraq and call for the US withdrawal from Iraq, are purblind and cannot see that such action would be the greatest error that one could commit against the war on global terror. It would surpass by a great order of magnitude all the mistakes that the Pentagon committed in Iraq. If indeed the opponents of the war are right, that the US incursion of the country and the overthrow of Saddam has strengthened and intensified terror in Iraq, then the reasonable course for nations who believe that there is no other alternative but to fight and defeat this global menace, would be for these nations to deploy their armed forces in Iraq and inflict a deadly blow on global terrorism, by defeating the insurgents decisively. Or if they are unwilling to spill the blood of their own soldiers, they should at the least support morally and politically the soldiers of the nations, i.e., the American – led coalition, who are brave enough to sacrifice their own lives in the cause of global security and freedom.

This would be the wise course to follow, to correct the mistakes of the Americans, instead of aggravating and compounding these mistakes, by running away from Iraq, and in spite of these errors (in all wars errors are made ), to unflinchingly support America in this historic and deadly confrontation with these medieval barbarians, whom only America’s military might can defeat comprehensively, among all other nations in the world.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

But the war against global terror and Muslim fanaticism will not be won, unless the governments who have pledged themselves to fight global terror also deal with and tackle the cunning and deceitful enemy that lies within their borders. To carry out this far from easy task, these governments have to realize that they can no longer be tolerant, on the basis of laws of non-discrimination on religious grounds, to the breeding grounds of terrorism that entangle, ivy-like, the edifices of Western cities, i.e., the mosques and Islamic schools, of whom a minority of, but highly influential, imams and teachers, preach hate against the mores of Western civilization and of their peoples, inciting young Muslims to enlist in a holy war against the Great Satan, America, and on all other nations that embody the cosmopolitan values of Judeo-Greco-Roman civilization.

The cardinal question therefore is, how to sterilize and make barren the breeding grounds of terrorism that are ensconced in the cities of the West whose deadly offspring are the enemy within. Since the idea of repatriation and resettlement by means of a monetary incentive for millions of Muslims, who have now made their home in Western countries, is no longer feasible – fathered by that prophet of British politics Enoch Powell, who in his Birmingham “Rivers of Blood” speech on April 20 1968, clearly and ominously predicted the deadly conflicts that would arise between Britons and British citizens of colonial background who had settled in England, and who with prescience had opposed the so called humanitarian immigration policies of both Labor and Conservative governments – one has to consider other lines of action. One of them would be the immediate cessation of funding these mosques and schools by governments, unless the former adopt in their curricula a primary undiluted course of ‘no leaks’ assimilation for their students to the mainstream culture of the nation that they have chosen freely to live in, and put an end to all ‘traffickers’ of the disastrous policy of multiculturalism, which with mathematical precision divides a nation. Another one would be the swift passing of special, indeed emergency, legislation that would make it easier for the police and for the relevant government officials to jail or deport, radical imams and teachers who propagate, either openly or cunningly and insidiously, a holy war against the West. Furthermore, to attenuate and diminish the high birth rate of Muslim families, governments should introduce a policy of negative incentives, which could stop this high birth rate such as paying to all families of the nation, children’s allowances up to the number of four children. Any children born beyond that number would not be entitled to any allowances. Nor would any allowances be paid to children born from a second marriage, whose fathers or mothers already have four children from their previous marriages. This measure would bring the birth rate as close as it is possible to the common standard of Western societies and to the ethos and aspirations of motivated modern nuclear families. It would also stop the ‘racketeering’ of phony separations and single motherhoods, whose deliberate purpose is to abuse and defraud the system of family payments, and whose side – effect is, the perennial continuation of voluntary unemployment among this group of men and women.  

Undoubtedly, these harsh measures will raise a hurricane of protests from Muslim organizations of the diaspora and from Muslim states. This will be followed by a chorus of international lawyers and of the liberal intelligentzia from the well-heeled countries of the West, who will denounce these measures as brutal and heartless to poor families, viciously racist, and chauvinistic, striking a terrible blow to democracy and opening the way to an authoritarian state and even worse. But this soft potpourri of legal and intelligence gnomes are unwilling to recognize, and it might be beyond their depth, that the grossly mistaken immigration policies of the nations of the West are now coming to haunt them with their destruction. And the only way to prevent this destruction is for the governments of these nations to take tragically severe measures to correct this gross mistake of past governments that now threatens their peoples with extinction, either by weapons of mass destruction or by the upshot of demographics.

DEFEAT OF TERROR LIES IN ITS LACK OF SUCCESS

One must recognize that the terrorists are technically educated barbarians, with PC’s in one hand and with the distorted fragments of the Koran in the other – who consider it to be the only fountain of knowledge – lacking the open- mind of a universal education; unread in the great writings and literature of all peoples and of all ages; mentally untouched by their rich Arab culture, literature and philosophy; unread in the great philosophical writings of Al-Farabi, who placed rationality above the revealed truth of the Sharia nor in the equally brilliant writings of Ibn-Sina (Avicenna ) and of Ibn-Rushid (Averroes ), who both placed human reason above religion, and of Omar Khayyam, who never believed in Providence or in any other World but this one, valuing the sensual pleasures of this world as the fill to the brim of life. Being ignorant of the existence of this great Arab intellectual treasure, that was an essential element of the cornerstone of Western civilization and of the Italian Renaissance, their minds locked in the fanaticism of fundamentalist Islam and its death-cult, they have no respect for any other peoples’ religions except their own. Instead they zealously believe that the followers of all other religions are destined to go to hell and only Muslims will enter the gates of infinite paradise, especially if they are anointed by martyrdom. It is of such stuff that these implacable enemies of Western civilization are made.

Confronting such suicidal fanatics, who fervently believe that the West and its Great Satan, America, are responsible and culpable for all the ills that have befallen upon Muslim countries; determined to destroy this source of evil by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as soon as they are in their possession, the political leaders of the West, and especially of America, are deprived of any soft options and are forced to take on the hard option of the “unsheathed sword”.

The art of diplomacy, the laudable deliberations of the United Nations for peace making, which could be effective when one deals with a rational foe, are totally ineffective when one confronts an irrational enemy, whose only ‘rational’ communication, in his hearing, is with God. That is why the academics who teach their students the ‘management’ of terrorism by a diplomatic demarche as the only rational way to counter and thwart it, rather than war, which is so costly in human and economic terms and without making certain its defeat, are not only starry-eyed, but also debar themselves from the disciplines of politics and of war strategy. Management presupposes and involves rational processes, which to the terrorists is terra incognita, and therefore with algorithmic precision is bound to fail.

But wherein lies the answer to this conundrum of how to defeat global terror and its state sponsors? History’s edict provides the clear and indefeasible answer to this intricate issue. When a nation fights a swarm of religious fanatics, depriving these fanatics of the ability to launch successful operations against their enemies is the most effective way to defeat them, as the terrorists, being no longer successful in their attacks against the West and in their attacks against the American-led coalition in Iraq, will find the “mouse of doubt” implanted in their hearts (a doubt whose epiphany will reveal to them, that after all they might not be in God’s favor) gnawing, slowly but surely, at their belief that they are the instruments of Allah. This, in itself, will compel them to abandon their cause.

This is why the successful outcome of the war in Iraq for the U.S. – led coalition and the introduction of democracy to its ravaged people, is of such vital importance. The decisive defeat of the terrorist insurgents will unfold a dawn of a bright future for the people of Iraq, and also commence the beginning of the quick end of global terror.

What is your opinion…

Discussion: American Liberals Continue to Whack Cheney

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s amusing to see all the passionate and incorrigible haters of Cheney to have a jab at him even “posthumously” Out of Office. Emily Bazelon on Slate Magazine speaks for all these haters but the context with ‘revenge’ belies what she says about Cheney. The latter did not say at anytime that the documents on torture should be ‘declassified,’ but once they were, they should not have been declassified selectively without also revealing the positive aspects of the harsh interrogations.

The Bush-Cheney administration prudently–knowing thy enemy–unlike the imprudent Obama who apparently lacks rudimentary knowledge of the kind of enemy America is fighting, were unwilling to disclose to their Islamist enemies some of the methods by which the key holy warriors held as enemy combatants were “spilling the beans.”

Halliburton says

Since the memos thus far released were all part of FoIA filings, it was not up to the administration to release them. Based on the Obama administration’s own FoIA policies, the memos had to be released. I might point out that Cheney’s own FoIA request is selective, listing only two documents, and then only some of the pages from those documents.

The “disclosing of interrogation methods” meme is claptrap. All of the methods the Bush administration sought to use are centuries old; SERE-derived methods are duplicates of torture used by the Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War. There’s nothing new to disclose.

Kotzabasis says

Certainly you are right that the memos according to President Obama’s FoIA policies had to be released since in January 21, 2009 he loosened Bush’s Executive order of November 2001 pursuant to national interests by repealing some provisions of the order. Cheney’s selectivity is consistent in this respect with the political acumen of the previous administration in being determined not to reveal to the enemy—even out of office– unlike Obama in office, its secret procedures in this matter.

As for the “disclosing of interrogation methods,” the sting of the “claptrap” is in you. To say, as you do, that these “methods…are centuries old…duplicates of torture used by the Chinese and North Koreans,” says more about the fertility of your imagination than of the complexity of the situation. Is it conceivable to you that Pentagon and CIA Intelligence confronting a unique enemy such as suicidal fanatical warriors would be using the same techniques and methods of the past without innovating new ones? But I suppose your intellectually barren answer would be “there is nothing new to disclose.”

Halliburton says

It’s certain that Cheney wants to keep portions of the reports he wants released secret, but I don’t have your faith in his judgment. After all, we are talking about the man who helped create the 1976 “Team B” report on the capabilities of the USSR, which was wrong on every detail, notably the nuclear-powered laser beam weapons the Soviets were supposedly building. Cheney also thought it a good idea to undercut Gorbachev in 1989, and Brent Scowcroft and James Baker squelched him. I’d be more likely to believe that Cheney doesn’t want portions of those reports released because they might undercut his assertions.

My “infertile imagination” seeks exceptional proof in the case of exceptional claims. Nothing about Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers is unique in history. Your claim that the CIA has some “new” methods of torture – “enhanced interrogation” if you wish – is an exceptional one, and would require exceptional proof. Only disclosure would provide that. It’s far more likely, however, that your imagination is overheated.

Kotzabasis says

I don’t want to go back to the past, mistakes can be made and only the Pope is infallible. And just as someone can be ‘serially’ correct in the past he is not bound to be correct all the time in the future. The same logic applies in inverse to Cheney.

But your belief is misplaced as already the portions of the reports released have “undercut” The Bush administration’s “assertions.” Cheney therefore is more concerned to prove that the “enhanced interrogation” did work in preventing the jihadists launching further attacks and releasing those memos that provide this evidence while ‘clinically’ isolating them from the overall intelligence that would be invaluable to the jihadists.

All the professionals in matters of war in contrast to laypersons consider al Qaeda to be a UNIQUE enemy. Of course there have been fanatics and their “fellow travelers” in all ages. But just give one example from ‘your own’ history where the mortal foes of a nation were operating within it clad in civilian clothes and in the carapace of cutting-edge technology and armed with the most modern deadly weapons, including potentially with nuclear ones, and crashing airbuses into the sky scrapers of a metropolis. If you cannot provide such an example of an enemy then you too must logically come to the conclusion that the holy warriors of Islam are verily unique foes.

In view of this incontrovertible fact do you consider an “exceptional claim” that needs “exceptional proof” that the intelligence services of a superpower such as America confronting such a ‘supernally’ dangerous enemy in times of asymmetrical warfare would not have developed new interrogation methods that would be appropriate in extracting vital information from their captives   saving thousands of lives? It would take lukewarm imagination to have come to this deduction.

Appease! Appease! Is the Shout of American Liberals

By Con George-Kotzabasis

This is a question that I was to put to Clemons from another thread but at the time I was under the surgeon’s knife. Since my question, however, is not completely unrelated to the present thread, I’m posing it here.

The question is related to Clemons ‘sweet’ emotional rapprochement to the leader of Hamas, Khaled Mashal, in the face of the ‘bitter’ realities of the Middle East. Is the West including that outpost of Western civilization, Israel, and especially the U.S., currently engaged in a mortal fight with a hard core fanatical Islam which includes its terrorist satrapies Hamas and Hezbollah or not? If the answer to the question by the “hybrid” realist Clemons, to use his term, is in the affirmative, then the latter is the grand appeaser toward fanatical militant Islam. If he answers it in the negative, with all the expected equivocations that he is capable of, then he is afflicted by an incurable virus of political necrophilia.

But in my humble opinion, Clemons will go down in the chronicles of American history, if he ever makes its footnotes, as the mini American Chamberlain in contrast to Churchillian mettle and sagacity. Appease! Appease! Is the shout of Clemons and the prophets.

Fanatics Unapproachable to Dictates of Reason

By Con George-Kotzabasis

I don’t know if Tamils were the first suicide bombers prior to the Palestinians—perhaps some other commentator in this thread could disabuse my ignorance– but my comparison was between Christians and Muslims so your point is completely pointless.

As for American pilots being suicide-bombers in the Battle of Midway, one must really overstretched one’s imagination. You totally disregard the elementary fact that America had never had a self immolating or suicidal cult in its culture, as there is definitively a suicidal cult among Muslim fanatics. So your riposte is intellectually “post less” as it cannot find the address of reason.

Certainly, stating the obvious, Muslims are human, and even the fanatics among them. But the latter, like all fanatics of whatever religion or ideology, are unreasoning humans and therefore are unapproachable by the dictates of reason. So your appeal to them will be a complete futile and barren exercise by you. And lastly, Thomas Hardy’s poem by which you thought would strengthen your argument is totally misplaced as it applies to reasoning combatants.