Iranian Turmoil Makes Obama’s Diplomacy Stillborn

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The dramatic events unfolding after the election of Ahmadinejad, whether legitimately or not, are also crippling Obama’s diplomacy and his Alice in wonderland Cairo speech, that mesmerized the ‘cerebral’ classes, and putting them both on crutches. And all the ‘grand bargainers’ from Flyntt Leverret to Juan Cole and the “hyper-active Clemons,” who has so little to show from his hyper activity, not to mention the ‘disciples’ of The Washington Note of David Hume and Bertrand Russel, are totally and irreversibly discredited. For the question is, that while the Theocratic regime for its own survival will have to clamp down with an iron fist the modernist forces of Iran and its putative leaders such as Mousavi, Rafsanjani, and Khatami-I’m saying putative because although they are apparently the leaders of these forces they themselves are not part of that modernity-and incarcerate and jail, if not covertly kill, some of the members of the educated classes if they continue to threaten the existence of the Mullahcratic regime, how then would be possible for President Obama to proffer to the regime the olive branches of his diplomacy when the latter was in the process of deflowering democracy in Iran? How could he possibly claim, with any credibility, that America by showing to the world that it was living and practising its values-which according to his simplistic notion would transform anti-Americanism  into a loving world –feast for America-would be changing its image, while at the same time was negotiating with the Mullahs at the tragic expense of the forces of modernity in Iran, when in fact Obama will be doing his own ‘Mossadegh act,’ launching his own “Operation Ajax,” which in his Cairo speech was one of the critical mea culpas of America, this time on the diplomatic domain which would be no less than a coup that would solidify and continue the existence of Iran as a dictatorship?

Alas, in such terms will be told the sad story of Obama’s stillborn diplomatic initiative toward rogue states and their sundry proxies.    

What to Do to Defeat the Taliban

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A short reply to: The Limits of Replicating the “Anbar Awakening”

Published on the Washington Note, June 04, 2009

There is a great possibility of replicating the success of the strategy of 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” in Afghanistan, as some liberals in America place their hope for the ending of the conflict on the casting of the dice.

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

 

The Iranian Election is Their Issue, Not Ours

The Iranian Election is Their Issue, Not Ours

By Steve Clemons

The Washington Note June 16, 2009

A short reply: By Con George-Kotzabasis

For a political animal like Steve Clemons his Pontius Pilate stand that the Iranian election is “not our business” is astonishingly amusing. But I suppose saying this with a grin on his face in his TV interview is because he has no answer to the argument that Bush’s hard policies might have influenced the educated classes of Iran in their revolt against Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs.

Even if Ahmadinejad won the election fairly, the fact remains that now as a result of the election the extant split prior to the election between the modernist forces and the antediluvian ones is exacerbated. What is imponderable, and lingers in the province of Nostradamus, is whether this fissure of Iran’s society between these two forces will bring an internal ‘modernist’ change or an open dictatorship of the Mullahs and the military, as their only way to survive from this tsunami of dissent against them.

As for Dan Kervick in his desire to present himself as an imaginative thinker he foolishly delves in ‘Rumsfeldian unknowns,’ which excellently illustrate the vaudevillian streak in him. His comment that there might be “anti-democratic” forces that would aim to “overturn” the democratic election is a laughable fiction. The forces that want to “overturn the result of the election” are doing so because of the perception that Ahmadinejad stole the election, not because they could be “anti-democratic.”

Hyping the GITMO Boys Threat

By Steve Clemons

http://thewashingtonnote.com May 29, 2009

A short reply: By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s more likely that “in twenty or thirty years from now” the “historic reflections” will be on the boys and girls of such as the Washington Note who delved in the sphere of geopolitics with their infantile ideas, as this post of Steve’s so pellucidly reflects. And the vaudevillian plays staged on Broadway “on the topic” ‘The Naughty Boys and Girls of the Washington Note’ will have as captions ‘Terrorists as suspects but not proven.’ There is no scarcity of Ivy League cast political comedians in Washington DC.

Obama’s Angelic Doctrine Disarms Evil Foes

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Reply to: The Mellow Doctrine by Roger Cohen

global.nytimes.com May 03, 2009

 

Roger Cohen riding his high horse as a columnist of The New York Times trots a ‘neighing’ argument that throws the rider on the paddock. He claims and infers that the new policies of President Obama in foreign affairs, which he frames in his term of The Mellow Doctrine, are holistic remedies for the wanton malicious inflicted maladies that the Bush-Cheney administration had placed upon the body politic of America that had alienated it in the minds and hearts of so many people in the world.

These policies now are spreading and reverberating across Latin America, Europe, and Asia Minor and are creating an echoing melodious sound of Europeans, Turks and Latinos–with only a slight discordant hoarse bass note coming through the nostrils of an old dog, Fidel Castro, who can smell in Obama another imperialist rat. In Strasbourg the French and Germans loved to hear the President expostulating on the new fully cooperative conduct of the U.S. with its major allies, the French seeing him as an exemplar of their own past mission civilisatrice in the sphere of diplomacy, and the Germans as a second Ich bin ein Berliner, after John F. Kennedy. In Prague, the multi-cultured Czechs were delighted to hear him say that he was “committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons,” and his outpouring of a profusion of mea culpa of America’s past misdeeds and the arrogance of imperial powers and its leaders, who like Roosevelt and Churchill would determine the fate of peoples “sitting in the room with a brandy.” In Turkey, the most modern of Muslim nations thanks to its insightful great Soldier-Statesman Kemal Ataturk, the Turks were regaled to see Obama parading before them his own partial Muslim origins and hear him say that Muslims had been treated with “insufficient respect” in the past. And in Trinidad and Tobago, where the Fifth Summit of the Americas was held, Obama enraptured the Latinos to such a degree that even the spirited anti-American warriors Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez were won over, the latter being moved so much so that he gave as a gift to Obama a book on American imperialism and the latter reciprocating to Hugo’s generous gesture by giving him a warm handshake and a friendly touch on the shoulder.

To Cohen, all the above related events are a clear sign that “Foes…have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy.” Obama’s “mellow doctrine…finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgement of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.” If the above quotes are not a perfect illustration that Obama made a confession of American weakness before the ‘priesthood’ of his ‘Catholic’ enemies, then one will ever search in vain for  a definition of weakness in any dictionary. And to bring jujitsu in this bout of weakness as a saving line is like offering someone who already lies unconscious on the floor from the blows of his opponent the Japanese art of training the mind and body in unarmed combat. In this context for Cohen to mock Dick Cheney for saying that America’s enemies perceive “a weak president,” is to brand himself with his own mockery. 

This confession of weakness is the ‘Eighteenth of Brumaire of Barack Hussein Obama,’ to paraphrase Karl Marx on Louis Bonaparte, the intellectual coup d’état by the constitutional lawyer against the constitution of the political wisdom of the ages in whose preamble imprescriptively is written that to show and admit weakness before one’s enemies is the cardinal unforgiveable political sin. As in any human contest only when a party is weakened is prepared to make concessions whereas the strong seek and drive home their victory. This applies more so to fanatically religious enemies who have an ineradicable tendency to see, due to their irrational cogitations, any conciliatory initiative of their opponents as an admission of weakness.

But the intellectual fragility of Cohen’s argument is exposed by his use of the weakest enemies of America, that is, the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez, and surprisingly Turkey, which has not been an enemy of the U.S., to drive home the success of the conciliatory attitude of President Obama. In the case of Turkey, he claims that at the NATO meeting the Turks dropped their opposition to the nomination of Denmark’s Anders Rasmussen as the alliance’s secretary general because of “Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims.” In contrast, the previous administration by “humiliating Muslims” filled the schools of Waziristan and Ramadi with recruits for future terror. When one asks whence this humiliation of Muslims started the unutterable answer of Cohen must be since 9/11. The undeniably harsh but necessary measures that the Bush administration took against Muslim terrorists to protect its citizens from, at the time, imponderable future attacks, were in the eyes of Cohen measures that “humiliated Muslims.” Just as well that columnists of this sort are ‘unsheathing’ their pens to write their columns instead of unsheathing their paper swords to protect Americans.  

Most of all Cohen is apparently very fond of the following by President Obama. “Resistance” to set of U.S. policies “may turn out to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas” of the previous administration, and “when they are cleared away …we can actually solve a problem.” So President Obama with a broom in his hand once he sweeps this ideological debris of the Bush administration he will be able to start solving the innumerable problems that America is facing. But the fact is that the United States is not countenancing these problems because of “old preconceptions or ideological dogmas,” but because of its status as the sole superpower is inevitably burdened to carry like Atlas all the world’s crises and hot spots on its back and to set up actions that are not always agreeable by the rest of the world that would have a chance to resolve these crises. And inevitably because of the multiple actions it has to take in so many complex parts of the world it cannot jump over the shadow of fallibility. The alternative, to restrict its engagement with the rest of the world because of its immense risks and possible errors of judgment, is not the raison d’être of great power. Moreover, a disengagement from the hot spots of the world would allow sinister and brutal fanatical leaders to take over countries and oppress their peoples as well as endanger the stability of the world.

The political naivety and immaturity of President Obama is encapsulated in his own terms in regard to Iran: Normal relations can be restored on the “mutual respect” of opponents. This would be forsooth the reality if your opponent considered you to be negotiating from a strong position. It would not be true if his estimate was that his opponent was negotiating from a weak position contra his own strong position. The strong can be at times kind, gracious, and helpful toward the weak but never have any respect for the weak. This is more so in the hard realm of geopolitics. The Iranian theocracy will see any diplomatic initiatives by the United States as an admittance of political feebleness by the latter and will exploit this to their advantage. And by the time when President Obama will become aware of this the Iranians will be already close to the entrance of the nuclear club. No angelic or mellow doctrine of Obama will disarm America’s implacable irreconcilable foes. Only the thunder, and as last resort the bolt of Jupiter, can defeat these deadly enemies.  

Hic Rhodus hic Salta

North Korean Nuclear Test a Shot across the Bow of Obama’s Diplomacy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

America’s power continues to be in a state of ‘explosion,’ if used wisely and resolutely against its enemies and not in a state of “implosion” as its critics, such as Steve Clemons of the Washington Note, claim.

The North Korean nuclear test is the “meme” that will destroy President Obama’s new foreign policy based on diplomacy with America’s irreconcilable enemies such as Iran. The doors of diplomacy that Obama is opening to the Mullahcratic regime and its sundry of proxies will close with a bang in the face of the rookie president in foreign affairs as Iran imitates North Korea’s defiance.

The Loving Concept of the Intelligentsia: Moral Equivalence

By Con George-Kotzabasis

 

Steve Clemons’ post, by adopting Brzezinski’s “both sides of the…divide…,” has all the faults of the politically, historically, and intellectually bankrupt concept of moral equivalence by expanding it into political, diplomatic, cognitive, and intellectual equivalence between the two warring sides of the Palestinian fanatical extremists and the civilized Israelis.

And how irretrievably naive is to be a fugitive from reality that geopolitics or any conflicts are anything else than a zero-sum game. Leave the kinder-garden Steve and re-read Clausewitz or Metternich! And only a permanent tourist of Disney Land could believe in the possibility of a Gandhi-esque way exercised by Palestinian moderates that would oust the fanatics of Hamas and al-Fatah and would lead to peace between Palestinians and Jews through the road map of moderation.

Iran:Know thy Enemy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

President Obama with his latest commitment to the war in Afghanistan seems to be harking to the realists of his political and diplomatic advisors, such as Richard Holbrooke, and is readying himself to debunk the bunk of his leftist supporters of ending America’s military involvement in the hot spots of the world and adopting and continuing the bellicose policy of the former Bush administration against the terrorist extremists. In his announcement of his ‘new’ policy in Afghanistan he very closely repeated Bush’s words that as President he would not allow Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorists that the latter would use once again to attack the American homeland. Hence he clearly coupled the war in Afghanistan with America’s security and therefore made it very difficult for the anti-war movement to continue influencing the silent majority, as it did against the Bush administration, toward a pacifist position since such a position would be senseless and stupid to anyone whose life was under a direct threat. Obama therefore placed himself in a politically strong position that even an increase of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan could not erode since this is the price that America will have to pay for its security. One therefore can say “hats off to Obama,” to quote Robert Kagan from his piece in the Washington Post, for his new strategy in Afghanistan.

What is most worrying however is in verity the president’s new policy in regard to Iran. In his keen propensity to detach himself from the ‘fisticuffs’ policy of his predecessor which he considered to be wrong and politically infertile, Obama, as he had promised during the presidential campaign, is opening the door of diplomacy to the ‘Mullahcratic’ regime hoping that the latter will be susceptible to the diplomatic blandishments and calls of reason that the U.S.A. and Iran could ‘live and let live’ with each other if they had the will and wisdom to change the belligerent attitudes of the past toward each other. This is a laudable aim but the question is whether it will resonate with the Theocratic regime in Tehran. President Obama in his direct address to the Iranian people, in their new year’s day, went out of his way to praise the Islamic Republic and the cultural achievements of its people. But what is in a name when one could praise in the same terms the united republics of the USSR, the republic of Mao’s China, the republic of Cambodia under Pol Pot, and a sundry of ‘genocidal’ republics in Africa with the only difference being that the scale of atrocities are not as high in Iran as they have been with the above blood-lusted republics. But who knows, with a future nuclear armed Iran the latter could surpass them all on the scale of wickedness.

It’s this great danger that a nuclear armed Iran would pose to Western nations and to the U.S. that the latter as the supreme power in the world must prevent. And the ambition of Tehran to acquire a nuclear armoury is un-ambiguous and unyielding. Only few days ago President Ahmadinejad in his address to the Iranian people proudly proclaimed that Iran would not cease its nuclear programme as its achievement is the deserved status of a great nation. It’s obvious that Ahmadinejad took his lines directly from the speech of Obama who praised so exuberantly the Islamic Republic and its cultural achievements. But in the hope of the President that by paying homage and offering peace to the Tehran regime it would de-couple the latter from its religious fanatic nucleus and its great hate toward America, Obama shows himself to be irretrievably naive and abysmally ignorant of the duplicitous enemy he is facing.

The foremost intelligence apparatus in the Middle East the Israeli one had its chief Major General Amos Yadlin saying early this month, …”Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb.” Moshe Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, saying that “the jihadists interpret compromise as weakness.”(M.E.) He cited the withdrawal from Gaza four years ago which many had thought at the time it would debilitate the conflict, instead it encouraged it. And this is exactly how the Iranian leadership sees Obama’s ‘open door’ diplomacy, as a screeching sound of American weakness, as in its eyes the relative isolation of the U.S. among its allies, Russia and China and its inability to persuade the latter to take harder sanctions against them limpidly demonstrates this weakness. And this enfeeblement of the U.S. is further exemplified in Iran’s view by the North Korean defiance in its rocket launching, which, only few months ago in the last days of the Bush administration, was participating in direct talks with U.S envoys in regard to its nuclear programme–that that stalwart and hawk-eyed in foreign affairs John Bolton had predicted with characteristic insight that the talks would come to nothing. If miniscule N. Korea could so brazenly defy the U.S., in spite of the commitments it made during the negotiations, what the great Islamic Republic of Iran would do in future negotiations with the Americans?

President Obama and his close advisers are incapable of realising that an enemy who sees the United States as being politically compelled to negotiate from a weak position cannot be forced by diplomatic means to accept the demand of the Americans and their allies that Iran must cease the development of its nuclear programme. Hence Obama’s administration is setting up its tent of diplomacy in a barren desert where the Iranian diplomatic camels will come empty of any reciprocal ‘gifts’ to the peaceful and morally generous gestures of the Obama administration. It’s inconceivable to imagine, that if not Obama, that some of his close and more astute consigliori are unable to anticipate the futility and dangers of diplomacy with a foe who considers himself to be negotiating from a position of strength. The only result that can come out from such negotiations with the Iranians is for the Americans to come out as losers from this parley or walk out of the talks with the tail in-between their legs in a scornfully embarrassed state.

This will be the fate of President Obama’s diplomatic overture with the Iranian theocratic regime as an outcome of his total inability to “know thy enemy,” a prerequisite, according to the great Chinese strategist and sage Sun Zi, in defeating one’s mortal enemy. But the final judgment on President Obama–the constitutional lawyer and former community organizer, a rookie in the art of statecraft and who in his Prague address beyond proclaiming, with humility soaked in weakness, America’s decline, indulged himself also to make some trite ‘brandy(ed)’ derisive comments about the two great statesmen Churchill and Roosevelt who defeated the Axis powers–who as a result of the pathological hate—that neutralized even the ingrained racism that many Americans have toward blacks–that a great part of the electorate had toward Bush-Cheney and by association the Republicans, was swept by this bitter wind into the Oval Office, will be rendered by a Shakespearean Sovereign, King Lear: “Nothing comes out of nothing.”          

   

 

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Gentle Folk Attempting to Analyze the Realm of Geopolitics

By Con George-Kotzabasis

You are one of those admirable genteel souls who attempt to cogitate and philosophize and be judgmental about the morality of realpolitik but who are completely ignorant and oblivious of the fact that the contemporary practitioners of geopolitics, as all their predecessors, are the direct descendants of the ‘feudal knights’—omnipresent throughout human history—”who made literal mincemeat of their enemies, leaving the clergy to handle the morals”, to quote the great Austrian writer, Robert Musil.

One would have expected you to at least be consistent with the logic of your own argument. If you are going to blame the U.S. of “propping up local despots”, who at most repressed their own peoples, and which perforce had to do during its deadly contest with the Soviet Union—it is a luxury to believe that one can chose one’s allies in critical situations– you have to praise the U.S. for having defeated the foremost dictatorships of our times, Nazism and Communism, not to mention Imperial Japan, which threatened to repress the freedom of mankind. Why have you ‘slipped’ from this consistency and irresponsibly imply that the perception of many people of the U.S. as the “Great Satan” could be justified?

As to your facts which some of them are imprecise, such as giving land to “interlopers” i.e., the Israelis, and the ones that are correct, you draw the wrong conclusions from them as a result of lack of imagination? The establishment of the Jewish State was the result of the “Balfour Declaration” re-affirmed by the Mandate of the League of Nations and was not the offspring of imperialist interests, if this is what your loaded word “interlopers” implies. And the upheavals of 1917 in Russia what did they bring in their wake? The rise of the most brutal millenarian movement, Communism. And the upheavals of the Middle East, what do they presage? The rise of another more brutal millenarian movement, Islamofascism. This is what the West must prevent at all costs, if it has learnt the lessons of history. And to achieve this one has to do it tragically in the mien, the spirit, and in the full armour of the ‘feudal knights’.