Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Short reply to: Bravo: Fareed Zakaria’s Ethical Stand on Mosque

By Steve Clemons The Washington Note August 06, 2010

Clemons, and his senseless and insensitive cohorts on this thread, may well “salute” Zakaria for “this exceptional leadership.” But he can only do so by the devaluation of all values. To put the ‘sensitivities’ of ‘moderate’ Muslims who can still blame America for 9/11, like the imam behind the building of the Mosque, whose religion for hundreds of years has profoundly failed to produce anything of value in the social, economic, political, and scientific sphere of man and whose sole contemporary staple product is terror, above the sensitivities of the victim’s relatives and of a fully justifiable aggrieved America emanating from the barbarous and atrocious attack of 9/11 that was bred and nourished within the confines of Muslim religion and culture, is to devalue all morality and human decency, not to emphasize the political bankruptcy of those who espouse such “exceptional leadership.”

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Clemons is desperately trying to find support for his stupidity Obama “gets it right” on the building of the mosque on Ground Zero by ironically compounding this stupidity by adding the gargantuan dopiness of Norquist on the pro-mosque argument. Norquist refers to a resolution passed by Republicans in 2000 which was prior to the murderous event of 9/11 without realizing how different such a resolution would look among these same Republicans after that ominous attack in the heart of America. He is also astonishingly blind to the negative reaction of 70% of Americans in regard to the building of the mosque in the vicinity of the sacred ground of Manhattan. But the crowning of this stupidity is his statement that Republicans would lose Jewish votes on this issue. It is like saying, as someone remarked that if the Democrats had a Hitler as candidate the Jews would not vote for the Republicans. This is a theatrical performance of the absurd that only an impresario of Clemons qualities could stage on Broadway.

The issue is not about “legal rights,” but whether a religion that irreversibly hates and reviles the values of Western civilization, and whose radical jihadists have declared a war on the latter, should have the right to build a mosque on the sacred ground of this civilization that has spilt its blood as a result of the murderous attack of the Islamists in Manhattan.

This is on the part of Obama, which includes his day after nuanced retraction of his original statement, and by all those who support him on this issue, like the Times columnist Zakaria, Clemons, and Norquist, not to mention others, the continuation of stupidity by all means.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Reply to: Israel/Palestine and Iran: Linkage Should be Hard Wired by Obama Team

By Steve Clemons The Washington Note August 07, 2010

Clemons’s piece is political metaphysics at its best. “Brilliant leadership,” “strategic leaps,” “visionary re-crafting,” “mystique,” all ripe fruits ready to fall from the tree of abstractness. No definition of their meaning in concrete terms, no concrete description of the characteristics of these “strategic leaps,” which he mentions half a dozen times, and how they are going to be affected. In short, fire crackers thrown over the tumultuous geopolitical terrain of the Middle East and beyond.

Further, to link the Israel/Palestine conflict as pivotal to the issues of the Middle East and of the Arab world, is to link it to Clemons’s simulacra and not to the real cause of Islamist radicalism that will remain fanatically athirst for its eschatological goals even in the aftermath of a resolution of the I/P bellicosity. Clemons’s proposal that this erroneous idea of the “linkage,” that apparently could even resolve the impasse with Iran, “should be hard wired” to the Obama team, makes him a fall guy to Islamist propaganda. And the seriousness of Clemons’s dissertation finishes with the fall of the curtain on a vaudevillian act: Does he seriously believe that if Obama possessed “strategic skills” he would not have them exhibited and used them by now?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

As Drew correctly states none of the classical liberal economists, Smith, Mises, Hayek, and I would add in this brilliant constellation Mill, Bawerk, and Schumpeter, ever argued that the free market was perfect and “market failure” was inconceivable. On the contrary they argued that the three cardinal principles of the free market were imperfect knowledge, uncertainty, and risk. How could any rational and economically literate person accuse the classical liberal economists of contending that the free market were free from market failure, when their whole argument was premised on the above three principles? Moreover, they did argue, that market failure could be cured mainly by the ‘elixir’ of the free market, and not by unqualified and ubiquitous government intervention.

It is the critics of the free market that engendered the ‘straw man’ of the perfect market so they could knock it down easily without any effort of critical thinking, which of course they lacked, and replace it with the socialist planning nostrums or, a la Kervick, with the hybrid panacea of the “mixed economy,” whose avatar was and is modern Europe, and which presently is at the threshold of economic bankruptcy. The sun is still shining in sunny Greece, but there are no more free suntans for its denizens.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It is not surprising that Kervick after losing so much blood from the hammering nails of WigWag would make such an intellectually bloodless counter-riposte to the latter’s concrete and cogent argument. To back up his phantasms of “Zionists undermining European Unity” and the resurgence of Enlightenment in Europe, what does he bring up, the “Erdogan exchange with Peres” and the “racialist and sectarian haters to alienate Europeans from their Muslim citizens.” The so called “attempt by Zionist activists to drive a wedge between the US and Turkey,” to quote Kervick, even if it was true, has nothing to do with the major premise of his contention that Zionists were undermining Europe.

Further his argument that Zionists promote conflict among Europeans against their Muslim citizens is staggering in its vacuity and lack of contact with the real world. The Europeans are in conflict with their Muslim citizens not because of racialism and sectarianism but as a result of the great threat of internal and external Muslim terror. To suggest that the reasonable fear and concern that Europeans have against Muslims after the murder of their filmmakers and threatened lives of their cartoonists by Muslim fanatics has its roots in racialism, sectarianism, and ethnic chauvinism spawned by Zionists, shows how completely Kervick is detached and uprooted from reality.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

In a famous interview, now infamous, given by President Obama three months ago to Kerry O’Brien on the Australian network ABC, Obama proudly likened himself with Kevin Rudd who historically has been the worst Prime Minister Australia ever had and a paradigmatic wimp to boot, and who unceremoniously was dismissed from his position as Prime Minister. This not only speaks volumes about the character of Obama but also ominously presages the fate of his own presidency.

And WigWag as usually wisely notes the bleak record of Clemons predictions. Clemons had an adulatory stand toward Kevin Rudd and also likened him to Obama, as he himself avers. His predictive powers about major events and politicians, such as the outcome of the war in Iraq and his praising of Obama for his intervention in Copenhagen on climate change, and his liking of that shallow politician Biden, the vice-President, who believes he can win wars with ‘toys’, drones, not to mention others, have the ‘brightness’ of the multiple colourful patches of a ‘pantaloonist’. But in one prediction Clemons might be inadvertently right. By coupling Obama with Rudd, the former might turn out to be the worst president America ever had.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A short response to: Afghanistan Exposing Huge Limits on American Power By Steve Clemons Washington Note September 09, 2009

Clemons, from his political labyrinth as the modern Theseus but without his Ariadne with any hope of escape, sends desperate signals about America’s “limits” in Afghanistan and the dire repercussions these will have on American power and prestige. From the boundless darkness of his labyrinthine domicile he is bound to be pessimistic of any prospect that the US could defeat the Taliban. It’s the same kind of pessimism that he also had for years about the war in Iraq, which he had also pontificated as being unwinnable–and he has as yet to acknowledge that the US under General Petraeus had defeated the insurgency in Iraq.

Only Clemons, in his strategic myopia, could make the statement, “One really can’t tell what our overall goal is at this point.” Really, the Taliban which was a host to al-Qaeda and which would continue to be so in the event it took over once again Afghanistan, and moreover threaten the Talibanization of Pakistan, is not a strategic goal for the United States? The US would be strategically foolish to abandon this aim of defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in one stroke and hence inflicting a devastating blow of global dimensions to the holy warriors of Islam. Nor can he envisage that any withdrawal from Afghanistan would be perceived as a defeat of America by Islamists and would embolden their threats against, in their eyes, a weak America. And the consummation of these threats would be of a greater magnitude of destruction than that of 9/11. Afghanistan therefore is pivotal to America’s strategy to defeat borderless Islamist fanaticism on a world scale.

The United States is not in a ‘labyrinthine’ situation wasting and reaching the limits of its military power in Afghanistan from which it needs to escape. Its task is, like in Iraq, to persevere in the defeat of the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary and a training ground for the recruits of al-Qaeda from which it could launch its ‘apocalyptic’ attacks against the Great Satan America and on the infidels of the West. In this task a combination of American intelligence, military professionalism and might, and strategic nous and determination, has a better than an even chance in defeating ‘blindfolded’ fanaticism.

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By Con George-Kotzabasis

In traditional Africa the medicine man by uttering a name he would identify and cure evil. In contemporary America an Afro-American modern medicine man who by a caprice of a volatile electorate became president, believes in contrast, that by not uttering the name of ‘evil’, America will be safer. This is the presidency of voodoo sorcery as depicted in the National Security Strategy of Obama who refuses to identify the great danger of our times by name, fanatical Islamist Terror. Instead the Obama administration prefers to name it as “violent extremism.”

In Benjamin Franklin’s “Tree of Liberty,” the United States of America, a spineless malignant worm is crawling on its trunk sucking its sap and strength that has been sustained by the water of blood of past and present generations of Americans.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

America hijacked by a Lemon! This will be the historical caption and history’s verdict on President Obama in his foreign policy misadventures of weakness. Who could have thought that the third rate powers of Brazil and Turkey would have the chutzpah and insolence to rudely supplant and supersede U.S. diplomacy on a most grave issue of our times, i.e., the attempted acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, by their own diplomacy, if America was not perceived under Obama as being weak and disrespectful? And the West Point speech clearly showed that the President still believes that diplomacy sans ‘rattling the sabres’ remains the pivot of his foreign policy despite the fact that this policy abysmally failed to deliver on his primary goals. That is, enticing the enemies of the U.S. to take the diplomatic road and repossess, by this ‘loving diplomacy’ toward implacable foes, the prestige and respect America had prior to the so called dispossession of these attributes by his Texan predecessor.

President Obama stuck to his geopolitical ignorant denial, due to lack of imagination and political nous, does not realize that a symphony, a ‘concert of peace’ having as players other powers can only succeed and be applauded if it has a Karajan as conductor. It is this role of the indispensable conductor in the realm of geopolitics that America has lost with the ‘sitting’ of Obama in the Oval Office. However, there are dawning auspicious signs that the lemon that Americans elected as president is in the process of being squeezed out. But the danger is that by the end of this process, the United States itself might be squeezed out of its strength as the sole superpower.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

For Whom the Bell Tolls

At the threshold of the Twentieth-first century Western civilization as a cultural political and economic formation encounters an elemental danger emanating from a Muslim brotherhood of religious fanatics, supported openly and covertly by a league of theocratic-rogue states, who use the ultimate means of terror, i.e., suicide bombers clad in civilian raiment against the infidels of the West. This great danger will not be neutered or eliminated by opening a dialogue, as is the naïve wont of the Obama administration, with such vehement implacable irreconcilable enemies of the West and its dominant power America, but can only be settled in the field of battle by the decisive defeat of these religious fanatics.

It’s the ultimate nonsense to believe, as President Obama does, that there could be “mutual interests” between the United States-European Union and these theocratic-rogue states on the basis of which an open door policy of diplomacy would be the most effective instrument to extinguish the present bellicosity between them. The knock on any door diplomacy of the Obama administration has crashed at its first experimental flight. Neither the gentle style of Obama nor his mournful penance speech in Cairo replete with mea culpas of past American actions and ‘sins’, were able to persuade either Iran or Syria or the PLO or the Taliban to take their seats at the diplomatic table. This resounding deafness of the enemies of the U.S.–excluding the PLO– to the ‘reasoning’ calls of the Obama administration to substitute diplomacy for an escalating belligerence between the opposing parties, shows clearly how doltishly unreasonable and futile has been President Obama’s overture to diplomacy toward recalcitrant and irreconcilable enemies. It is quite obvious by now that the burning issues between the belligerents are not going to be resolved on the part of the United States by soft power diplomats bearing olive branches but by hard power diplomats ‘rattling their sabres’. And in case this bellicose diplomacy also fails then the issues will ultimately have to be settled by the United States and its allies by unsheathing the sword.

Setting Up an Anti-Terrorist Foreign Legion

The menace of Islamist terror is moving like a migratory bird across the continents to find suitable safe havens in which to propagate and train its deadly species and from which it can launch its destroying operations against the infidel west. It is for this reason that the war on terror cannot be localized and must be fought on a transnational terrain. And as we have witnessed with the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, jihadists who survived the lethal attacks of U.S. Special Forces, under the command of General McChrystal, and of the Marines, moved into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen and increased the local ranks of the jihadists in those countries and brought to them the knowledge and deadly methods of how to kill Americans, infidels, and their Muslim collaborators. And the latest news are that jihadists from Afghanistan have moved into Somalia and the lethal attack on a Mosque in Mogadishu few days ago that killed and injured close to a hundred civilians is being attributed to them.

To counter and to clip the wings of this migratory deadly bird it is necessary that a conglomeration of worldwide powers, that would include Russia, China, and Japan, should come to an agreement to set up a global anti-terrorist foreign legion that would operate trans-nationally covertly and overtly in all areas where jihadists are trained, nourished, and engaged in fighting. The rationale for setting up such an anti-terrorist international entity is based on a strategy that clearly recognizes that since terror operates in a world without borders and trespasses the sovereignty of nations, the forces that are countering terror must also operate on the same principle. In such conditions to uphold the precept of national sovereignty axiomatically, especially when the particular nation is either unwilling or militarily incapable to prevent the incursion of terrorists in its own territory and stopping them from using it as a safe haven, is to severely disadvantage militarily the nations which are fighting terrorists and to prolong the conflict at the expense of higher civilian and military casualties.

Moreover, since Islamic terror threatens the economic stability of the world and the prosperity of its people, the burden of fighting it should fall on its Atlas’s world shoulders and not solely on the shoulders of the United States. Hence by the logic of the situation it must be a multilateral reaction by all the nations of the world that are under this menacing threat. Further, it will inflict a serious blow to the jihadist propaganda that the United States is anti-Muslim and will irreversibly deprive al-Qaeda and its sundry affiliates of this false claim that has become a roll call for recruiting Muslims into their ranks, since now the whole world will be fighting and killing the holy warriors of Islam and not only America. This in itself will gravely damage the ability of al-Qaeda to attract future terrorists from Muslim countries and the Diaspora to join it as it will discourage young Muslims to become terrorists seen that the whole world is hostile toward Muslim terror and is being mobilized to fight it. Also, the prowess of the foreign legionnaires, along with other state forces of American, British, Australian, and European, will erode the potency of the jihadists to actuate successful operations with the great possibility that such a series of failures in their terrorist actions will implant great doubts among them that they are implementing the wishes of Allah. It is precisely in this, once the terrorist fanatics are ‘bedded’ on the Procrustean bed of measured failures, that the decisive defeat of the jihadists lays. As terrorists lose their faith that Allah is on their side they will be sided-out from the ranks of al-Qaeda, and all radical imams will be emasculated of their spiritual ability to be the incubators of jihadist terror.

Whose Task is to Train and Lead the Foreign Legionnaires?

Like in all difficult tasks, the training and leading the foreign legionnaires must be assigned to the best experts in the field. And beyond any doubt the countries that are deemed to have such experts in the art of Mars are the United States, Russia, Israel, Britain, France, and Australia. It is from these countries that the technical and military leadership of the Foreign Legion should sally forth. But the lower echelons that will form the Legion will come from all over the world excluding only Muslim countries and not delimited to the above named countries. There is a huge reserve of young armed forces veterans and adventurers of all types, as the private security personnel deployed both in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, that will be willing and eager to join such a high powered elite military world-unit whose tasks and high pay for their accomplishment would be enormously attractive to people of picaresque swashbuckling temperament and the world prestige that their successful overt and clandestine operations against formidable enemies will confer upon them.

Moreover, since the formation of the Foreign Legion will be composed of multi-colored personnel it will easily brush off the racist strictures and condemnation of its hostile critics and its Islamic foes that it is a white imperialist venture and attack upon all those who have no Caucasian pigmentation. Also, the ingress of this multi-colored force in countries, where the jihadists are using them as safe havens or are attempting to overthrow their less than stable fledgling governments, as currently happening both in Somalia and Yemen, for the purpose of capturing or eliminating the jihadists, will be seen by the local population more favourably and not as an American or British occupation, as they tended to view it in Iraq and as they presently view it in Afghanistan. If it will still be seen by the locals as a foreign occupation of their land it will come under the colors of a “United Nations” one and not of the “hated” Americans. And once it becomes clear to the local population that the aim of the occupying force is to defeat and expunge the jihadists from their midst, such an “occupation” might be more tolerant and agreeable to the local inhabitants, especially when its necessity will be perceived by them of having no other goal than their security and the restoration to their country of a safe and normal life.

Strategic Advantages

The formation of the Foreign Legion will bring a cascade of political and strategic advantages to the countries of the world that are fighting the holy warriors of Islam in this stealthy war of terror. In the political arena, by ‘mobilizing’ the world against fanatic terror it will eliminate any misconceptions about the seriousness of the terrorist threat that some people may still have. And by showing the determination of their political leaders to protect their peoples by all savvy means, including that of a force of international condottieri that will be decisive to the defeat of the jihadists on a global scale, it will rally the people behind them. Further, it will lighten the burden of those countries such as the U.S., the UK, and Australia that carry at this moment the major weight of the war–that has provoked an anti-war sentiment in their own countries that serves willy-nilly the interests of the enemy as it has done in the past in Vietnam–by shifting it on more shoulders and hence making it an international serving duty.

In the strategic arena, by being able to operate on a transnational legitimate base without national sovereignty restrictions been placed upon its military movements, it will be able to deploy its lethal forces swiftly in all areas of this borderless war in search and destroy operations and it will deprive the jihadists of safe havens and cripple their tendency to move from countries where they have been defeated– as it happened in Iraq when many of the foreign jihadists who survived the Petraeus Surge moved to Afghanistan and Pakistan–to other countries, such as Somalia, Yemen, and Morocco, to continue their fight against the infidels and the regimes that collaborate with the latter. Moreover, it will have a decisive impact upon the whole psychological structure of terrorism which is pivotal to attracting young Muslims to its cause. Since by making it more difficult, and indeed, preventing, jihadists from entering other Muslim or semi-Muslim countries, such as Nigeria, to foment jihad and by their mere presence in those countries to recruit locals in their ranks, it will turn off the tap of recruitment and hence their ability to launch large successful operations against the non-believers.

Hence the Foreign Legion by chasing the jihadists wherever they are, in the East or the West, and depriving them of their potency to succeed in their actions, will inflict a devastating blow both to the recruiting grounds of terror, i.e., to the Madrasas and Mosques, and in the field of battle, where the issue will be decided. And the paucity of martyrs and their eventual unavailability will make the seventy-two virgins to keep everlastingly their chastity.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now