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

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

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

Dan Kervick is the liberal pendulum of a unique antique clock that swings from the serious to the comical. He swings from his serious proposal that Arabs “need to set their sight on multiple and diverse improvements drawn from many separate sources of inspiration (M.E.), to the comical one , “Or maybe most of them can just go on doing their old world, traditional things(which nadine aptly described as ‘romanticize camel herding’) without lusting after the almighty buck…” This is very similar to his profound insight about Iran’s election when under the rubric of “Rumsfeldian Unknowns,” to quote him, he made the statement in one of his posts to The Washington Note, that there might be “anti-democratic” forces that would aim to “overthrow” the democratic election in Iran.” And the liberal pendulum continues to swing on.

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

By Con George-Kotzabasis

“The administration has long” wrongly “argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried in civilian court.” Clemons of course would be loathe to admit that Obama’s administration might have realized its great mistake politically and strategically to prosecute Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court and is ready now to be corrected for its stupendous error by “the dark side,” to quote Clemons, methods of former vice-president Cheney and chief of staff of the Bush administration David Addington, which politically and strategically were always on the correct side.

Liberals who tend to support a civilian prosecution for the mastermind of 9/11 are fugitives from reality and are impresarios of a burlesque show trial, since members of the administration like Press Secretary Gibbs and Attorney General Holder already publicly declared him to be guilty. And as Nadine hints to the critics of military tribunals, among who is Clemons himself, and who are in favour of a show trial for Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court, the way to hellishly bankrupt arguments is paved with good intentions.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s the “leg-breaking soldiers in fatigues,” to quote Dan Kervick who denigrates them, that are indefatigably and with great sacrifices defending liberal values and the democratic and entrepreneurial mores of Western societies from the mortal danger that rises from the barbaric atavism of fanatical Islam. But it is not surprising that the ideologues of the serially bankrupt left, like Kervick, would lambast great Americans, like General Petraeus, with their vitriolic sarcasm.

It’s obvious that Kervick as a hubristic member of the gang of General “Betraeus” is divinely apportioning from his Olympian abode his moral legless strictures upon great successful Americans who stand on, and leap with, strong legs. And it’s clear that Kervick with his intellectually and morally rickety feet cannot stand and ‘fight’ on the superb motto of Virgil, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito”. But what other could one expect from nipple-fed liberals?

The above emitted the following comments on The Washington Note

Posted by Dan Kervick, Mar 07 2010, 6:44AM – Link

“…defending liberal values and the democratic and entrepreneurial mores of Western societies from the mortal danger that rises from the barbaric atavism of fanatical Islam.”

Mortal danger … right. You might as well say that the English language faces a mortal danger from Portuguese. Your sense of proportion and connection with the real world are seriously impaired.

From my own seat here in America, I don’t see many fanatical Muslims about. What I do see is a danger to liberal values rising from the diseased fears of the neurotically terrified. My concern is not with David Petraeus, who is just doing a job the civilian government gave to him, but with the poisonous weakness of the cowardly right, who seem ready to hand over their most valuable possessions to soldiers like Petraeus, if the latter promise to protect the relatively insignificant hides of the former.

Posted by kotzabasis, Mar 07 2010, 5:23PM – Link

Kervick

The reason that you don’t see the great danger “to liberal values,” and indeed to civilization as we know it, issuing from the few “fanatical Muslims” that you see is due to your lack of imagination. This is an asymmetrical conflict or war in the context of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear ones and one doesn’t have to see a myriad of fanatical Muslims to perceive the mortal danger to these values.

And do you consider within this context, that the professionals of HUMINT(Human Intelligence), not amateurs and dilettantes like you, who warn that in the near future there is a high probability that these few fanatical Muslims will be armed with WMD and nuclear ones are disconnected from the “real world” and “are seriously impaired” from “the diseased fears of the neurotically terrified,” to quote you?
Who in this case is “seriously impaired” in one’s sense of reality? And in your continued inveterate sickly sarcasm you degrade and make a vaudevillian mockery of this stupendous danger by turning it into a protection of the “hides” of the rich.

Threats

By Steve Coll The New Yorker January 18, 2010

A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

While Americans and international law are violated by the fiendish jihadists and the U.S. is involved in a relentless war with these fanatics, Clemons is concerned with “inhumane detainee operations.” What a memorial of mockery Clemons makes of Americans killed by the jihadists.

Here we have the ‘playwright’ Steve Coll staging on The New Yorker his burlesque play of al-Qaeda and terrorism and receiving the plaudits of Clemons in the form of a standing ovation. Proudly displaying his originality by writing, that because “Al-Qaeda provides no social services [like Hamas] and thus has built no political movement” it has no mass support among Muslims. But Al-Qaeda is and remains a powerful ideological movement and Coll is oblivious of the historical fact that ideology is the sire of politics and the foundation stone of political movements. Think of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

Furthermore, no radical imam has denounced bin Laden or al-Qaeda in Muslim countries or in Western ones and there are thousands of worshippers who follow those imams who vehemently preach violent death to the infidel West and its Great Satan America, and therefore many Muslims are sub rosa, if not open, supporters of al-Qaeda.

Also the closing of Gitmo for the purpose of improving “America’s image abroad” does not come free and pays a heavy price: U.S. weakness in the eyes of terrorists and thus a centripetal force for recruiting jihadists.

Obama’s “forward defense” is a red herring. He has already adumbrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and his latest stupid ‘forward’ announcement that he is not going to deploy U.S. forces in Yemen, and by implication in Somalia, makes his “forward defense” a fiasco. As this advanced announcement by Obama signals and encourages jihadists from other Muslim countries and from the Muslim Diaspora to move into these two countries without fearing that they will be met by the might of the U.S. military.

Lastly, it’s monumental idiocy for Obama to believe that by ‘recruiting’ American “values and institutions” in the fight against fanaticism, he will defeat the “hateful ideology.” And, indeed, President Obama “has neither overestimated nor underestimated terrorism,” he has nullified it. For what else means his initial reaction to the Nigerian suicide bomber when he dubbed him as being an “isolated extremist” not connected to a terrorist organization?