Nemesis

Reply: Con George-Kotzabasis to the “critics” of John Stone’s article,

SOME WILL NOT INTEGRATE,   – Online Opinion 25/11/2005

John Stone is a highly accomplished, principled, respectable and the wisest of Australians. No other Australian would have deserved the mantle of national leadership on his shoulders than John Stone.

The vacuity and piffle of his “joker-critics” is shown by their inability to see even the witty joke of his last two sentences, least of all to understand his argument. Stone is mentioning a series of events, which as a result of Britain’s failure of multiculturalism, and France’s equal failure of its “assimilation-integration” policies, and the high birthrates of its Muslim migrants, that are now coming to haunt Europe with its destruction, either, by homegrown terror or by the upshot of demographics.

In the Netherlands, thirty per cent of children under the age of thirteen are Muslim. No wonder, the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis argues, that Europe by the end of the century will be Muslim.

It’s exactly this awareness, about the dangers that Australia could be facing by a large number of non-integrated Muslims that Stone tries to instill with his article among Australians. The savvy ones will be his  “takers”, the obscurantists will be his knockers.

                         ANTI-TERROR LAWS: SUBTERFUGE
                         NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ARGUMENT

The anti-terror laws proposed by the Howard government, have brought in their wake the civil libertarians’ nightmares – that these laws will destroy civil liberties, freedom of speech and assembly, and eventually and irreparably erode the values of our democratic state. The nightmarish shadow of ASIO and its spooks will forebodingly spread and pervade all parts of our society, and no institution or person will be safe from the horrid intrusions of its ghostly agents. Hence, according to the libertarians’ ‘apparitional’ thinking, the offspring of these laws will be a police state.

But how real are these ugly images -read as concerns of the civil libertarians -beyond the tarot cards of their predictions, and what is the probability that they could change the democratic fabric of our society so drastically resulting in people losing their civil liberties? It’s in the adversarial response of the critics to these proposed anti-terror laws, that the answer to the above question lies.

The point d’appui upon which the critics of these laws rest their case is fear. But a one-sided fear – the fear that these laws will deprive us of our freedoms – that totally disregards the other greater fear posed by the terrorists, which will deprive us of our lives. Thus, the libertarians’ protection of freedom is the protection of the freedom of the dead.

Let us however be more gentle with their claims, and attempt to examine them historically and rationally as they stand. They claim that the anti-terror laws will be implemented in an unfettered and shadowy way – without oversight or legal scrutiny by parliament or any other relevant authority – by ASIO and other security agencies against suspect terrorists and without the latter having recourse to the normal judicial processes that are part and parcel of a just state. They also claim, that these laws “can be used to deal with a range of issues beyond terrorism” and hence open the backdoor to a police state. Furthermore, they are unprecedented in their sweep, such as “preventative detention of suspects”… stripping them of their citizenship and deporting them, “legal powers akin to wartime than peacetime”. John North, the President of the Law Council says that “these laws may bring us in danger of capitulating to terrorists, because they would have achieved their objective”.  Maybe we should capitulate to weakness and not pass these laws and hence get bombed, which is the ultimate objective of the terrorists. This seems to be less of a danger to Mr. North. And they assert that there is no certainty that these laws will be effective in preventing a terrorist attack in Australia.
(The quotes above are from Cameron Stewart, The Australian, 17 September 2005.)

This is no more than an ardent attempt by the civil libertarians to demolish the rationale and effectiveness of these laws by employing, as above, subterfuge, legal and philosophical abstractions and scarecrows to make their case. They are unwilling to use concrete historical evidence to make their argument (maybe because such evidence would have been detrimental to their claims) or reason, since the premise of their position is founded on the emotion of fear.  

All democratic nations in times of war in the past had to pass legislation that enforced censorship and the detention of suspects propagating and promoting seditious action. And the laws issuing from such legislation had to be applied rigorously against any suspects who could organise themselves into a fifth column within a country at war. But the historically conclusive evidence is that in democratic societies as soon as the war ended, these laws ceased to apply and once again society returned to its former normal state. Undoubtedly, during the application of these laws, mistakes and indeed, abuses were made and some individuals apprehended or incarcerated were entirely innocent. But the scale of the operation and application of these injunctions were so great that it would have been impossible to execute them without making in some cases mistakes and errors of judgment. No human action on any gigantic scale, as for example in war, can ever be error-free. To expect that one could achieve one’s goals on such a wide range without human fallibility playing an acting role, both in the mental and moral spheres, is to expect a play about the Fall of Man without any human actors, but only angelic ones, in it.

The human condition is a state of irremediable imperfection. But despite this grim fact, the evolution of human nature has not stopped at its amoebic stage. In the irreversible Darwinian process of the survival of the fittest, the human species had to continuously develop new and more perfect means for its survival. Although these means were far from perfect in a divine sense, they were good enough for its earthly existence. The anti-terrorist laws are in this category of ‘good enough’.

Australia, being at war, has no other option but to take these less than perfect hard measures that have a high probability of protecting its citizens from a home-grown terrorist attack. However, the premise upon which any wise legislation or enactment of laws rest, is that these laws must be commensurate to the threat (s) that emanates from illegal action. For example, if there is a spate of housebreaking, parliament has to legislate the appropriate, but not too-harsh laws that could deter this criminal activity from occurring – by jailing the culprits for a short time. If on the other hand, like New York few years ago, when a spate of robberies and murders were occurring which posed a greater threat to the residents of a city than housebreaking, the government would have to pass harsher laws, if it seriously wanted to prevent these ‘deadly muggings’ from happening, such as those with the ‘zero tolerance’ passed by the former mayor of New York, Guiliani. Furthermore, because of haphazardness and uncertainty, which is the shadow of all human action, one can never be sure that any laws passed will be completely effective in deterring people from engaging in illegal activities. Nonetheless, despite this ineradicable element of chance that is implanted in all laws, no government can eschew or excuse itself from the responsibility of taking the appropriate punitive measures that have a high probability of being successful against criminal conduct. (A clear example of this were the zero tolerance laws that were enforced in New York. At the time there was a volcanic eruption of protests from civil libertarians that these laws were inhumane, unjust, and ignoble, and that they would be totally ineffective as a deterrent to crime. Their success however, in substantially diminishing crime within a short time, proved its critics to be totally wrong.)

This indeterminacy and unpredictability of all human laws, unlike the physical laws of gravity, in regards to their success against lawbreakers, is moreover augmented, to the highest degree when a government has to legislate laws against a ‘consortium’ of religious fanatics whose mode of operation has the speed and randomness of quicksilver and whose goal is the destruction of civilised society by the barbaric and ruthless use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones, against it. The legislators of these laws that could forestall such lethal terrorist attacks must be aware that all such attacks in the eyes of these fanatics are ‘pushed’ by the breath of Allah. Hence, the most impossible action(s) fantastically imagined, in the context of such apocalyptic fanaticism, becomes an alarming reality. Muslim fanatic terrorism, has no rational concrete political or social goals, despite its propagandistic pronouncements to the contrary, which are merely a fig-leaf of their real intentions, but only the eschatological goal of destroying decadent Western civilisation. In such circumstances, laws that could be effective against criminal activity would be totally ineffective against zealots who are guided solely by the laws of God.  Hence, one of the most fundamental elements of law, the deterring factor, is completely useless against these fanatics. And this is the reason why the government has to legislate a new generation of laws that would have a chance to be effective against god’s outlaws.

In the passing of such legislation however, one has to make a distinction between hardcore terrorists and would-be terrorists. The latter have not reached the point of no return of the fanatics. And either because of fear of what would happen to themselves or to their families, they could be constrained by laws, from entering the gates of hell of active terrorism. This is why the anti-terror laws must be composed of both a ‘safe-haven’ and a ‘purgatory’: a safe-haven for those Muslim fundamentalists that can be promptly rehabilitated, and a purgatory for those inveterate and pathological fanatics, whose ‘rehabilitation’ can only be accomplished, if ever, inside the gates of Infinite Paradise.

To the raw suspect recruits of would-be terrorists, the applied laws must have provisions that they are not going to be treated too harshly, thus leaving them an opening, a safe-haven, to rescue themselves from the relentless squeeze of the vice of the law that would apply to the hardcore fanatics, either as suspects of being active terrorists or as suspects who propagate and incite terrorism – as some of the fundamentalist imams and teachers in Islamic schools do among their followers. To these imams and mentors who actively or by intent engage in seditious activities and the incitement of a holy war against ourselves and our allies, who are also waging war on global terror, the purgatory of deportation, detention, and imprisonment should remorselessly apply. This is where the deterring factor of the law lies against these votaries of fanaticism -in the concrete rigorous harsh application of the laws against them and not in their abstract state as a threat.

This clear distinction of how to deal with the hardcore fanatics in contrast to their greenhorn recruits, has the great potential to sever the association of the latter from the former, and hence ‘dry’ the pool from which the fundamentalist mentors of a holy war against the West get their recruits.  And by ‘deporting’ and ‘clinking’ their perfidious activities the government will effectively disable them from continuing to be the incubators of terror in this country.

The government must not be constrained by any ‘legal-niceties’ or illusions in the enactment of the anti-terror laws. The latter must correspond to the great threat that external and home-grown terrorism pose to the country. And the curtain has fallen on all discussions, deliberations, and debates about the causes and ideological roots of terrorism. When someone is ready to stab you to death, you don’t restrain his action by parleying with him about the causes that made him an assassin. This is the time for action. The government must take no heed of the animadversions and subterfuges of the civil libertarians. All their assertions are no more than a marivaudage, a sophisticated banter, about this grave and deadly serious issue. In its enactment of these anti-terror laws, it must be solely governed by its historical duty to ordain this imperative legislation to protect Australia.


Con GEORGE-KOTZABASIS (Former Director Of SBS TELEVISION 1986-96 )

SEPTEMBER 23 2005

MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

E-mail: kotzabasis@bigpond.com or dinosaur3@bigpond.com              

                         ANTI-TERROR LAWS: SUBTERFUGE
                         NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ARGUMENT

The anti-terror laws proposed by the Howard government, have brought in their wake the civil libertarians’ nightmares – that these laws will destroy civil liberties, freedom of speech and assembly, and eventually and irreparably erode the values of our democratic state. The nightmarish shadow of ASIO and its spooks will forebodingly spread and pervade all parts of our society, and no institution or person will be safe from the horrid intrusions of its ghostly agents. Hence, according to the libertarians’ ‘apparitional’ thinking, the offspring of these laws will be a police state.

But how real are these ugly images -read as concerns of the civil libertarians -beyond the tarot cards of their predictions, and what is the probability that they could change the democratic fabric of our society so drastically resulting in people losing their civil liberties? It’s in the adversarial response of the critics to these proposed anti-terror laws, that the answer to the above question lies.

The point d’appui upon which the critics of these laws rest their case is fear. But a one-sided fear – the fear that these laws will deprive us of our freedoms – that totally disregards the other greater fear posed by the terrorists, which will deprive us of our lives. Thus, the libertarians’ protection of freedom is the protection of the freedom of the dead.

Let us however be more gentle with their claims, and attempt to examine them historically and rationally as they stand. They claim that the anti-terror laws will be implemented in an unfettered and shadowy way – without oversight or legal scrutiny by parliament or any other relevant authority – by ASIO and other security agencies against suspect terrorists and without the latter having recourse to the normal judicial processes that are part and parcel of a just state. They also claim, that these laws “can be used to deal with a range of issues beyond terrorism” and hence open the backdoor to a police state. Furthermore, they are unprecedented in their sweep, such as “preventative detention of suspects”… stripping them of their citizenship and deporting them, “legal powers akin to wartime than peacetime”. John North, the President of the Law Council says that “these laws may bring us in danger of capitulating to terrorists, because they would have achieved their objective”.  Maybe we should capitulate to weakness and not pass these laws and hence get bombed, which is the ultimate objective of the terrorists. This seems to be less of a danger to Mr. North. And they assert that there is no certainty that these laws will be effective in preventing a terrorist attack in Australia.
(The quotes above are from Cameron Stewart, The Australian, 17 September 2005.)

This is no more than an ardent attempt by the civil libertarians to demolish the rationale and effectiveness of these laws by employing, as above, subterfuge, legal and philosophical abstractions and scarecrows to make their case. They are unwilling to use concrete historical evidence to make their argument (maybe because such evidence would have been detrimental to their claims) or reason, since the premise of their position is founded on the emotion of fear.  

All democratic nations in times of war in the past had to pass legislation that enforced censorship and the detention of suspects propagating and promoting seditious action. And the laws issuing from such legislation had to be applied rigorously against any suspects who could organise themselves into a fifth column within a country at war. But the historically conclusive evidence is that in democratic societies as soon as the war ended, these laws ceased to apply and once again society returned to its former normal state. Undoubtedly, during the application of these laws, mistakes and indeed, abuses were made and some individuals apprehended or incarcerated were entirely innocent. But the scale of the operation and application of these injunctions were so great that it would have been impossible to execute them without making in some cases mistakes and errors of judgment. No human action on any gigantic scale, as for example in war, can ever be error-free. To expect that one could achieve one’s goals on such a wide range without human fallibility playing an acting role, both in the mental and moral spheres, is to expect a play about the Fall of Man without any human actors, but only angelic ones, in it.

The human condition is a state of irremediable imperfection. But despite this grim fact, the evolution of human nature has not stopped at its amoebic stage. In the irreversible Darwinian process of the survival of the fittest, the human species had to continuously develop new and more perfect means for its survival. Although these means were far from perfect in a divine sense, they were good enough for its earthly existence. The anti-terrorist laws are in this category of ‘good enough’.

Australia, being at war, has no other option but to take these less than perfect hard measures that have a high probability of protecting its citizens from a home-grown terrorist attack. However, the premise upon which any wise legislation or enactment of laws rest, is that these laws must be commensurate to the threat (s) that emanates from illegal action. For example, if there is a spate of housebreaking, parliament has to legislate the appropriate, but not too-harsh laws that could deter this criminal activity from occurring – by jailing the culprits for a short time. If on the other hand, like New York few years ago, when a spate of robberies and murders were occurring which posed a greater threat to the residents of a city than housebreaking, the government would have to pass harsher laws, if it seriously wanted to prevent these ‘deadly muggings’ from happening, such as those with the ‘zero tolerance’ passed by the former mayor of New York, Guiliani. Furthermore, because of haphazardness and uncertainty, which is the shadow of all human action, one can never be sure that any laws passed will be completely effective in deterring people from engaging in illegal activities. Nonetheless, despite this ineradicable element of chance that is implanted in all laws, no government can eschew or excuse itself from the responsibility of taking the appropriate punitive measures that have a high probability of being successful against criminal conduct. (A clear example of this were the zero tolerance laws that were enforced in New York. At the time there was a volcanic eruption of protests from civil libertarians that these laws were inhumane, unjust, and ignoble, and that they would be totally ineffective as a deterrent to crime. Their success however, in substantially diminishing crime within a short time, proved its critics to be totally wrong.)

This indeterminacy and unpredictability of all human laws, unlike the physical laws of gravity, in regards to their success against lawbreakers, is moreover augmented, to the highest degree when a government has to legislate laws against a ‘consortium’ of religious fanatics whose mode of operation has the speed and randomness of quicksilver and whose goal is the destruction of civilised society by the barbaric and ruthless use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones, against it. The legislators of these laws that could forestall such lethal terrorist attacks must be aware that all such attacks in the eyes of these fanatics are ‘pushed’ by the breath of Allah. Hence, the most impossible action(s) fantastically imagined, in the context of such apocalyptic fanaticism, becomes an alarming reality. Muslim fanatic terrorism, has no rational concrete political or social goals, despite its propagandistic pronouncements to the contrary, which are merely a fig-leaf of their real intentions, but only the eschatological goal of destroying decadent Western civilisation. In such circumstances, laws that could be effective against criminal activity would be totally ineffective against zealots who are guided solely by the laws of God.  Hence, one of the most fundamental elements of law, the deterring factor, is completely useless against these fanatics. And this is the reason why the government has to legislate a new generation of laws that would have a chance to be effective against god’s outlaws.

In the passing of such legislation however, one has to make a distinction between hardcore terrorists and would-be terrorists. The latter have not reached the point of no return of the fanatics. And either because of fear of what would happen to themselves or to their families, they could be constrained by laws, from entering the gates of hell of active terrorism. This is why the anti-terror laws must be composed of both a ‘safe-haven’ and a ‘purgatory’: a safe-haven for those Muslim fundamentalists that can be promptly rehabilitated, and a purgatory for those inveterate and pathological fanatics, whose ‘rehabilitation’ can only be accomplished, if ever, inside the gates of Infinite Paradise.

To the raw suspect recruits of would-be terrorists, the applied laws must have provisions that they are not going to be treated too harshly, thus leaving them an opening, a safe-haven, to rescue themselves from the relentless squeeze of the vice of the law that would apply to the hardcore fanatics, either as suspects of being active terrorists or as suspects who propagate and incite terrorism – as some of the fundamentalist imams and teachers in Islamic schools do among their followers. To these imams and mentors who actively or by intent engage in seditious activities and the incitement of a holy war against ourselves and our allies, who are also waging war on global terror, the purgatory of deportation, detention, and imprisonment should remorselessly apply. This is where the deterring factor of the law lies against these votaries of fanaticism -in the concrete rigorous harsh application of the laws against them and not in their abstract state as a threat.

This clear distinction of how to deal with the hardcore fanatics in contrast to their greenhorn recruits, has the great potential to sever the association of the latter from the former, and hence ‘dry’ the pool from which the fundamentalist mentors of a holy war against the West get their recruits.  And by ‘deporting’ and ‘clinking’ their perfidious activities the government will effectively disable them from continuing to be the incubators of terror in this country.

The government must not be constrained by any ‘legal-niceties’ or illusions in the enactment of the anti-terror laws. The latter must correspond to the great threat that external and home-grown terrorism pose to the country. And the curtain has fallen on all discussions, deliberations, and debates about the causes and ideological roots of terrorism. When someone is ready to stab you to death, you don’t restrain his action by parleying with him about the causes that made him an assassin. This is the time for action. The government must take no heed of the animadversions and subterfuges of the civil libertarians. All their assertions are no more than a marivaudage, a sophisticated banter, about this grave and deadly serious issue. In its enactment of these anti-terror laws, it must be solely governed by its historical duty to ordain this imperative legislation to protect Australia.


Con GEORGE-KOTZABASIS (Former Director Of SBS TELEVISION 1986-96 )

SEPTEMBER 23 2005

MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

E-mail: kotzabasis@bigpond.com or dinosaur3@bigpond.com              

           WHY TERROR IS SO TERRIFYING   ( Guy Rundle )

                                                               Crikey: Friday, 18 November, 2005

A reply: ConGeorge-Kotzabasis             Crikey: Monday, 21 November, 2005

Guy Rundle’s tad reply to Gittins comical “statistical” explanation of terror, is a perfect example how can one defeat his argument by his own logic. While he is opening a new perspective that of fear, beyond morality and statistics, and “the cultural character of fear”, and making correctly the distinction between being killed by accident and of being murdered by someone, in his last paragraph he equates these two possibilities, by saying that “terrorism, like car crashes, are simply part of contemporary life”.  If Rundle thinks that the 9/11 terrorist attack was part of contemporary life, then he must be living in-cloud-cuckoo-land.

Furthermore, Rundle “de-escalates” from the premise of his logic, i.e., the “terrifying” aspect of terror and “the fear of being murdered that haunts people” (my emphasis), and according to him, this fear has “a cultural character”, he destroys this premise and therefore his argument, by saying, again in his last paragraph, “that such slightly elevated risk (by means of a “mushroom” device?) is worth taking”. Surely, if the risk is so “slight” it could neither terrify nor “haunt” the people.  

Moreover, if fear has a “cultural character” it must be a deeply embedded trait, and therefore it can only be abated, more so in the case of terror, by severe measures that would provide some sense of security to the people. This will inevitably be at the cost of some modicum loss of freedom and to our accustomed way of living. Alas, all existence is a zero sum game!  

                THE FEAR GAME OUR LATEST SENSATION

                 Ross Gittins       – The Age November 16 2005

A reply:  Con George-Kotzabasis

Ross Gittins with his piece in The Age has reached the dismal lows of his training as an economist. He digs, typically of his profession, and brings up statistics to make his “game” against the fear of terror. Like as if, the actions of fanatic terror could be gauged and explained by statistics.

He must have been temporarily impaired by a bout of aphasia when he wrote his article. Statistics are good in studying and comparing the normal and ordinary conduct of human or animal behavior, not the abnormal skewed behavior of either of the latter. Millenarian fanatic terror and the fear it produces upon its victims, does not fall under the category of normal behavior. Nor is it a “passing” sensation, as he claims. It’s an everlasting feeling that will not go away until its threat is considerably diminished, if not eradicated.

Moreover, one cannot quantify – as apparently Gittins attempts to do – the extent and volume of the threat by any scientific means, and least of all by statistics. The extent of the danger of global terror can only be measured by students of history who have distilled their knowledge from the sublime pages of Herodotus, the great Edward Gibbon, and Samuel Huntington, not to mention others for the lack of space, and by the power of imagination, attributes that are obviously missing from Gittins. Doesn’t he perceive or realize, that the present terrorist “mole-hill” threat could give birth to a mountain full of “mushrooms”?  Doesn’t he perceive the exponential increase in casualties by a possible nuclear attack, once these zealots possessed nuclear weapons, which they would use with glee against the decadent West? Doesn’t he realize, that this is an existential struggle for Western civilization?  And finally, does he seriously believe, that the Bush administration went to war, with all the uncertainties wars are replete with, and the great loss of lives and resources, for the purpose of saving a lesser number of American lives than those falling off  from a ladder?

In the annals of Australian journalism, Ross Gittins’article will be forever pilloried for its analytical flippancy and intellectual banality.  

                    HOW TO DEFEAT THE INSURGENCY IN IRAQ


President Bush’s declaration of ‘mission accomplished’, at the defeat of Saddam’s military power on April 2003, must be haunting the Pentagon’s military strategists like a specter. How was it that such a devastating defeat of the dictator’s forces went so awry, and spawned, within such a short time, a deadly insurgency against the Coalition forces and against the people of Iraq?

The American victory over Saddam was brilliant in its execution and historical in its meaning, not only for the future political and economic development of Iraq, and of the region in general, but also, for its potential of sealing the fate of global terrorism, by beginning its death throes on the soil of Iraq. However, notwithstanding this military victory over a brutal regime -  which was  beyond any doubt an accomplice of  the many acts of terror that had occurred over a number of years -  by the Bush administration, the latter committed a number of serious political and strategic errors, that now threaten to take the wind off the sails of this victory. One of these mistakes, was to disband Saddam’s military forces in toto, instead of “cleansing” the Saddamites from its ranks, and replacing them with military commanders who would be friendly to the Americans as    as occupying power.

The fearful nature of the dictatorial regime, would not allow any of its high ranking military personnel to have had or to have developed such a standing among their troops,  that would have threatened the overthrow of the dictator. Therefore, neither by the anointment of Saddam Hussein, nor by the personal merit or talent of any military commander, was there any potential leader standing in the wings. Hence, the positioning of new military commanders in the non-disbanded armed forces of Iraq by the U.S. occupying power, would not have risked the possibility that a “strong man”  could rise from the ashes of the Saddam phoenix. Moreover, the Americans as a result of their awesome technological and military power, and the respect this power emanated within the armed forces of Iraq, would be in full control, and would supervise initially, all movements on the military and political milieux of the country. It would have also made unnecessary all the subsequent efforts and expenditure, both of life and matériel, that the Bush administration is now employing in the military training of Iraqis, so they would be able to stand on their own feet and carry the main responsibility of suppressing the insurgency, as the Americans would have already had in place the newly-commandeered Iraqi army to perform this task, if the insurgency happened to emerge – which was most unlikely, and at the least, not have issued forth on such a wide scale -  in the wake of the defeat of the dictator.

Another mistake occurred when the insurgency unfolded. The Americans, instead of ruthlessly using an iron fist to nip it in the bud, and hence prevent it from spreading to many other parts of the country, gave in to the concerns and anxieties of the then Governing Council – which did not have any strategic thinkers amongst it – and adopted their admonitory councel to begin a parley with the insurgents of Fallujah and of Najaf. This diplomatic overture of the Americans however, had disastrous consequences, as it gave the impression to the insurgents that the Americans were doing so out of weakness, hence rallying a rush of recruits into their ranks, both from the Baathists and the foreign Jihadists. One would have thought that the Bush administration had learnt the lessons of the withdrawal from Beirut and Somalia, by presidents Reagan and Clinton respectively -that the worst thing one can do politically, is to show weakness before a fanatic enemy.  The U.S. response should have been to crash with awesome and overwhelming force the insurgency at its inception. This would have been a telling example to would-be insurgents about their fate and would have prevented their rush headlong into the gardens of infinite paradise.

A further error, and perhaps this was the most serious in concrete terms, was that the Americans had failed to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people who would have unshakably supported their plans for the political and economic development of the country, and whose spinoff would be to deny the insurgents any popular support. The Americans had an “oily” trump card in their hand, which by playing it artfully and strategically would have trumped the insurgency in its own game, as is shown below. They should have persuaded either the first, preferably, or second Interim Government of Iraq, to make the historic announcement, that the Iraqi people would be the major equity holders in the profits of oil and to convince the people of Iraq that this was not a promise for the future, but a present tangible offer. Each Iraqi household would have received an advance payment – calculated on the prospective profits of oil of the financial year in consideration – which would be financed either by the World Bank or by the International Monetary Fund. (These proposals, including the hastening of the formation of the first Interim Government and the creation of an elite National Guard, were made by me to the Bush administration, and were sent to President Bush and to the U.S. Ambassador in Australia on August 2003, and to my great surprise and chagrin, the axis of my proposals, i.e., that the equity of oil should be given to the Iraqi people, as a strategic gesture, beyond any other, including humane considerations, was not taken up by the Administration.)

In spite of these “stormy” errors, the American commanders on the ground have not lost the initiative or the power to re-direct the winds of victory onto the sails of their warring yacht. The defeat of the insurgents, however, will entail a new strategy on two fronts. First, on the political front, the American advisors to the drafters of the new constitution should persuade immediately its constituent factions, the Shiites, the Kurds, and the Sunnis, to make an amendment to the constitution which would ratify that the Iraqi people, indiscriminate of sect, will be the major equity holders of the oil wealth of the country.* This will have three momentous political outcomes. First, it will unify an overwhelming majority of the people of the above sects to vote in favor of the constitution in the referendum on the 15 of October. Secondly, it will serve as a palliative to the concerns of the Sunnis, that federalism will weaken the central power of the government – since it will be the central government that will distribute the profits issuing from oil – which they believe would put them at a disadvantage in regards to their share from the revenue of oil, and hence, will deal a blow to their threat that they will oppose the constitution in the referendum, since a substantial majority of their followers will have a primary, irreversible interest to vote in its favor. And thirdly, and just as importantly, the overwhelming support of the constitution by the Iraqi people on the day of the referendum, will sound the bell-toll of the isolation of the insurgents from the people, thus denying them popular support. And this will inevitably ease their military defeat by the  American – coalition forces. This amendment to the constitution, itself, will accomplish in one stroke the ‘oil-spot’ strategy of Andrew Krepinevich, by swiftly spreading the benefits of security and economic opportunity to the country as a whole.

Secondly, on the military front, the American commanders on the ground must put their main efforts not in killing the insurgents by ordnance only, but by “starving” them to death. That is, by depriving them of weapons, ammunition, and explosives, with whose wherewithal they are able to continue their lethal campaign. Hence, the focus of this new strategy will be in “killing” quickly the insurgency itself, and not only the individual insurgents – as the supply of the latter, unlike possibly that of armaments, seems to be far from scarce. This will involve new technologies, or even extant ones, that will enable them to detect the vehicles that carry weapons and munitions, as well as detecting the caches of armaments that are hidden in houses and in the ground. With this new strategy the U.S. forces will no longer have the difficult task of finding a needle in a haystack, that is, the insurgents, who appear and disappear among the populace, but in finding and destroying the insurgent’s haystack of armaments, which will be an easier task, once the detecting technology is in place. And once this is accomplished on a great scale, it will break, and deplete of armaments, the supply lines of the insurgents,  and thus break the back of the insurgency as its terrorists will no longer have in adequate amounts the armaments and munitions to continue their urban warfare.

The American commanders must also be apprised of the sanctuaries that the insurgents have in countries bordering Iraq, such as Syria, Iran, and Jordan, which not only serve as camps of retreat for the insurgents, whenever they are hotly pursued by the U.S. forces, but also serve as conduits for foreign Jihadists to enter Iraq. Furthermore, these countries, especially Syria and Iran, supply the insurgents, whether by the cognizance of their own governments or not, with arms and explosives, and apparently a lot of this matériel is stored in these countries close to the borders of Iraq. The U.S. commanders on the ground must not be hindered, either by political considerations or repercussions, from taking the necessary action that will destroy these sanctuaries and stores of munitions. One must be reminded, that wars are won not by political repercussions, but by sagacious, resolute and ruthless military action. This is the price that statesmen must pay.

This new strategy applied on the political and military fronts, has the great potential to defeat the insurgency quickly and decisively. The moves of its success depend on the precision and skill of the moves on a chessboard by a master player. The American masters of this justified war, especially its brave commanders and soldiers on the ground, deserve no less than this resounding defeat of these hordes of barbarians. And in turning the pages of history, they will be everlastingly glorified for their coruscating victory.

• THE CONSTITUTION OF IRAQ (Voted by the Iraqi people on October 15, 2005)

Article 108: Oil and gas are the ownership of all the people of Iraq in all regions and   provinces.

Article 109: The revenues [of oil] will be distributed fairly in a manner compatible with the demographical distribution all over the country

Con GEORGE-KOTZABASIS (Former Director of SBS Television 1986-96 )

SEPTEMBER 8 2005

MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

NEW YORK TIMES   EDITORIAL:

“PREVENTIVE WAR A FAILED DOCTRINE”

_ September 12, 2004

A reply:  Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s infinitely depressing that the leading newspaper in the world is taking such leaderless position on world terror.
Your editorial, “Preventive War a Failed Doctrine” wins the sweepstakes of one running away from the “draft” of leadership.      Ironically the ending of your editorial, “…in the dangerous times ahead”, also ends and stabs your argument to death. And it pellucidly reveals the stolidity and unimaginativeness of your contention. America will not be there to face the dangerous decades ahead, as it would have been already destroyed. Because of its pusillanimity not to have launched a preemptive attack against its mortal enemies, the terrorists and their state sponsors.

This is a reply to Stephen Mayne’s attack on Andrew Bolt of  The Herald Sun on the Crikey site on 10/11/2005

Your commentator Stephen Mayne, in his eagerness to “touché” Andrew Bolt, unwontedly exposed his intellectual shallowness and pronounced infantilism, in the affairs of politics and war.

It’s astonishing, to say the least, that Mayne, who so successfully delves in the intricacies and abstruseness of the stock market, and who can sell a “crikey” for the price of a gold mine – all these achievements issuing from his scientific reasoning, in which it’s obvious he has been trained in – uses the “reasoning” of a fanatic to make his argument against Bolt. It’s clear, that Mayne is completely ignorant of the psychology of fanatic reasoning, that is, in the fictional world where it has originated and nurtured, it will contrive all kinds of fiction to justify its behavior and actions. And he is also unaware, that fanatic reasoning will distrust and doubt even the most reasonable argument. For example, if Mayne was convinced on solid reasonable grounds that the attack on The World Trade Center was the work of al-Qaeda, the fanatic reasoning of the imam of Melbourne will pop-up to deny it  and instead assert  that the attack was the deed of the “twin” conspiracy of the Jews and the Americans.

Australia is a target of terrorists, unlike New Zealand, because it wages war, along with its allies, against a borderless global terror. “Yesterday” in Afghanistan, today in Iraq, tomorrow, who knows, in Somalia, in Sudan? If Mayne is consistent with his implied logic, the only chance – a chance however with highly diminishing returns – that Australia would not be a target, would be to withdraw itself from the war, and hence cause a fissure with the American alliance. But how long this “immunity” from attack would last, when the goal of al-Qaeda and its affiliates is the destruction of the decadent West? According to Mohammed al- Magdisi, the spiritual mentor of al-Zarqawi, in his address to a group of Jihadists said the following: “Do you think that we care about anything more than destroying and ending these bad and rotten regimes [ of the West ] ?  ( The Australian, November,11 2005 )

Mayne would do well to concentrate his well reasoned efforts in the affairs of the stock market and in advising his clients how to augment the value of their stocks, where he excels, and not to delve on the issues of war and politics, where he is out of his depth.

                Con GEORGE-KOTZABASIS  

                 A retort to professor of strategic studies, Hugh White’s article:

                  “How Awful is this Threat”?   ( The Age  3/10/2005 )

                   “How Lawful is the Logic of this Non-Threat”?

Professor Hugh White’s piece is an historical and logical non sequitur. IRA terrorism , had a concrete political goal, the establishment of an independent Ireland, not the destruction of the UK. The Islamo-fascist fundamentalists, have an eschatological goal, the establishment of a Talibanized Caliphate and the destruction of Western civilization.

He claims, with amazing intellectual levity, and total lack of imagination, that “even nuclear terrorism”does not pose “a threat  to the existence of our society”. It seems, that he is unaware that success breeds success. Once these fanatics succeed in attacking any part of the West with nuclear weapons, they will continue to do this until Judgment Day.

Only one who lives in-cloud-cuckoo-land could believe that this would not threaten the “existence of our society”.

                      Beware of our strategic keepers.          

   THE “TREASON” OF THE MEDIA

A cosmic tidal wave of Muslim fanaticism is threatening Western civilization and its peoples with destruction. Since 9/11, the terrorist myrmidons of Islam have unleashed a ruthless and relentless war against Western countries in the name of God. With such indefatigably fanatic believers in their godly mission, no compromise is possible and all overtures of diplomacy by Western and other governments are bound to fail. As Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation has said, to the Jihadists, ‘war is its own reward, a perpetual condition until Judgement Day’. It is for this reason that all efforts of the United Nations -as it has been shown in Afghanistan prior to the overthrow of the Taliban – to reach some sort of accommodation based on reason with these terrorist zealots and their state sponsors, would be an exercise in futility and would have  no chance of being successful. Fanatic terror can only be strategically compromised and defeated on a world scale only by “platetary” intelligence and military power, whose arsenal and force must be deployed overwhelmingly against the terrorists with no quarter given.                      

Also, the nations whose political leaderships, such as Bush’s, Blair’s, Berlusconi’s, and Howard’s, are clear-sighted about the real stakes of this total war against global terror, which must also involve the rogue states which are the silent, if not the loud, sinister allies of terror, must initiate and undertake covert, clandestine operations against suspected terrorists on a global scale, – as I had suggested in a paper of mine back on October 2001 – as well as against the breeding grounds of terrorism, i.e., the madrassas, wherever they happen to be situated, in the East or in the West.

Total war by definition, is a limitless war against an enemy, and Western political leaders who profess to be involved in such a war against global terror, as both Bush and Blair have averred to be, cannot avoid and eschew its imperative and remorseless demands.  One must use all means and techniques of warfare, including foreign mercenaries organized in covert operations against these shadowy terrorists, whose murderous deeds have no frontiers and all areas of the world are open targets.

One has to recognise, that in total war, one also has to fight the allies of one’s foe, in this case the rogue states which directly or indirectly support the terrorists, which is pivotal to the easing of the defeat of the latter. By decisively cutting the Gordian Knot of the logistical support in materiel and manpower the terrorists receive from these states, one irreversibly debilitates the morale and militancy of the former. Hence, total war against the terrorists, is strategically a two-front war. But that does not mean that one has to start a war against all rogue states. Such a course would be strategically foolish! One has only to pick and fight one rogue state, and by defeating it decisively, one  can simultaneously defeat by “proxy” all other rogue states, as the Americans have done in Iraq and as Libya exemplified this defeat by proxy, with the caving-in of Colonel Qaddafi. And it is apparent that Syria is next in line.

In the context of such a total two-front war against global terror, the media in general have an historical responsibility, as the fourth-estate in the political structure of  democratic countries, to generate a factual awareness, beyond any shades of ideology, among its readers and viewers about the real stakes of the war against these fanatic barbarians – an awareness that will mobilize the people of these countries that are engaged in this war to stand unflinchingly behind their governments.

As in any critical armed conflict that involves the survival of a nation, the moral fibre of its civilians is just as important as the moral fibre of its armed forces in the defeat of a mortal enemy, such as the terrorists are. Any moral or intellectual doubts and scruples that the media might have about the justice or strategic correctness of the war, must be expressed with infinite prudence and wisdom without compromising or sacrificing this awareness, in the name of the freedom of the press, that is so vital to the moral strength of its people to support their government in war. The moral fortitude of any  people does not arise from some sort of immaculate conception, but only by falling, like the mythical figure of Antaeus, on the earth of reality that unravels and reveals the dangers that a nation countenances. In this peoples’ fall on the earth of reality, the media must be a primary pusher to this fall, as strength can only be generated by the coupling with strength -in the present case, the realization that the strength, the power, of the terrorists can mortally endanger one’s existence. Once such a realization imbues the inner being of a people, it instantly conceives in them the mettle and determination to confront this great  danger head on.

It is in this moral and spiritual realm that the Western media could have reached the peak of its achievement. Regrettably however, instead of concentrating its immense power of persuasion to forge and mould the spiritual strength of its readers and viewers, it chose to betray, both to itself and to its audience, its vocational noblesse oblige. It chose to select and pick the most negative, indeed, the most gruesome aspects of the war in Iraq, such as the civilian casualties, the prolonged and apparently irrepressible and undefeatable insurgency, the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, etc. etc., to make its case against the war.  The result of this enamoured “nuanced” selectivity to which the media is hooked on, was to enfold its readers and viewers into a thick cloud of doubt from which all ability to perceive the whole gamut of this total war against terror was lost.

The impessionistic analyses of events by its commentators and pundits, gave the impression to its audience, that it was their governments which were the real culprits of the war in Iraq. This in turn generated among many peoples, whose governments were involved and engaged in the war, an almost complete discouragement and great doubts about the need and justice of the war. The ominous dark clouds that menacingly loomed over the cities of Western civilization replete with the lightning bolts of the terrorists, were no longer real and became merely a fantasy of the “mythical” and “lying” world of Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, and Howard. But the commentators who believe that Al Qaeda could not obtain weapons of mass destruction or nuclear weapons from rogue states, or if they did, they would not use them without warning against the cities of the West, are fools and knaves.  

Only America, among all the nations of the world, has the military power and resolve to prevent and preempt  this from happening. Ostensibly however, the court jesters of the media are very proud of their intellectual performance before their populist audiences in exposing the above named leaders as the irredeemable liars and wrong-doers of the war. And it is by this breathtaking flippancy that they will claim, as intellectual pretenders, the Nobel Laureates for being the keepers of the freedom of the press.  But history, being neither forgetful nor forgiving, will play an everlasting trick upon them. It will render its harsh and remorseless verdict by condemning this “treason” of the media toward the nations, such as America, Britain, Italy, and Australia, whose leaderships had the moral courage and political acumen to be the gatekeepers of Western civilization, against this surge of fanatic terrorism which threatened, and threatens, to bring all civilized life to an end.

ALEA JACTA EST
Con GEORGE-KOTZABASIS  (Former Director of SBS TV 1986-96 )
June 8 2005 Melbourne Australia
E-mail: Kotzabasis@bigpond.com