Nemesis

           HELMAN ON RICE THE NEW TRUMAN DOCTRINE

                                                          Ambassador Gerald Helman

                                              Informed Comment (Blog) –December 14,2005

A reply: Con George-Kotzabasis

Ambassador Helman must be reminded that even mountains can be moved by action. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush/Rice international order is a framework for the creation of a new order made in the image of a series of novel actions both in the world of diplomacy and in the field of war. These actions cannot be compared to any actions of the past nor can they be guided by successful actions of the past. Both the unique nature of the present enemy and the revolutionary changes in technology, especially in telecommunications and the advent of the Internet, as well the fundamental shift in geopolitical power, i.e., that the US is the sole hyperpower, demand a pivotal re-evaluation and transformation in the domains of diplomacy and military strategy.

The Bush administration had the historic burden of making this re-evaluation and transformation in circumstances where the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were already galloping with scimitars drawn against America and the infidels of the West. In such circumstances political action, on the part of the US, was the child of necessity born of the coupling of reliable and credible intelligence about the prowess of the terrorist threat and its ability soon to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons supplied by rogue states.

Once the genies of fanatic millenarian terrorism were out of the bottle, the Bush administration did not have the leisurely time to sift through a sieve of deliberation all the evidence it had in hand – and some of it was in conflict both about its source and its credibility – but had to make a swift decision how to confront this enemy on the basis of reliable evidence and of the indisputable fact that Saddam possessed WMD in the past and had used them against his enemies.  As well as having links with many terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda. Within the context of a boundless threat posed by the terrorists, the argument of the critics of the Administration that there was no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and therefore his regime should not have been attacked, is puerile and bereft of strategic nous. Saddam’s link or not with 9/11 was already irrelevant. I t was the likelihood of a future 9/11 link that was strategically relevant for imaginative, astute, and resolute policymakers.

Helman argues, that the war against terror “will require strong continuing international cooperation”. But he cannot perceive, that unlike the past when there were only two superpowers in a deathlock and America could get the solid support of all the countries of the West since it was providing the shield that protected them from the threat of the Soviet Union, now that America is the sole hyperpower it would have had great difficulties in receiving this strong cooperation from all the countries of the West. What will America then have to do now that it does not have in its grasp this elusive international cooperation from all the major countries of the world? Helman does not even pose this question least of all answer it.

Finally, he comments on the great importance and influence that NGOs exercised in the aftermath of the Second World War in the economic and political restructuring of the destroyed countries as a guide to the present problems, especially in the Middle East and in Iraq. Though NGOs can still be important in some cases, they are being to a great extent been supplanted by TV and the Internet. The people living under authoritarian and oppressive regimes by having regular access to the above outlets are daily “spoonfed” with information on how other people who reside in democratic countries prosper and live in freedom. That is why it is more than possible that democracy can be advanced by other states. And coming to my opening, it is by decisive and successful action that the Bush administration can move the “mountain” of international cooperation toward itself. There are auspicious signs that the Bush/Rice international order will as yet succeed in this historic task in Iraq.

               WHAT WAS NOT A LIE

                                                         Frank Rich New York Times November 27, 2005

A reply:      Con George-Kotzabasis

Frank Rich is an erudite and a stylistic writer. And his words are often searing as lava streaming down a mountaintop. But while “rich” in the vein of his verbalism he is poor in his strategic thinking. He disdains and derides Bush’s and Cheney’s explanation and defense of “the origin of the war” by going to the past. All wars, however, have a past. And the past of the present war is concentrated in two numerals, 9/11. This was the date when the ghosts of terror came out of their closets. And this was the time when the Bush administration would have to “recalibrate” its defensive and offensive strategies in the ghostly world of terror.

After the brutal attacks on New York and Washington, one would hardly need to marshal “doomsday threats…to sell the war”, as Rich claims. Since these attacks had already sold the war to the American public. No “half-truths and falsehoods” could replace the truth and actuality that America was facing a mortal enemy with inestimable lethal resources at his disposal, including nuclear weapons that could be supplied to him by rogue states. The Bush administration having reliable evidence in its hand based on intelligence- not the perfect intelligence that its critics demand which does not exist-had to take action to prevent this ominous threat from possibly snowballing into a “mushroom”.

Undoubtedly, the information and the intelligence in hand were controversial, both about its origins and assessments. But it would have been a gross political error to having suspended any military action until these conflicts between the experts were resolved. Statesmen, in critical situations have to make their momentous decisions on less than perfect information and intelligence. In the human world of uncertainty, it’s on reliable intelligence that the ship of state moves and accomplishes its goals.

Rich may well be satisfied and indeed, feel triumphant in identifying, like so many others, the errors of the war committed by the Administration. But his triumph is the triumph of a “hindsighter”, whose great achievement is merely the starting of the alphabet from Z to A.

The strategic goal of the war in Iraq was to establish an Archimedean point from which it could turn the world of terrorism and its state supporters upon their own heads. The defeat of the insurgency in Iraq had and has the great potential to defeat by proxy all other rogue states, as Libya has shown, as well as put a stop to the global financiers of terror, the Saudis, whose promiscuous funding have set up the indoctrinating grounds of terrorism, in the form of the madrassas. And finally, it would expedite the defeat of global terror.

Rich, on the Olympian mists of his verbalism has missed this strategic reality of the war in Iraq.              

                                    THE “BETRAYAL” OF THE MEDIA

A retort: Con George-Kotzabasis to Michelle Grattan’s Lecture with the title: Gate-Keepers and Gate-Crashers, Melbourne University May 2, 2005



The title of your lecture is a misnomer! It should be named the ‘Gate-Keepers and the History-Crashers’, read as the “betrayal” of the media, in the context of this historic mortal threat to Western civilisation posed by Muslim fundamentalism, in the aftermath of 9/11. But I do realise that as a hostage to the political shibboleths of the past, you could not deliver such a lecture. Only a Charles Krauthammer of the Washington post, or a David Brooks of The New York Times, and closer at home, a Greg Sheridan or a Tony Parkinson respectively of The Australian and The Age, could have given a lecture on this topic.
  
The betrayal of the media, can be clinically diagnosed by its pathological revulsion against the Bush, Blair, and Howard administrations, whose moral, spiritual, and political fortitude to swim against the populist tide against the war, and to be the defenders, the Gatekeepers of Western civilisation, against this fanatic necrophilous onslaught of terrorism, brought the wrath of its pundits on their heads.

The suitors of the media, passionately courting the “see-through” charms of populism and stricken in the heart by the populist arrow of Venus and mistily fallen in love with it, at the start of the war transformed their love into hatred for the Coalition of the willing. Dizzily enraptured in the flaming vapours of their inamorata, they lost their ability to be clear-sighted about the real stakes of this total war against global terror, and how to defeat it comprehensively. To accomplish the latter, one would have had   also to fight the rogue states (the allies of one’s enemies), such as Saddam Hussein’s, which were and are essentially the silent, if not loud, sinister allies of terror. That means that total war strategically, is a two-front war, which cannot but also involve the rogue states. The argument   the “liberal” media used to denigrate the propriety of the war, that is, that no WMD have been found, is chimerical, as all sources who acknowledge that although no hard evidence of WMD has been dug up, Saddam Hussein had the ability and the scientific apparatus in place to develop, just in time, WMD as soon as the sanctions of the UN were lifted. Yet another oversight that the “liberals” of the media continue not to give media coverage to…to their and their civilization’s own peril!

Instead of recognising this simple truism, the media scribblers and their foster siblings of academe, dipped their pens into their malevolent ink and wrote on their “yellow” pages all the abominations of the war that presumably were deliberately perpetrated by the American-led Coalition, and pronounced Zhdanov-like, and omnisciently, Bush’s strategy in Iraq as deeply flawed and as a foolish diversion from the war against global terror. Mentally anchored in the still, and by now putrid waters, of their “progressive” socialist ideology of the sixties and seventies, they dug out from the graveyard of history, the “scarecrows” of American imperialism spreading its rapacious wings over the globe in its pursuit of dominance and exploitation, corporate profits from the war, blood for oil, etc., etc. to make their case against the invasion of Iraq, instead of marshalling and concentrating their thoughts on the real cause of the war in Iraq, i.e., the attacks  on 9/11, and the underlying meaning the invasion had  for the total defeat of global terror. Even the French Newspaper, Le Monde, now concedes that Bush after all might be right, i.e., the democratization of the Middle East would be the way to defeat global terror.

That is how it was, that the “liberal” media, unable to liberate itself from the shibboleths, fetishes and wooden idols of their “progressive” ideology, and cast away the rosary of their left-wing devotion, which strangles them morally and intellectually, could not possibly be objective and factual in their punditry about the war in Iraq. And like stunted children, who will not grow up, they will gambol and play out their fantasies on paper and on TV screens, but no serious person will take any notice of them.

In the context of this existential threat that fanatic terror poses against Western civilisation, your lecture in toto was morally, politically and intellectually, a miscarriage.


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

May 2, 2005
Melbourne Australia

E-mail Kotzabasis@bigpond.com

P.S. The above contribution would have been made, if there was discussion from the floor, at a lecture given by Michelle Grattan, with the title ‘Gate-Keepers and Gate-Crashers’, on May 2, 2005, under the auspices of The Alfred Deakin Trust, at Melbourne University.