Nemesis

                    FIRST REFLECTIONS ON THE ELECTORAL

                    VICTORY OF HAMAS       Professor Gilbert Achcar

                    Posted on INFORMED COMMENT– January 28, 2006 www.juancole.com

A retort: Con George-Kotzabasis

The radical-left, is enamored in using the language and the words (“prognoses”) of the tragic revolutionary Leon Trotsky, with seldom however having the sharp political nous and insight of the great revolutionary. Professor Achcar, by making his “prognoses” about the electoral victory of Hamas on a hastily foreclosed analysis that precludes all other possibilities, may find his prognoses to be completely wrong. He “honeycombs” his argument with the delectable finalities that are so sweet to the intellectual palate of the radical left. He argues, that the electoral result of Hamas “is the final nail in the coffin of its neo-con-inspired, demagogic and deceitful rhetoric about bringing  ‘democracy’ in the ‘Greater Middle East’.

Eager to be the carpenter of this coffin that will bury all lies and deceits of the neo-cons, he cannot see in the sawdust of his own making, that there is a high probability that Hamas in government will not squander the international sympathy for the Palestinian cause, by continuing its belligerence and terrorist attacks against Israel. Nor will it sacrifice on the altar of its radical ideology the financial support it receives from the EU and the US, which will be vital for its continued viability as a government, and more importantly, for the economic survival of its people. (The statements of some leaders of Hamas  – if they really believe this – that if this financial support is cut by the western donors it will be substituted by the financial support of Arab countries is, to say the least, a forlorn hope.)  To do otherwise, is to provoke an uprising of the Palestinian people, including Hamas supporters, against it. And already we have witnessed such a possibility in a dress rehearsal of the clashes between the supporters of Fatah and Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the elections.

Hence, there are more optimistic scenarios that could evolve from the electoral victory of Hamas, than the “gloomy finality” of professor Achcar. One of them is, that Hamas will chose a diplomatic demarche, under mounting international pressure, to resolve its problems with Israel. Thus, there are still many moves to be played on the chessboard of nascent democracy in the Mideast, and the policies of the neo-cons are not yet checkmated, as the omniscient ideologues of the left want us to believe.    

              AMERICA: THE COST OF ALLIANCE

                                                  John Langmore The Age—January 9, 2006

A reply: Con George-Kotzabasis

               A NECESSARY ALLIANCE IN A WORLD

               OF MULTILATERAL WEAKNESS


Old socialists never die they just morally and intellectually wither away. John Langmore with his article in The Age demonstrates the veracity of this aphorism. In a world where the values and the peoples of Western civilization are under a mortal threat by the Islamo-fascist suicidal forays, and when many western countries under an American-led coalition are being aware of this threat and are militarily engaging this deadly enemy on the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and in the deserts of Iraq, to say, as Langmore does, that our shared values with the US are declining, is to expose himself as being noetically totally irrelevant in the analysis of events au courant in the world of global terror. By saying furthermore, as a corollary to this contrived “decline” of our shared values, that maybe they are replaced by “the market-fundamentalist economic ideology and complied with neo-conservative foreign policy,” he willy-nilly unfurls the banner of his own socialist ideology whose congenital bias inevitably bars him from being objective about the issue of the American alliance.

The values of open societies and their freedoms are the values that are politically uniting   a modern world and underpin its great economic, cultural and scientific achievements. These values can only decline if the countries that are their beneficiaries and custodians lose the moral and intellectual strength to fight for them when they are challenged by their foes. America and its staunch allies, Britain and Australia, being fully aware of the real stakes of the war against global terror, are in the forefront of defending these values upon which the freedom and prosperity of the West are founded. The legitimacy of their military action has risen like a Phoenix from the ashes of the World Trade Center that portended the great danger that Western civilization faced before the twin dangers of fanatic Islamic terrorism and the upshot of Muslim demographics, especially in the counties of the West, as Mark Steyn so brilliantly adumbrated in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Langmore’s argument, that America’s de-legitimized actions in Korea, Vietnam, and now in Iraq, needed some sort of apparent legitimacy that presumably was provided partly by Australia, is cognitively and historically unsustainable. First, in regards to Korea and Vietnam, it is as serious as claiming–during the rivalry between the two superpowers for world dominance– that the Soviet Union’s and China’s support of these countries did not pose a grave threat to America’s interests and to Western interests in general, and somehow the US did not have the moral and political legitimacy to protect these interests. Secondly, in the present case of Iraq, to argue also, that the US’s invasion of Iraq is illegitimate, is to embrace and uphold the politically feeble and morally corrupt arguments of Kofi Annan, Chirac, and Schroeder, who all three, as the Food-For-Oil scandal proved, were in cahoots with Hussein and had therefore a sinister interest to claim falsely that the war against the latter’s regime was illegitimate.  Moreover, to show the selfishness of the US’s actions, Langmore quotes two academics, Stuart Harris, and Amin Saikal who emphasize that “the US has long made clear that the US national interest comes first in its actions.” This is a profound statement! But where in all the history of mankind can we find a nation, that was unwilling to commit suicide, had acted altruistically in its foreign policy? (Langmore, and the two academics of the ANU, should re-read Thucydides and distill some profound lessons about power politics from the tour de force arguments of the great historian). It’s very often the case however, that the “selfish” interests of a great nation coincide and are also beneficial to the interests of its allies. That was so during the cold war as it is so with the war against global terror.

He also contends, that Australia incurred substantial costs in uncritically accepting US intelligence on Iraq, both by its commitment to engage its armed forces in Iraq, and by the abandonment of adhering to international “norms, treaties, and law” embodied in the UN, whose ability and competence to be a catalyst for “conflict resolution, peace keeping…are lost.” First, the US intelligence was shared by all the intelligence services of the major countries of the West, which included the UK, France, Germany, and Russia, as well as Australia. For Australia to have gone against this highly reputable consensus of the most credible, but not perfect, intelligence services of the world about Iraq, its intelligence operators would have had to be “double-agents” of the West’s and Iraq’s intelligence that would have given them exclusively the true real situation about the existence or not of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Despite however this error of US intelligence, the fact is, that Iraq had the technical and scientific apparatus and programs in place to develop WMD, and indeed, nuclear weapons (British intelligence was correct in its probe that emissaries of Saddam had gone to Niger seeking uranium-in spite of ambassador Wilson’s contrary statements, to which the media had given wide publicity, which however, were soon proven to be lies- albeit its government might have been reluctant to supply it), as soon as the UN sanctions were lifted, which Saddam hoped to achieve by the falling out of old Europe with the US  and by the Food-for-Oil corruption.

Secondly, Langmore’s argument, that international norms and treaties, whose custodian was the UN, could play a decisive role in conflict resolution, in this case of Iraq, when the latter contemptuously infringed a sundry number of UN resolutions, and when Kofi Annan’s visit to Saddam, just prior to the American invasion, failed abjectly to bring him along in accepting the peaceful proposals of the UN, is to abscond from reality. And display egregiously his total ineptness to fathom and evaluate Saddam’s stratagem in playing on the diplomatic rift and impasse of France, Germany, and Russia with the US, that Saddam was using so cleverly to further his aims.

It’s the fundamental weakness of the UN’s multilateralism that makes unilateral action, in a world where there is only one superpower, and in a situation when the order of the world or parts of it are gravely threatened, the only realistic option to prevent such a threat from taking a virulent form. The UN, in speaking for the separate interests of so many is incapable of speaking in the interests of all. A present glaring example of this is the situation in Darfur, where, genocide is virtually perpetrated by the Sudanese government and the UN, not unlike the genocide in Rwanda, is incapable of stopping it. The visits of Kofi Annan in Sudan and his diplomatic overtures to its government were completely fruitless and the Secretary General failed miserably in his mission. Nor was he more successful in persuading the Organization of African States to take a strong stand against the Sudanese government and coerce it to desist from its murderous actions. Thus it was, that the interests of all, of humanity, to stop the genocide in Darfur, were sacrificed on the altar of the separate interests of Sudan and of the African States.

Langmore, being a fugitive from reality, cannot perceive that the “rhetorical” diplomatic power of the UN, as an entity of resolving the critical issues of our time and in mobilizing nations to take a stand against aggression, makes it totally unfit to play such a role. Furthermore, he does not realize that in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Bali bombings, Australia’s alliance with the US is crucial for the security of the country. As only the US, among all nations in the world, can defeat global terror. And within such an alliance, or any alliance, the security of Australia cannot come on the cheap.    

Con George-Kotzabasis (Former Director of SBS TV 1986-96)

January 16, 2006   MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
                        .                        

              Federal Plan to License Clerics an Absurd Measure Bound to Fail

                                                                                                         Amir Butler

                                                                         The Age—January 9, 2006

A brief response: Con George-Kotzabasis

Amir Butler, of the Australian Muslim Civil Rights Advocacy Network, has let the cat out of the bag. He argues in his article, ‘that it would then be an unwelcome and unfortunate intrusion on freedom of religion for the Muslim Advisory Council to interfere’ with  ‘those religious …clerics,’ who ‘continue to enjoy the support of increasing sections of the Muslim community’, and who are selected…on the sectarian tastes of their constituency.’ (He is talking here about radical fundamentalist leaders and imams).

He may reproach the intrusions of the Muslim… Council, but he must be, as presumably a moderate Muslim, in full support of the “intrusions” of ASIO among those radical leaders and imams and in those increasing sectarian sections of the Muslim community, who as followers of the former could be the hotbeds of home-grown terror.

      The jury is still out on Iraqi democracy

                                                      Steven Clemons  -The Australian December 20, 2005

A reply: Con George-Kotzabasis  (Former Director of SBS TV 1986-96)

       TURNING POINTS WILL NOT COME

        UNLESS STAYING ON THE POINT

Steven Clemons argues by implication that the Iraqi election was neither a milestone nor a turning point, as “there is still a lot of treacherous ground to cover”. He mocks Kristol and Kagan for writing in the Weekly Standard that the Iraqi election was “an eruption of democracy in the heart of the Arab world”, and Kaplan for stating in the New Republic, that the election “really was a milestone”. And he strikes with the last arrow of his mockery President Bush for declaring that the election “was a landmark in the history of liberty”. But being a professional he does not burn all his boats just in case the history making of the “neo-conservatives” and its Executive in the Oval Office turns out to be right and the arrows of his mockery change into boomerangs. He states, that “Kristol, Kagan, and Kaplan-as well as Bush-may still prove to be correct”, albeit he still holds their position to be “more sentimental than logical-not to mention self-serving”.

But let us respond to the crux of his argument that “beneath this big number [of voters] are some unpleasant realities”. The religious leaders of the country issued a fatwa instructing their followers that it was their “religious duty to vote”. This was to him “soft coercion rather than a strong buy-in to democratic process”. The importance lies however, that “this big number” of voters followed the directions of their leaders who were themselves convinced of the value of the democratic process and who had embraced it so ardently. In a country such as Iraq, whose people had lived for so long under authoritarian and dictatorial regimes and who had never experienced the benefits of democratic freedom, only their leaders could usher them into a democratic system of government. Kemal Ataturk is the ne plus ultra example of leading his people to embrace modernity after four centuries of Sultanate despotism. Clemons completely disregards, indeed, misses, this historic fact, in his endeavor, so heedlessly and so hastily, to understate the advent of democracy in Iraq. As the most important feature is not in the “buy-in” of democracy by the people, but the successful “sell-in” of democracy to all the religious and secular factions of Iraq by their respective leaders. It is in this “U turn” of the leaders of Iraq toward democracy in their bid to secure power and in their rejection of violence and the barrel of the gun as a means of achieving power, that augurs well for a democratic future in Iraq.          

Clemons also argues, that the high turn out of Sunnis at the elections was prompted as a result that many of them were tortured and murdered by the present Shi’ite dominated government, hence the continuation of the latter would further endanger the Sunnis. He concludes, therefore, that it was fear that caused the Sunnis to participate in such great numbers in the elections, and not only “hope and belief in democracy”. But the Shi’ite dominance was installed with the first Interim Government that was elected last January. Why then the Sunnis who were tortured and murdered surely before last October did not participate in the constitutional elections held on this month?  

He furthermore states, ‘that most Iraqis…don’t believe that politics is the best…’solution’ to their problems. They feel that violence remains the more pragmatic way to achieve justice and to protect one’s interests”. To say this in the face of all polls that show that security is the greatest concern of most Iraqis and which can only be achieved by the elimination of violence exposes Clemons as being unhinged from reality. Unless of course he believes the proclivity of the majority of Iraqis for violence has the latent aim of the restoration of a new Saddam who would provide this security.
Such a hidden desire by Iraqis for a new despot however is counter factual and goes against the grain of all the probable scenarios that could unfold in Iraq. The rise of a strongman in Iraq could only happen if the Americans withdrew from the country prematurely with the likelihood that their early departure before Iraq was stabilized could spark a civil war.
  
Finally, in a burst of risible absurdity, he downgrades the “mountain” of neo-conservative strategy, i.e., the spread of democracy, into a “mouse” of political score pointing, by saying with a serious mien, that “framing an election as a success to score political points will only blur the US ability to see what is really unfolding in Iraq”. But if it was not a success could he say that it was a failure? Or would he choose some sort of a hybrid between success and failure, such as Richard Haass’ “ballotocracy”?

Turning points in history are not instant made nor are they made by a spectacular event. They are made in a long hard building process. The turning point in Iraq will come as the policymakers of the Bush administration stay unflappably and with tenacity on their original strategic point of spawning democracy in the Middle East. Iraq is the pivotal point of this strategy that will turn the world of the terrorists and their state sponsors on their own heads. By defeating the insurgency in Iraq it will defeat also by proxy all other rogue states, as Libya has shown, as well as expedite the defeat of global terror. All the indications are that the Americans are going to stay on the point of their victory.