Nemesis

REALIST FOREIGN POLICY: US ISOLATIONISM CURE AGAINST TERROR

          Con George-Kotzabasis—June 29,2006

Chuck Pena, a realist in foreign policy argues, in his piece in the Washington Note, June 16, 06, as a result of the “debacle” of the US invasion of Iraq, ‘that US interventionism is a root cause of anti-American resentment in the Muslim world-which breeds hatred and becomes a stepping stone to violence, including terrorism.’ He suggests, therefore, that the US ‘stop meddling in the internal affairs of countries…except when they directly threaten US national security interests’, lessen its involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and cease supporting authoritarian regimes, such as the Saudi Arabian and that of Egypt. He strongly believes, that such a new course in America’s foreign policy can  ‘cure the disease’ of terror. Hence, the withdrawal of the US from the hotspots of the world, such as the Middle East, is the prudent course to take and avoid, according to him, the disastrous intervention in Iraq from happening again.

This is no less than a new version of the US isolationism of the past. And this is isolationism with a vengeance. As such a policy will be taken by the only superpower in the world. And historically will be unprecedented. As no great, powerful nation in the past withdrew from the turbulent spots in the world, for the purpose of avoiding the resentment of those nations that were the fomenters of this turbulence, especially when the latter threatened the order upon which its power rested. Such a policy is completely unrealistic, especially when it’s recommended to be adopted by the sole superpower, which is the major force that keeps the world’s order, and deals a severe blow to the realist credentials of Chuck Pena.

But it’s obvious that pessimism is the paternity of this new version of isolationism. In the face of US casualties and reverses in Iraq, in the aftermath of its victory against the Saddam regime, some foreign policy realists have lost their grip on history as well as their strength to stand firm against these reverses. In all human enterprises mistakes and reverses are part of the process, and this is especially so in war. To believe that one can engage in warfare without committing errors and without the risk of suffering reverses is the belief of armchair strategists who presumably can plan their wars with the precision of Laplace’s demon leaving nothing to chance. Alas, such absolute knowledge that can foresee every reaction of an enemy to one’s action and hence plan victory against an enemy with algorithmic precision, has not been bequeathed by providence to man. But despite this weakness of man, some people have been endowed by nature to be strong in the face of all errors and reverses and to have the ability to turn them around. This is the endowment of great commanders, and this is the difficult task they have in the Iraqi war today. To cut and run, as a result of these tactical reverses that the Americans are going through, would be the greatest error that would surpass all other errors, as well as being a stupendous strategic reversal, of the US war against global terror.

Wars cannot be waged nor can they be won with pessimists a la Chuck Pena. It’s the vocation of optimists to win wars. And there are auspicious signs–beyond the dramatic selectivity of most of the media to pick the most gruesome events in Iraq, i.e., the daily terrorist killings of civilians and the frequent killings of US troops which are the two aspects of the war that have maximum impact upon the public–that with the formation of a government of national unity, the strengthening of its security forces, the amnesty announced by Prime Minister al Maliki, and the elimination of the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi, that the insurgents will become  not only more isolated  from, but also more hated than feared by, the Iraqi people. This will lead to the demoralization of the insurgents and the loss of their élan to continue fighting.

Moreover, and this is the most important feature of the insurgency, the fact that the main target of the insurgents are not their counter-combatants but civilians, exposes their military weakness, their increasing inability to kill, the by now, better trained Iraqi security forces, in armed combat. And the narrowing of the sieve, through which car bombs can penetrate into populated areas, will further disable the insurgents to continue to commit their atrocious attacks against civilians.

In the chronicle of insurgencies, no insurgency that was unable to fight its enemy in battle and resorted only in targeting and killing civilians was successful in destabilizing and eventually overthrowing the established regime. This fighting inability of the Iraqi insurgency is accentuated further, by having to confront the prowess of the occupying forces. And although it can inflict more than moderate casualties upon the occupying power and upon Iraqi security forces by the stealthily moving car bombs and laying road bombs, it cannot win the war by stealth. Furthermore, its increasing isolation from the people will deprive it of any logistical support that is getting from the latter, as well as the cover behind which it can hide. Hence, the insurgents will become cherry picking targets of the American-led forces.  

In such militarily disadvantageous milieu the insurgents cannot survive for long. It’s this optimistic scenario that is unfolding from ‘the fog of war’ in Iraq, that the pessimists, like Chuck Pena, are unable to see. The Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq, and more generally for the region, has a high probability of being successful. And its success will destroy all the unrealistic propositions of the pessimistic realists, that America, the sole superpower, should withdraw from the hotspots of the world and insert itself into a cocoon of neo-isolationism.        

THE BETRAYAL OF THE NEW YORK TIMES  

The New York Times’ (NYT) decision to publish the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, whose goal is to identify terrorist networks through the use of financial data, is totally irresponsible and will seriously harm the war against global terror.

By this action, the NYT has converted its centuries old logo from, “All The News That Are Fit To Print”, to All The News That Are Fit To Betray America.  

WILL THE SLEEPING WEST FALL

INTO THE TERRORIST INFERNO?

Con George-Kotzabasis

The resplendent holy crescent of Islam that has been transformed by Muslim fundamentalism into an unholy black sharp scimitar is hovering over the cities of the West ready to fall and ‘behead’ Western civilization. Yet despite this ominous great danger, a substantial part of its population is slumbering in deep depths of insouciance and complacency, and is zestfully indulging in its economic prosperity, comforts and pleasures that emanate from freedom and the ethos of amity, cooperation, and coexistence, without realising how brittle and short-lived these have become under this scimitar wielded by the terrorist fanatics. The nannies that rock the cradle that is putting the people to sleep, is an assortment of epigonistic political leaders in Western countries, such as the politically opportunistic triumvirate of Chirac, Schroeder, and Zapatero, and a miscellany of unimaginative and intellectually malevolent, and therefore misplaced, commentators and feuilletons, such as Kerry O’Brien, Paul McGeough, and Robert Fisk – all three morally weak and with an axe to grind – who so unworthily dominate the commentary in the media. It’s this coupling of an inferior breed, that has produced the offspring of drowsy disinterest among most people in the West, to this great danger that is posed by global terrorism.

It would be a gross mistake to underestimate this lethal threat that hangs over all civilised life. There is no room for complacency here that this danger will dissipate  once the temporal aims of terrorism are achieved. But the terrorist threat is not ‘motioned’ by a political agenda, i.e., by the problem of the Middle East and the settling of the Palestinian issue or the withdrawal of the American-led coalition forces from Iraq and Afghanistan but by an apocalyptic agenda, whose primary ‘motion’ is the subjugation and destruction of Judeo-Greco-Roman civilisation. This threat, therefore, cannot be partitioned into certain regional areas, as it has a global reach, since its goal is no other than global dominance.

ISLAMIC TERRORISM NOT REVOLT OF POOR

The political analyses, therefore, that claim that countries which are closely allied with the American hegemon and are involved in the latter’s imperialistic wars of monocratic rule, are targets of terrorism, are cerebrally unhinged and totally wrong. Moreover, Islamic terrorism is not the revolt of the poor, the politically disenfranchised and oppressed but the revolt of the Arab religious fundmentalist geist of the educated, the rich and those who crave to be the trailblazers of a new caliphate, all of whom are literate to such a high degree that they can distort and re-interpret even the writings of Mohammet, in their thrust for power.

Undoubtedly however, the leaders of terrorism have  a plenty supply of terrorist-fodder from the under-classes of the Muslim world, both from the East and the West. And the magnetic power they have to draw their suicidal recruits into a Jihad against the West from lumpen Muslims arises from the position they hold in the pecking order of Islamic fundamentalism. To illustrate this gravitational power that proceeds from this order, two examples, one from the macroscopic and another from the microscopic world of Muslim fundamentalism will suffice. In the macroscopic domain, the tremendous influence bin Laden has among ordinary Muslims emanates from the position he has in the hierarchy of this belligerent warring fundamentalism. In the microscopic one, the influence among his followers that the imam of Melbourne, Mohammet Omran has, derives too, from the position he retains in this hierarchical order of doctrinal fundamentalism. It is this combination of the educated, literate authority and knowledge of a wealthy élite, and the uneducated, illiterate recumbency and ignorance of the lower orders, that is the magma that ignites acts of terror by lumpen Muslims.

Strategically, therefore, the loci of power of global terrorism lie in the Mosques and in the madrassas, and among those fundamentalist Muftis and mentors who are its vehement, vociferous, and fanatic propagators and propagandists. It’s here therefore that military strategists must strike their deadly blow. The war against global terror cannot be won in the field of battle, unless it’s also taken into the breeding grounds of terrorism, wherever they happen to be located, in the East or in the West.

FANATICISM IS THE STRENGTH OF TERRORISM

In this strategic thrust, the decision-makers and planners of the war against global terror, must discover and identify both the dynamic of fanaticism, and its opposite,  the static of fanaticism . It’s on this dual identification, that the total defeat of global terror lies.

Since antediluvian times, history has shown that the quintessence  of all millenarian movements is a dogmatic, fanatic and unshakable belief in a paradisiacal tomorrow. The earthly sufferings, nature-and-man-made, of human beings, blighted with ignorance and fear of the unknown, have motivated millions of them throughout history to embrace fanatically and fatally millenarian movements. Ultimately to their detriment, since eventually these movements would not open the golden gates to an abode of earthly paradise, but would cast them into a dark pit of hopelessness, despair, and destruction. Modern examples of this fatefully destructive millenarianism in its large scale secular form, are the Hitlerite vision of The One Thousand Years Reich, and the Marxist-Leninist utopia of utopias, Communism, and on a smaller scale in religious form, the Jonestown mass-suicide in Guyana, South America.

In all cases, millenarian-eschatological doctrines thrived in crisis situations, either in the aftermath of catastrophic wars or abominable and abysmal socio-economic injustices, as millions of people lashed by the scourge of war or poverty, clasped to their bosom these doctrines, either as the consolation for or revolution of their hopelessness. Likewise, non-literate and solely religious cultures, which tend to spend more time in the affairs of heaven than in the affairs of the earth, in encountering the economic, cultural and scientific achievements of Western civilization, suffered an unbridgeable cultural shock. Their peoples, who were stuck in a milieu of poverty, lack of education, corrupt governments and destitution had no other remedy for their ordeal and despair but the panacea of religious salvation. Messiahs who promised to bring about a new age of material and spiritual blessings, and throw their respective Satan into a bottomless pit, were an irresistible force to this mass destitution.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its terrorist suicidal death-squads, fits perfectly the above schema. The prophet-like preaching of its leaders and their actions in the field of battle against the great Satan America – which has given to its leaders a heroic stature, such as Osama bin Laden has, even in the eyes of moderate Muslims – is drawing many young Muslims, as a result of their failed, but proud culture, both from the middle and from the under-classes, into the fatal embrace of the seventy virgins. To this wild and virile chase of the will-o’-the-wisp ‘virginity’ by would-be terrorists, and especially, by those who have passed the threshold of hesitation into active terrorism, martyrdom is an infinitesimal price to pay for the infinite prize of the hedonistic pleasures of a boundless seraglio. Moreover, the holy war against the West, and the telluric triumph of Islam over the great Satan, America, fulfils to the brim the great pride of Arab culture. It is of such stuff that the dreams of terrorists are made. And to the eyes of these suicidal zealots, no power on earth can prevent the realisation of these dreams, since these dreams are the epiphany of the mind of Allah.

How can the West, confront, counter and defeat such an awesome, formidable, and fanatic foe, who is fighting under the banner of God, armed with weapons of mass destruction, and possibly soon with nuclear weapons? An enemy with a shadowy existence, with the wings of Mercury on its heels, moving swiftly to its global targets, being able to hide and receive aid and comfort, and indeed, recruits, in the numerous Muslim diaspora in the West, not to mention its home-ground, the East?  This is the historic challenge, of Herculean tasks, that Western civilization is being called to take. Will it be able to slay this multi-headed Hydra of terrorism and its bestial existence, and will it have the will and strength to accomplish the severe and stringent tasks that are absolutely essential to its defeat, or will it wear the ‘Shirt of Nessus’?

HOW THE WEST MUST DEAL WITH TERRORISTS?

The answer to the above questions resides in the kind of political leadership Western democracies will own, i.e., whether this leadership will have the ironclad characteristics of statesmanship, and the prescience, imagination and wisdom to confront this mortal challenge, not with traditional strategies and tactics, since it confronts an unearthly, heavenly inspired enemy, but by unconventional and ground-breaking strategies and tactics that will have more than a chance of subduing and defeating these ‘outlaws of god’ . A leadership, furthermore, that will have the strength to swim against the stream of populism and its anti-war ‘canons’, and not to be a hostage to political considerations and repercussions that could emanate from its ruthless and merciless actions, as a result of its new strategy and tactics, against its fanatic foe. One must be reminded, that all political repercussions rapidly dissolve in the cup of victory. If its military actions lead or seem to be leading to the defeat of the terrorists, then all remonstrations and demonstrations against these actions, will burst quickly, in a puff, at the stroke of victory.

In all strategies, discerning and identifying the strength and weakness of one’s enemy, is vital for his defeat. The strength of global terror does not reside in its moral courage or in its technical and mental competence to devise new means and methods in its lethal attacks against the West, or in the purported injustices inflicted by America on Muslim countries, but in its suicidal fanaticism. It’s the latter that imbues in its holy-warriors the robotic courage that turns these means and methods into flagrant successful attacks against its infidel enemies.  It’s on this dynamic of fanaticism that Islamic terror accomplishes its most arduous and rationally most unimaginable attacks. And the more successful these attacks are against the great Satan America and the infidels of the West, the more this dynamism increases, and hence, becomes a stronger gravitational force to would-be terrorists to join the ranks of the holy-warriors.

It is here where Anglo-American strategists must strike their fatal deadly blow -to deprive terrorism of the ability to be successful in its operations. In the context of global terror, therefore, success is the quintessence of the dynamic of fanaticism. And concomitantly, failure is the core of the static of fanaticism. But the focus of this strategy on the ‘success of failure’ for the fanatics of Muslim terror cannot be accomplished by the ‘Martial arts’ of the past, but only by a new imaginative war-craft that would intrepidly and remorselessly be waged against these hordes of fanatics.

FANATICISM SPREADS LIKE BIRD FLU

One of the primary characteristics of fanaticism is, that it spreads swiftly like a bird flu. Like medical practitioners, therefore, the practitioners of war against this virus of fanaticism, have to take swift, and necessarily and inevitably, ruthless measures that will prevent this epidemic from expanding and infecting the minds of an even greater number of proud and/or vulnerable culture-shocked  Muslims. As very often in medicine, the best antidote to poison is another kind of poison.  Likewise, the antidote to fear is fear. Hence, the fear of terror has to be fought with fear. One has to implant the fear of the terrorists into their own hearts. This is the only and most effective way to defeat quickly and decisively global terror. But this is a very difficult task for the civilized West to take on and to perform. To fight by the laws of the jungle, even against an enemy who is the embodiment of the jungle, would be incongruent, and, indeed, a blatant violation of all the principles of a civilised people. Principles, however, in all societies since the beginning of history, are in a state of permanent ‘competition’.  In a critical situation of childbearing, for example, the principle of life is split in two, as an obstetrician has to make a choice whether to save the life of the baby or of the mother; in a sinking ship, its captain gives priority to women and children to have access to the ship’s boats than to men. And in crisis conditions, it’s obvious that the principle of life, more often than not, overrides all other principles.

In the aftermath of 9/11, it’s indubitably clear, that the existence of Western civilization is under a mortal threat -a threat that cannot be negotiated away by any order of human reasoning with these addicts of fanaticism, unlike the threat of nuclear war between the two superpowers in the Cuban crisis, when Krutchev, at the reasoning of President Kennedy and of the dangers this confrontation would have upon mankind, “blinked”, and withdrew the nuclear missiles from Cuba. In the case of these fanatics, however, their robotic programming will never allow them to blink before any reasonable argument or danger. But this robotic program is written by the graph of success. Once, however, one destroys this success, the program becomes static and dysfunctional. As a series of mounting failures in the operations of these zealots against the West, will engender a progressive doubt in their minds that, after all, Allah may not be in favour of their actions. And, if at the same time, this doubt is accompanied with fear about their capture or physical elimination by their enemies, this will lead to an irreversible demoralisation within their ranks, and with mathematical precision will bring forward their total defeat, as the mark of death will be indelibly imprinted in the minds of the terrorists and their supporters.

For this feat however to be accomplished, Western strategists must employ remorselessly their awesome military power and technology overtly and covertly against these holy-warriors, both in the field of battle as well as in the loci of their ideological and doctrinal power, i.e., in the Mosques and madrassas. The success of this strategy will involve the setting up of a clandestine organisation of international special forces of condottieri, who will serve as covert hit-squads against suspected terrorists and their mentors, including those who have been acquitted by courts on the basis of legal technicalities, wherever they happen to be, in the East or in the West. This will give to the terrorists and their supporters an overwhelming sense that the legal process of civilized societies will no longer serve as a shield behind which they can cover. The incontestable overpowering force and Humint (spying intelligence), and the deadliness of the covert operations, will loom like an incubus over the head of global terror, and its ubiquitousness will be an endless nightmare for all its practitioners and supporters. Undoubtedly, some innocent people will become victims of these lethal clandestine operations. But as in all human critical conflicts of such enormous and intricate proportions, the fallibility of human nature will inevitably extract its toll, in the coin of innocence. Moreover, the rogue states that continue to support terrorists politically and materially will be threatened with sanctions and ultimately with force, if they don’t change their ways. (All the ideas contained in this paragraph were passed to the Pentagon by the writer in October 2001. )

It is by this strategy of ‘displaced fear’, from the terrorists to the terrorists, in combination of the success of failure in their operations against the West, that the nadir of fanatic terror will be reached.

Only by daring to use ‘infernal’ means of warfare against fanatic terrorism, will the West be saved from slipping and falling into the inferno of terror. The Gordian Knot of global terror will not be loosened by any U.N. nostrums of diplomacy
( Diplomacy will have a backseat in this crucial conflict), nor by snake oil palliatives that will soothe the purported grievances of the terrorists, but by cutting it ruthlessly with the ‘unsheathed sword’. Will the leadership of the Western world, especially the American, have the gumption and the moral and political strength and wisdom to use these deadly instruments against its mortal foe? In this existential struggle of Western civilization against fanatic terrorism, the question for political leaderships with éclat, is – to be, or not to be.

OCTOBER 23 2005

MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

LIBERALS IN DENIAL ON GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ

Swagger is Back: Post-Zarqawi Iraq  Creates Spin Opportunity  For Republicans.
                                  Steven Clemons Washington Note–June 14,2001

A short reply: Con George-Kotzabasis—June 15, 2006

No positive news coming out from Iraq will satisfy the sniveling and sniggering liberal intelligentsia, except, it seems, the defeat of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Not long ago, they were impugning and pillorying the Administration for its inability to capture or kill either bin Laden or al Zarqawi as a significant sign of the failure of the war against global terror. Now, that one of the pivots of their argument has been “violently” removed, they transformed it, to quote Clemons, as “swagger is back.”

The formation of a government of national unity with a new Prime Minister, the completion of appointing to the senior cabinet posts of Defense and Interior a Sunni and a Shi ite respectively, the abysmal failure of the critics of the war, in regards to their prognosis that Iraq was in the midst of a civil war—and now that   “their” civil war is not occurring they have re-christened it as “sectarian violence”—the death of Zarqawi, these achievements, according to Clemons, merely ratchet “up the arrogance and hubris of America’s position in Iraq.”

On the contrary, the good news that are coming out of Iraq indicate, that the war might turn out to be a resounding success of the Bush administration’s strategy of spreading fledgling freedom and democracy not only in Iraq, but  in the region in general. And the liberal intelligentsia will have so much egg on their faces that their financial donors, such as Soros, will have to hire numerous nannies to clean their faces.  

   DAVE  MEYER: Revisiting the GWOT    

                                              WASHINGTON  NOTE  June 05, 2006      

A reply: Con George-Kotzabasis

‘It’s time to kill the “war on terror” ’, states Dave Meyer, as if one could kill terror with rhetoric.  He continues, ‘the phrase… has both inspired and been exploited to advance a pernicious agenda. It’s based on fear’. And the latter ‘abandons reason in dealing with enemies.’ But in all species, including man, fear is a predominant characteristic. And throughout their biological evolution, fear started a veritable “arms race” between predators and preys to develop the organs of attack and defense respectively. Fear therefore, has not received its breathe of life from political elites with “pernicious agendas.” In human species, it has deep Hobbesian roots.

But fear has a dual origin. It springs both from reality and hallucinations. Dave Meyer, and Glen Greenwald, carelessly, or because of their own political agenda, do not bother to make a distinction between this dual provenance of fear, and hence they let their guard down. One therefore, cannot take their proposition seriously. For if they claim, that the fear that sprang from the attack of 9/11, and the foreboding that a future attack could take the form of a mushroom, is a hallucination, then they show themselves to be escapees from their straitjackets.

In any sense of the word, the American people, and their savvy counterparts from the rest of the world, had every reason to be deeply concerned about their security from the reasonless attack emanating from religious fanaticism. Any administration, of whatever political hue, would have been politically irresponsible and stupid had it not taken this fearful threat as real, and would have been accountable for such stupendous dereliction of duty.

But it’s obvious, that Glen Greenwald’s ‘fantastic new book’, to quote Meyer, will be rich in its fantasies.