Nemesis

   US UNILATERALISM ONLY ALTERNATIVE
TO MULTILATERAL WEAKNESS

                                                                    Con George-Kotzabasis

A virus is threatening to enter and contaminate the bloodstream of a large part of the Australian people, the virus of moral desertion.  Desertion of major and important allies in their hour of need, and desertion of Australia’s long-term interests, as these allies could be crucial, as they have been in the past, for the nation’s survival and its future, in a world where nations cannot easily identify their future enemies in advance.

The fountain of this virus are Messrs. Hayden, Fraser, Whitlam and Hawke, who cravenly, unwisely and un-historically, have taken their “one-night-stand”  (of such length will be its intellectual duration), against the possibility of US unilateral action on Iraq, whose development of weapons of mass destruction is obvious to all savvy observers, and whose harboring and supporting of terrorists is just as evident.

The missing star in this constellation of darkness is Paul Keating, who apparently is hedging his bets on the issue, and who with his status as major domo (Placido Domingo?), will not enter the scene until the bit players are “finished off” the stage.  Ostensibly, only after that denouement will he reveal his “unilateral” position to his admirers and “encoreists”.  And let us wish and hope, that when he enters the act, his stand will be of an intellectually and historically longer duration, than that of the fountainheads, especially of Mr. Whitlam, who prides himself to be a student of Herodotus (the father of history), but who pitifully desecrates the teaching of the great historian indeed.  But when Paul Keating does give his strutting performance, don’t count on there being more eggs in the basket than “chickens” in the hatchery, on this issue of US unilateralism.

Also presently, there is a congregation of Christian religious prelates rushing towards this fountain, to water, in the heat of their emotional stand against the possibility of an erupting war in Iraq, their intellectually dry palates, threatening a revolt against a possible war tax and civil disobedience, whilst Muslim fundamentalists are slaughtering Christians all over the world, and threatening to kill millions in the future. According to Richard Reid’s evidence,(the captured British Muslim of Arab extraction, the shoe-bomber), presented before the court, after the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the second and third plan of the al Qaeda terrorists was to attack the US with biological and nuclear weapons.  Could the latter be accomplished without state sponsored terrorism?  That is the question!

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            USA BULWARK OF DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM


For more than six decades, the US has been the bulwark of democracy and freedom, and the successful defender against the onslaught of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, as well as against Japanese imperialism, which threatened to reverse the world order back to the dark ages. This was especially so of the communist threat, whose ideology not only pervaded and beguiled many nations and peoples of the poor world, but also, many nations and their intellectual luminaries of the affluent West. These luminaries, in many cases, served as teachers to many post-colonial communist rulers, such as Ho Chi Ming, Pol Pot and Chou En Lai in Asia, and Idi Amin, Lumumba and Mugabe in Africa, not to mention others.  

Inevitably, during this period, when the world was threatened to become a laboratory of experiments of communist ideology, a “killing fields” of universal dimensions, the US was compelled to make alliances with unsavory and undemocratic regimes in many parts of the world, to defend itself and the free world from the communist plague. In this confrontation of the US with its mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, the former had no choice as to the moral and political regime status of these allies.

In normal circumstances a nation, espousing the values of freedom and democracy, would not generally ally itself with dictatorial and authoritarian regimes.  In circumstances of crisis however, facing a mortal foe, such a nation is deprived of the luxury of choosing regimes, which share its own values and institutions, as allies. No wonder then, that the Taliban in Afghanistan during its war against the Soviets, was helped and supported by the US, as well as Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, which the Americans considered had moved closer to the Soviets, and hence threatened to alter dangerously the balance of power after the overthrow of the Shah by the fundamentalist leader Khomeini.  Not to mention other right wing regimes in Africa and Latin America, which were supported by the US, in their fight against left wing rebels, who were in turn aided by the Soviets, whose goal was to establish socialist regimes in their countries.

To students of world history, such alliances forged by the US, should be neither a puzzle nor a reason for condemning the latter.  Nor should the US be denounced for the many errors and immoral actions it committed, during its defense of the West from the communist menace.  

Infallibility is not a characteristic of humans, nor is angelic morality in crisis conditions. A superpower, burdened with the defense of its own interests and in the exercise of its heavy responsibilities on a global scale, will inevitably commit errors and violate morals in its clash of survival with a mortal enemy.  But a benign superpower, imbued with civilized values, such as the US, will not perpetrate these violations willingly and with deliberation. In the realm of war, although Adrastea, Necessity, is the absolute sovereign and dictates the actions of all combatants, a civilized nation will do its utmost to desist from committing atrocities.  In relation to its adversaries, the US never reached by a long distance the atrocities committed by its enemies.  And one has to be reminded, that it was America, with all its faults, which saved the world from both nazi and communist totalitarianism.  For this historic event alone, mankind should be grateful and thankful to the United States.  (Australia itself was saved from Japanese occupation as a result of US military power). Only inveterate, pathological ingrates, would refuse to give America its due.  

      PRIME MINISTER’S FLAWED LOGIC

Bob Hawke’s argument that Australia would become a target of terrorists if it supported the US unilateral action on Iraq is remarkable for its incoherence and flawed logic. If indeed, permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council of the UN, heeded and acted on Mr. Hawke’s advice, they would be foolish to authorize US military action against Iraq, if such authorization at the same time, would have made these nations targets of terrorism.  His argument therefore that the US should have the imprimatur of the Security Council before it attacked Iraq, is according to his logic, a non sequitur, it would never materialize. Why should any of these nations give the US such authorization, if it is going to provoke the fury of terrorists to fall upon their own lands?

Moreover, if the implications of Mr. Hawke’s contention are, that the issuing of such a mandate by the Security Council, for some mysterious reason, would be respected by the terrorists and would restrain them from attacking nations which supported the US war after the issuing of such a mandate, then Mr. Hawke lives in-cloud-cuckoo-land.

It is almost impossible to believe, that after his forced retirement as PM, triggered by his former colleague and “enforcer”, Paul Keating, that Mr. Hawke has been afflicted by such maladies of illusion. What is more puzzling however, is why Mr. Hawke did not adopt the same position during his tenure as Prime Minister in the Gulf War, when he supported unquestionably and vigorously the senior Bush?  Wouldn’t Australia have been such a target of the terrorists at the time, as a result of Mr. Hawke’s action?  Mr. Hawke is locked in a golden cage of illusions, if he really believes that Australia will be immune from terrorist attacks if only it would not support US unilateral military action against Iraq. (The Bali terrorist attack must have been a sobering snowball hit on Mr. Hawke’s head.  The terrorists must have known that most Australians were against a war on Iraq. Despite this knowledge, they did not desist from attacking Australians).  Australia cannot afford to take the illusions of Mr. Hawke as wisdom coming from the mount, especially in the context of the Bali massacre. In a global context, the future holocaust fundamentalist Islam has in store for Western civilization, will be far worse than the Nazi holocaust.
There is nothing unusual or new about unilateral action in crisis conditions, either for nations or individuals, when one’s life is at stake.  And it is not unusual when someone’s life is under threat, that many of his “friends” will abandon him, especially when any help rendered by them to him will involve them in some risk.  Only very few, the stalwartly loyal and the morally strong, will stand by him. And more often than not he might have to stand alone and fight for his survival.  And this is the other broken leg of Mr. Hawke’s logic. Would he suggest to someone whose life is under immediate threat, not to take any defensive action against his identified foe until he is able to secure the permission of his would-be supporters?  If Mr. Hawke mulishly persisted in giving such advice to such a person or nation, he could only do so at the expense of his intelligence and moral fortitude.  But no strong person or nation would heed such advice of weakness.

           THE IRREVOCABLE RIGHT TO DEFEND ONE’S COUNTRY

A nation under attack, as the US is at the moment by terrorists, once its intelligent organizations have the evidence in hand, (Can anyone doubt the efficiency of its intelligent services after the Bali bombing?) that a particular group, nation or group of nations sponsors and aids terrorists, has every right to defend itself by all means, including pre-emptive action, once it warns these nations of the dire consequences that would fall upon them, if they continued to support these terrorists.

And the Bush administration has done so repeatedly. It has warned these nations to dismantle all terrorist organizations and its financial backers immediately, and cease supporting terrorist activities. In addition, if these nations do not heed these grave warnings of the US, they would become targets of its military power.  It is in this context that a US unilateral attack against its mortal enemies is fully justified.  It is the only strategic alternative that a nation has for its survival. This is especially so, when a nation has to fight against invisible foes, such as terrorists, who strike without any warning and at random.  The core question is, does a nation have any other alternative of preventing morally bereft terrorists, anointed by religious fanaticism, who are sure that they are guided by the hand of Allah, from attacking it by weapons of mass destruction?  It is imperative that this question is answered not with pietist wishes, but by resolute and relentless action.  Only the timorous and cravenly will lay prostrate before the apocalyptic mushroom cloud, that the terrorists are preparing to envelope Western civilization.

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The times are not for irresolute, fickle and pusillanimous political leadership.  Complacent and Hamletinesque Clinton is no longer the occupier of the Oval Office. The former president, despite having knowledge that Iraqi intelligence was involved in the terrorist actions of the nineties, did not have the strength of character to confront this source of terrorism by military action, fearful that the casualties the US would sustain in a war with Iraq would shatter the complacency of his Administration and of the country, and that America would never feel “a touch of evil” (to quote the Orson Welles’ film). Instead he made the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 wherein there was ample evidence that Iraqi intelligence was involved, a law enforcement issue and not a war issue, as it should have been.  What will haunt the rest of his life will not be the scandals, the perjury, and his impeachment before Congress, but the collapse of the World Trade Center, as a result of his past inaction, or rather as a result of his cravenly refusal to deal and tackle with force, one of the main sources of terrorism, i.e. Iraq.  And quite possibly, had he done so, this would have prevented the slaughter of September 11.  

In contrast, the Bush Administration is resolute and determined to correct the lassitude and paralysis that emanated from the irresolute leadership of his predecessor, accepting this challenge of evil and responding to it with force.  Furthermore, the President is timely wise not to be trapped by the politics played in the UN, especially of its Security Council, and await for the United  Nations’ “Mandate of Heaven”, before the US acts with force against its mortal enemy and its terrorist allies.

The United Nations have been for many years a “Tower of Babel” - a welter of discord of conflicting interests and power plays between its member nations.  Within such a situation it is difficult, and at times impossible, to receive majority support for a nation’s actions, particularly if such actions involve war and are to be taken by a superpower, such as the US.  In this instance, two of the members of the Security Council, France and Russia have conflicting interests with the US, both of an economic and political nature, in the latter sphere as pretenders of global power. Hence, their opposition to the impending war against Iraq.  

It is quite probable, of course, that ultimately the US will receive the backing of France and Russia for military action against Iraq, if the latter once again breaches the new resolutions of the UN.  But the US should also have the indivisible and sovereign right to defend its citizens and its soil immediately, from enemy attack.  And this is provided by article 51 of the UN Charter.  Hence the US as a last resort, if it cannot procure the support of the Security Council for its use of force against Iraq, must act alone and unilaterally, without any pangs of conscience, against Saddam Hussein.

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Some people claim that the US war against Iraq is about control of the oil.  Undoubtedly, oil is a strategic resource vital for the industrialized world and for the healthy state of its economy.  But why was this important resource not an item in the agenda of the US in 1991 with the decisive defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, when the Americans could obtain substantial control of the oil in Iraq, and became an issue only in 2001, after September 11?

Such a claim is totally nonsensical. Oil for the US is only a secondary issue.  The primary issue is the deadly threat that Iraq poses against the US with its development of weapons of mass destruction, and the delivery of these weapons, either deliberately, or inadvertently and stupidly, in the hands of terrorists.  The claim therefore, that an attack on Iraq is about the control of oil, has all the seriousness of saying that a person whose life is under immediate danger, is more concerned that his salad is oiled, than that of securing his own safety.

However, oil is important for America’s two allies, France and Russia, as both have substantial holding interests of this strategic resource in Iraq. That is why the concerted prevarication of these two major members of the Security Council, as to whether the latter should provide the inspectors of the UN a stronger resolution that would give them unfettered access to sites in Iraq, is so salient.  Not to mention other possible mortal weaknesses prevailing in the power plays and procrastinations of France and Russia, such as envy of America as a superpower, and a modicum of schadenfreude in the suffering of the US in the aftermath of September 11, in seeing some wings clipped off from the American eagle. Hence the status quo in regards to Iraq, is not uncongenial to France and Russia especially when, blinded by their short-term interests, they cannot see that eventually their own countries will not remain immune from the massive and deadly attacks of Islamic terrorism.

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It is for all these reasons, that if the US will not finally get the support of the Security Council, because the latter is sunk in a quagmire of multilateral weakness, ultimately it must act unilaterally and pre-emptively against Iraq, and with those allies who have the historical insight and moral courage to stand by it. And the war against Iraq will be a walkover for the US and its allies. Despite the blustering of Saddam’s propaganda machine, Iraqis will not fight to save him.

In these critical times, when Western civilization is threatened to be swamped with a tidal wave of fanatic barbarism, Australia does not need the prescriptions of political quacks, or the vaticinations of false prophets. What it needs is wise and resolute Churchillian leadership, leading from the front, against the great threat posed by the terrorists and their state sponsors, not the myopic and weak leadership of the four fountainheads and of the Church Fathers, who, stung by the populist bee and being in a state of frenzy, are leading from behind.  

CON GEORGE – KOTZABASIS

(Former Director of SBS TV, 1986- 1996)

OCTOBER 14 2002   MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

                             E-mail   kotzabasis@bigpond.com

HOW TO DEFEAT THE INSURGENCY

BY ITS OWN LETHAL WEAPON

                                                     Con George-Kotzabasis

                                                      July 27, 2006    

To expedite the defeat of the insurgents in Iraq, the following proposal might make a practical contribution toward this major event.

My proposal is simple but a most effective method in identifying car bombs in time so civilians in urban areas will not be killed, as well as lead to the defeat of the insurgency in the mid-run.

The Iraqi government should immediately pass a law directing drivers, that when they park their vehicles either the driver of the vehicle or at least one other person must be sitting in the front seat of the parked car. No standing or parked vehicle will be unoccupied. A vehicle that was abandoned by its driver and occupants would immediately be seen by nearby commuters and would instantly trigger their quick distancing from it, as they will consider it to be more likely than not a car bomb. Hence, when the terrorists exploded it by remote control or otherwise no civilian or military casualties would occur. Moreover, those abandoning the vehicle could be arrested on the spot, either by security forces, if they were in the vicinity, or even by the commuters, or be killed by the former if they were likely to be terrorists. Hence, a vehicle that was being abandoned by its occupants would instantly have the mark of death writ large on it and would immediately be seen by the vigilant eyes of “commuter watch”. The great advantage of such law would be that it can even be executed by ordinary citizens, and hence turn the latter into virtual “vigilantes”. Thus an important serendipitous side effect of such law will be to actively mobilize the whole nation of Iraq against the insurgents.

The insurgents, certainly, would try to overcome this by having as decoy a kidnapped passenger tied in the front seat of the vehicle. But this possibility could be thwarted by prescribing in the law that the passenger side-window of vehicles when they are parked should be pulled down, so when a passenger is a kidnapped one, he would be able to make known this to “by-walkers” close to the vehicle, as soon as the terrorist driver had left the car.    

Of course, this method would not be effective against the suicide bomber who would be willing to lose his life by not abandoning the vehicle.  Notwithstanding this however, the immediate result would be to diminish the number of car bombs by excluding the unoccupied vehicles of which many of them up to this point have been car bombs. And in the mid-term, the increased number of suicide bombers losing their lives by sitting in their cars, will deplete the ranks of the hardcore fanatics.  

Thus, by this practical method, the Iraqi government will substantially decrease the number of casualties among civilians and army personnel that the insurgents continue to inflict by car bombs, as well as not before long dry the pool from which the insurgents are getting their suicide bombers. And hence by turning soon their most lethal weapon useless will irrevocably defeat the insurgency.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

In the present decisive confrontation between the civilized countries of the world and fundamentalist Muslim inspired terror and its state sponsors, such as the regime of Saddam Hussein, one re-hears the cry of wilderness of No To War shouted by the peace-loving devotees of the globe, who hold pride of place in their wishful thinking, that in all human conflicts, good will and sober reason are the only effective means in resolving them. To uphold such a position however, after the “Fall of Adam”, is to uphold that irenic instincts are the predominant instincts of man. Such a stand revises all known human history and re-writes Darwin’s Origin of the Species, by appending to the latter, that conflict is not an immanent characteristic of all species but an aberration. Hence the upholders of this slogan of wilderness can only sustain their stand by re-inventing human nature, or by adopting the tale of Genesis that man, unlike other species, was created in the image of God and not in the image of the “monkey”. Thus enlightenment, Clarence Darrow ( in the famous ‘Monkey Trial’ in the U.S.A. ), is replaced by obscurantism, William Jennings Bryan, by the believers of peace in all circumstances. And ironically, the avant-garde of the progressive movement, as most of the war protestors would proudly claim to be, replace Marx with Habakkuk.

In the stupor of their religious ‘oceanic feeling’ of the basic goodness of man, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzsche are thrown into the bonfire of their ignorance. Power, ambition, envy, avarice, and passion, have no place in their thinking. Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, who premised their great writings on these inherent characteristics of man, are turned into spiritual and intellectual reactionaries.

All these global demonstrations against war, are happening at a time when Muslim fundamentalists, and their suicidal death-squads, have declared a relentless holy war against Western civilization and its so called dens of vice. To raze and exterminate Western culture and its people is the number one item in the “holy agenda” of Muslim terrorism and its state sponsors.

There is no precedent in history that a powerful civilization, such as our own, responded with such imprudence and cowardice by not fighting a mortal enemy who threatened its survival. No nation or civilization with any pride in its achievements would lay prostrate before such a threat. Only nations and civilizations blighted with necrophilia would choose such a course. Fortunately, however, this necrophilia is not widespread among the civilized nations of the world, and blights only the war protestors, who would let their own people to be killed in their hundreds of thousands, under the ruins these terrorists will bring to the cities of the world, once they are in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Thus the real slogan of the war protestors is not ‘No to War’, but ‘Die By Not Fighting’.  This is the doomed message that the agit-peaceniks have for the non- activist majority of the peoples of the world who are threatened by this terrorist holocaust.

                         WORSE THAN APPEASEMENT

War is the bane of the human condition. But there are justified and unjustified wars. Mankind must always strive to achieve peace in the interrelationship of nations by non-belligerent means, whenever this is possible. But paradoxically, often peace can only be achieved by war. War therefore, in some circumstances is absolutely necessary, as a surgeon’s knife is that saves a human organism in crisis, and serves as the only effective means of saving a nation from extinction. In our era, where the exponential development of science and technology has been partly transformed into weapons of mass destruction, and when the latter, in the present milieu, can easily fall into the hands of Muslim terrorists, who would have no hesitation to use them against the infidels of the West,  delivered to them by rogue states, unilateral or pre-emptive war, by those nations whose survival is at stake, is the definitive means of survival. And this is why America’s war against Iraq is an absolute necessity. It would be the greatest folly, much worse than appeasement, for governments, like the French and German, to be lured into indecision and inaction by the peaceful refrain of the war protestors, by their swan song.              

Saddam Hussein poses an enormous threat to the peoples of the world. But to expect that the U.N. inspectors will discover the weapons of mass destruction that will make this threat a reality in the eyes of the sceptics without the pro-active co-operation of the Iraqi regime, is naive in the extreme.    Even if, by some fortuitous chance the inspectors came close in discovering them, Saddam at that point, would fabricate some excuse, such as spying etc., to block and obstruct them from uncovering them. It is therefore foolish to expect that the inspectors, no matter how much extra time they are given, will ever find a ‘smoking gun’, against the will of Saddam. The fumes of that poisonous gun are already there to be seen by all people whose eyes are not blurred by the smoke-screen of deceptions his regime is churning out, that it does not have weapons of mass destruction.

For acute observers, in contrast to obtuse ones who would only be satisfied with legalistic forensic evidence from the “scene of crime”, it is in Saddam’s historic record, in his atrocities to his own people, in his use of chemical weapons against the Iranians and Kurds, in his close connections with terrorists in the past and present – the involvement of Iraqi intelligence in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 is well known – in his fabrications and lies, since his bloodstained rise to power, all of which are beyond dispute, that the evidence is so glaring, that his expansive power was and is based on the possession of these weapons of mass destruction and the fear these produce upon his neighbors, and indeed, upon America itself, as a result of his linkage with terrorists. And in the present circumstances, when he is facing an imminent attack by the U.S. and its allies, this evidence becomes even more pointed. Whilst his ventriloquist spokesmen vehemently deny the possession and existence of these weapons, the ventriloquist himself, Saddam, is giving orders to his generals to use these non-existing weapons against the invading Americans.
As well as issuing orders to his Security apparatus, to kill all Iraqi scientists and their families, if the former show any signs of spilling the beans on Saddam’s weapon’s of mass destruction. ( Why should he threaten to kill them if they have nothing to reveal? )

                 THE WET LABOR OPPOSITION

It is for the above reasons that the calls of Simon Crean, and Kevin Rudd, his Foreign Affairs spokesman, that the U.N. inspectors should be given more time to discover these weapons, before Australia participates in a war against Iraq  under U.N. auspices, are intellectually flabby and politically naive. Such gargantuan political dilettantism on their part is as close to the reality of the situation in Iraq, as metaphysics is close to real life.

Once again, on the crucial issues of the nation, as on the legislation against terrorism, the Labor opposition is responding with characteristic mediocrity and with the mantra of populism. Politics however, is about leadership, not about putting one’s wet finger up in the air and feeling which way the “mass wind” is blowing. ( Wet politicians like Mr. Crean and Mr. Rudd, are in the wrong profession. Demonstrating as models, the strength of diapers should have been their vocation.) It is leading from the front, not leading from behind, by having the majority of people “behind” one before one makes a crucial decision, especially when one’s nation is under a great threat.

The majority of people do not have the vital information that is provided to governments by their intelligence agencies by which the former make their grave decisions in the Affairs of Nations. Hence, they are incapable of making an informed judgment, in the present case, as to whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or whether or not it has links with terrorism, as a result of lacking this information. Their judgment therefore about war is premised on their emotional attitude about war and peace. And it is more likely than not to choose peace, as an outcome of their reasonable fear about the consequences of war, even when war is an absolute necessity to prevent a greater catastrophe.

The Opposition’s opportunistic jump on the bandwagon of the populist anti-war movement, and the locking of its position, in regards to the impending war in Iraq, with this key of populism, is therefore totally irresponsible. In the aftermath of the Bali massacre, the real danger is that Australia itself could be attacked
by these fanatic terrorists. Labor is completely inutile to face and confront effectively this great danger. “Flirting” with an inadequately informed electorate, in regards to a war with Iraq, it hopes it will be placed in the matrimonial bed of power at the next Federal election, by “ravishing its innocence”. Hence, on the altar of winning the election Labor is prepared to sacrifice the security and the vital interests of the country.

One cannot decisively defeat global terrorism if one de-links the latter from its state sponsors. The Opposition’s inability to make this linkage between terrorists and rogue states, and its lack of historical insight to go to war against the latter, proves it to be completely incompetent to lead the country in these critical times. A nation that does not have the will and mettle to fight a right war loses the right to exist. And a political party, such as Labor, that is morally and intellectually wimpish and lacks the will and vigor to take the lead in such a war, loses its right to govern.

CON GEORGE-KOTZABASIS ( FORMER DIRECTOR OF SBS TELEVISION 1986-1996 )

JANUARY 27 2003  MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA