Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The intellectual usurpers, a la professor Juan Cole, totally discredited by their doom say scenarios about the war in Iraq now that the war is being won under the strong and imaginative leadership of General Petraeus, are cognitively ‘exiled’ in the desert island named quibbling. They can quibble as much as they like as who were the ‘spearheads’ of the de-Baathification legislation when actually the latter opens the door to Baathists, who formerly held government positions in the Saddam regime, to enter the present Malaki government.

The reason why liberals consider de-Baathification a failure is because the initiator of the process has been Ahmed Chalabi, the eminence grise who influenced the Bush administration through his contacts in the Pentagon to invade Iraq which according to them was strategically and militarily a complete failure, and whom the ‘darling boy’ of the liberals Steven Clemons calls “the greatest villain of the Iraq war”. The fact is however, that the de-Baathification legislation is the first door of many that is opening the nation toward the difficult course of political reconciliation between the two major factions, the Shias and the Sunnis, rendering to the latter the opportunity to be reinstated in their former government positions.

Moreover, the fact that both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have applauded the passing of the legislation, speaks volumes of being a great achievement. As neither of them could be so imprudent to jeopardize their great success in winning the war against the insurgents and al-Qaeda by precipitately picking a ‘political loser’, that is a legislation that happened to be a failure. One would challenge all the critics of the legislation to answer why Petraeus and Crocker would back a failed legislation and risk of irreversibly vitiating their glorious success on the battlefront.

All the quibbling and lamentations of the liberals about the sire of the de-Baathification legislation is a most clear indication that the American liberals are intellectually rattled by lamentably losing their argument on the Iraq war. And the fact, as I stated in an essay of mine exactly one year ago, that 2007 would be Bush’s Annus Mirabilis on the war.

Your opinion on this issue…

Sidelining the Loud-Mouthed Cultural Warriors

By Irfan Yusuf, On Line Opinion, January 18, 2008

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

To conflate, as Yusuf does, the so called cultural ‘warriors’ of the West with the religiously fanatic suicidal jihadists of al Qaeda, does not only abuse reality but also one’s intellectual integrity and honesty. Yusuf writes “the vast majority of people …are quite happy to live with people who don’t share their culture or religion”. Indeed they do, but only in the tolerant societies of the West. However, that does not mean that they are indifferent or apathetic about the achievements of their culture. No people can survive without breathing daily the achievements of their culture. And no people can be proud of these achievements if they are depicted by revisionist historians, like Robert Manne, that they have been made by the “spilling of blood”.

In our case, Australia’s culture is the descendant of the great culture of Western civilization. But no culture, no matter how great, is a manifestation of Godly purity. However, the blemishes of Western culture are infinitesimal next to its “infinite” virtues, and hence Western culture is ”closer” to the “realm of God”.

Yusuf wrote his piece on On Line…under the rubric of political philosophy. But with his moral equation between the “loud-mouthed cultural ‘warriors’ ” and “the likes of al Qaida”, he bans himself from all philosophical discourse. As by such philosophical credentials no philosopher would ever allow him to enter his academy.

Your opinion on the issue…

2007: The Cold War Ends By Ali Ettefagh Postglobal, Washington Post, January 2, 2008

A response by Con George-Kotzabasis

The Iranian commentator Dr. Ali Ettefagh has laid Iran’s libido dominandi on his psychoanalyst’s couch and has given us his professional prognostic diagnosis that it’s rapidly finding its gratification not in the acquisition of nuclear weapons but in “common sense”, “stronger friendship, good neighborly conduct and removing doubt…(by ‘holocausting’ Israel?), in trade…and in the launch of an Egyptian –Iranian car”. According to Ettefagh, “stability and peaceful co-existence” is President’s Ahmadinejad’s agenda. He states, this is “the stark reality of today against the fog of yesterday”.

But the fog has not disappeared! And it’s behind it that Ahmadinejad’s regime is building its nuclear arsenal by which it will dominate the region and find ultimately its gratification in the establishment of the twelfth Imam Mahdi’s prophesy of a Caesaro-Ayatollah state, seizing the leadership of the Muslim world and posing a stupendous threat to the existence of Western civilization.

This is why a politically and historically prudent U.S. administration should have all options on the table.

Your turn now

Happy new year to all

A reply Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Domestic Issues Return To Spotlight
By Waleed Aly, The Australian December 27, 2007

The lawyer and commentator on political and Muslim affairs Waleed Aly argues in his latest co-ed like someone who has a brief as an undercover agent. To disseminate a false sense of peace in times of war purportedly to disarm those who are attempting to defend themselves from an external and internal deadly foe. Therefore the whole argument of his article is far from being disinterested, from a political and religious point of view.

He claims that there has been a “paradigm shift in the politics of the Anglosphere…September 11, the London bombings, the war in Iraq—are losing their political bite” and “politics has entered a post terror phase” (My emphasis). He continues, “Australians’ fear of terrorism was diminishing… Iraq barely appeared on the radar” during the election campaign and “the issues of the day are indelibly domestic in nature…Improbably 2007 may prove to be the year that the politics of terror passed into history”. But at the end of his piece he offers as a lawyer his professional and wise caveat—but only as an afterthought—and at the same time willy-nilly uncovers the falsity of his sense of peace and his “defusing” of terror, by stating more realistically that “of course one bomb would rapidly change all that…as I say, nothing is inevitable”.

From what source does Aly derive his knowledge that makes him feel confident that his analysis of events is correct and that the fear of terror is abating? It’s none other than the gut feeling of ordinary people who a lot of them in their somnambulistic complacency do not consider terror to be a great threat, and as a consequence are against the war in Iraq which presently is the template of global terror. Moreover, laymen who are not cognizant of the plans of the jihadists, like professionals in this field are, and therefore cannot make a prudent judgment on the issue of terror. It’s by this reading of the gut feelings of hoi polloi that Aly makes his prophesies. Disregarding completely the serious cogitations of professionals in the fields of anti-terrorism and war strategy. Who have gathered their information from concrete evidence about the plans and strategies of the holy warriors against the infidels of the West and the Great Satan America. In this Aly is like the artless trite person who is attempting to tell a scientist how to formulate his equations or, more cognate to Aly’s profession, of telling someone who studies law how to do his articles. One would have expected Aly as a professional not to have committed this ‘carnal’ sin by putting the ignorance of a freshman above the knowledge of a professional. Yet this is exactly what he does on the issue of terror and its continuous and conspicuous presence in our times.

The American think tank Strategic Forecasting in a recent study avers that with the defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq members of the latter are preparing to move into Pakistan. And the assassination of Benazir Bhutto by the extremists is a fillip to the holy warriors of al Qaeda and its affiliates to move into the country and form a chain of command that would attack its present political status quo with the aim of overthrowing it and establishing an Islamist regime. Another savvy observer of the plans of the jihadists William Arkin of the Washington Post states that “beginning early next year, U.S. Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan… to train counter-terrorism units”. Within this context of the intact ability of jihadists either as a group or as individuals to move in and out of countries to engage in their stealthy murderous war against both the so called apostate regimes of their own and against the infidels of the West, to state, like Aly does, that ‘2007 may…be the year that the politics of terror passed into history’, is the ultimate inanity.

Even as a ‘moderate’ Muslim he should know that the fundamentalist doctrines of Wahhabism and Salafism have been propagated for many years now constantly and with the intensity of religious fervor among the Muslim intelligentsia and the middle classes—both of which are the cradle of pretenders for Islamist political power. It’s because of this long “gestation” of terrorism that makes it inextinguishable in the short term. Furthermore, these doctrines have such a hold among the masses that make even moderate Muslims to be held in awe before the enormity and influence of their ideological power and hardly dare to challenge it. That is why we often see moderate Muslims jumping on the Wahhabi Salafi band wagon especially when it succeeds running like a juggernaut over the powerful infidels of the West, such as the U.S., or at least not to put any spokes in its wheels, and Aly may be of the latter category.

Further Aly knows full well, and he cannot fool anybody by hiding this fact, that there are radical Sheikhs and imams that preach the Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines to their followers and especially to young Muslims whose religious fervor makes them vulnerable to the “heroics” of martyrdom and to the chase of the seventy-two virgins. One of those Sheikhs is Mohammed Omran of Brunswick whom a Somali mother accused him of being responsible for her son’s abandonment of his family and going to Somalia to fight on the side of the Islamist extremists. Also The Australian reported on December 28, 07, that young Muslims in Australia go to the internet searching for information about fatwas and jihad from local and ‘ultramontane’ imams. And I would add that ASIO has reliable information that some Australian Muslims have gone overseas to join the Islamist battlefronts against the apostates of Islam and of course against the infidels of the West.

In the post 9/11 global political constellation, the trajectory of Islamist fanatic terrorism is developing a momentum of such magnitude that if it’s not going to be stopped by the civilized nations of the world it will threaten the existence of Western civilization. Only one with a fool’s cap or with a sinister agenda pertaining to the anti-terrorist laws of this country could believe and inculcate that this trajectory of fanaticism will be entering in 2007 a ‘benign’ orbit of post-terror. And that the “spotlight” will “return” on “domestic issues”. It seems that Santa has given a unique gift to Waleed Aly as a Christmas present: Aladdin’s magic lamp. All he has to do is to rub his lamp and the geniis of terror will disappear. But there is still the possibility that one terror ‘fairy’, among so many, will appear with “one bomb” and destroy Aly’s fairy tales masquerading as reality.

Your Turn now…