Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

When we are presented with a pessimistic vision we are encouraged to be optimistic pessimists. As I’ve argued for a long time the war in Afghanistan can be won–as David Miliband too, the UK Secretary of Foreign Affairs, an aficionado of Steve Clemons, argues in a piece on the Australian–and democracy can be established in the country, even in countries such as Somalia and Yemen.

The ‘cultural obstructionists’ to democracy, like Rory Stewart, who use the intellectually barren and useless concept of “cultural differences” as the irrevocable impediment to the establishment of democracy in countries who have lived for ages under authoritarian and despotic regimes, are imaginatively and cognitively blind to the historical fact that the opening and clarity of telecommunications between all countries of the world has broken the barrier between cultures and indeed has thrown all ‘Noachian’ cultures into the deluge of technological modernity. And all the people of the backward world are craving to ride this “third wave” of political and economic development through the heuristic device of democracy.

Can any of the cultural obstructionists to democracy seriously contend that people who have been nurtured on the staples of backward cultures, whose chief characteristic is poverty, cannot make a distinction between the latter and affluence, an affluence that is depicted every day before their eyes on the screens of TV and computers which by a glaring contrast is the chief characteristic of Western modernity? That is, they would not be attracted and willing to grow the tree of economic prosperity by planting the roots of democracy in their own countries because for years they have been conditioned to live in a culture of poverty?

Alas, it’s by such poverty of thought that the propagators of cultural differentiation as the unbridgeable gap to democracy are building their intellectual reputation.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A reply to: …on Israel-Palestine Conflict by Steve Clemons

Washington Note June 21, 2009

“Absolutists on both sides need to be overcome” which Steve obviously agrees with this statement of former Secretary of State James A. Baker. This statement however ravages the truth by its direct reference of a ‘political equivalence’ between Hamas and the Netanyahu government. No Israeli government ever governed on behalf of the minority absolutist interests of the religious fanatics of Israel unlike Hamas which governs Gaza in the interests of its millenarian goals. It’s like saying that Republican governments, such as the former Bush administration, governed on behalf of the narrow interests of the religious right and not for the general interests of the United States.

If this is the quality of strategic thinking that the four eminent persons of Carter, Baker, Scowcroft, and Brzezinski, are offering to the Obama administration for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict then such advice will be a repeat performance of past failures as it rises from the lowest ebbs of their strategic ‘cogitations.’

And Steve will be found to be completely wrong if he thinks that the new turbulent situation in Iran might ‘force’ the Khatami-Ahmadinejad regime to change its policy toward its Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist surrogates. Steve in his misplaced realism does not realize that Iran will never abandon its pawns as long as it engages in its power-play in the region.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

As we had predicted prior to the election of Obama, Americans had picked a lemon for president. Both on the issues of the post-election turmoil in Iran and the START Follow-on Treaty in Moscow, Obama chose to take a weak position to ‘save’ his new diplomacy, as I foreshadowed he would do in a paper of mine.

In the case of Iran, astonishingly, neither Obama nor any of his senior advisers were able to foresee the great potential for regime change that the revolt of the educated modernist forces of Iran were and are still fuelling for the near future, especially if the U.S. and its allies were prepared to take a stronger stand against the Mullahcracy and Ahmadinejad, as I had suggested to do in the above paper. Obama however chose to take the position of least resistance, not to “meddle” only to be accused later, as was expected, by the regime of meddling in the internal affairs of Iran. And the Group of Eight (G-8) In Italy this week, under the leadership of Obama, failed to reach consensus on tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. “According to Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, the G-8 did not move for sanctions because the ‘conditions’ for tougher action against Iran ‘were not present.’ One can only marvel at the absence of such ‘conditions.’ Iran is not moving away from its intransigence in regard to its nuclear program, a large segment, if not the majority, of its population considers the Ahmadinejad regime as illegitimate and yet to the political savants of the G-8 these are not sufficient for harsher measures against the ‘imamocracy.’

In his negotiations with Russia, for the sake of an inutile unrealizable abstract goal of nuclear disarmament he sacrificed by putting in limbo the concrete goal of anti-ballistic missile defence of its European allies, in which technically the U.S. holds indubitable superiority. One can immediately see the farcical fallacy of Obama’s diplomatic overture to the Russians in regard to nuclear disarmament, which Obama in his press conference touted as a great opening for getting rid of nuclear weapons, when Moscow’s concern about the anti-ballistic shield was that it would be against its own nuclear armaments. If Russia in the future was willing to dismantle its nuclear armaments in reciprocation to America’s dismantling, why should it be concerned about the anti-ballistic shield set up in Poland and Czechoslovakia? It’s by such farcical diplomatic deeds that President Obama tries to dupe his American constituents that his new diplomacy is working.

But the great danger lies that by the time the lemon is squeezed dry America’s vital interests will be sacrificed on the altar of an erroneous and historically false diplomacy. A diplomacy whose end result will be on the one hand the strengthening of America’s foes and on the other the weakening of America, pushing it off its Archimedean point as a benign superpower which up till now was able to ’tilt’ the world toward relative political stability and economic prosperity. And one can easily presage that the clever and duplicitous enemies of the United States will just as easily checkmate all Obama’s naive moves on the chessboard of diplomacy to the great detriment of American prestige and power.