Nemesis

By Con George-Kotzabasis

I fail to see how my “syntax and phraseology” relates to your argument and your need to criticize it. But indeed I’m “touchy”, with your attempt to present yourself as a serious thinker on the complex issues of war and of history.

The incongruity of your argument to the quote from Thucydides is diaphanous, to use a Greek word, since you appear to be an aficionado of Greek words with your use of an AGONIST of the (mind?). At the end of your article you obviously compare the Athenian plague with the “general economic crisis” that has made America “a bankrupt nation” and then you ask President Obama how in such circumstances one can win the war in Afghanistan.

The Athenian plague occurred in the second year of the war yet the Athenians despite the dire consequences of the plague continued to fight the war for at least another fourteen years which by the 16th year they “had gained the upper hand”, and as you state, “they had a great golden opportunity to end the war there and then.” And then you correctly say that what brought ruin to Athens was their invasion of Sicily. Ergo, you admit yourself that it was a strategic error that brought Athens down and not because it continued to fight the Lacaedemonians during the plague (In the present case under a general economic crisis), which anyway it had brought Athens close to victory, according to your contention.

It’s all these contradictions of your argument to the quote from Thucydides that are bespattered at your agonist’s feet.

America can still win in Afghanistan once it corrects its errors, as it did in Iraq, and providing it does not lose its will and determination.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 16 2009, 12:09AM – Link

Clemons offered a broken “wing of the foreign policy spectrum” that will not fly. Only a member of the New America Foundation related to Nostradamus could predict the “length” of any war and consequently its “cost.” As to consequences these could either be positive or negative. Positive if the war is won and negative if it is lost. To ask “lucid questions” to unanswerable ones like the length of a war is an unproductive, futile, wasting exercise. And the eminent signatories of the letter have signed a document that is “lucid” in its fatuousness that will have no impact on American strategy in Afghanistan, providing Obama does not go to water on his initial stand.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 16 2009, 12:23AM – Link
As these wars grind on, I know I should feel disturbed by what is happening, especially given the increasing casualties of late. But I can’t help feeling that the situation is now more sadly, fatalistically absurd that horrifying.

Are there really any models of success in state-building projects such as the US has been involved in this decade? I know there are examples of well-organized states with well-organized militaries that have been defeated in war, and which having surrendered were then susceptible to systematic reform, because they were just about as unified in defeat as they were in war. But are there any examples of the successful use of militaries to build real states out of disordered despotisms and anarchic warlord-run battlegrounds, on territories the size of Iraq and Afghanistan?

The authors of the letter say we should “focus U.S. strategy more clearly on al Qaeda”. But we just saw a news report this past week that told us there is barely any Al Qaeda left. We continue to beguile ourselves with images of a global posture of permanent war against some hideous phantom horde. But in fact, there is no such horde.
We remain bogged down in two foreign military interventions that we can’t possibly win, but that we can ignominiously lose. So we just stand there with our backs to a crumbling levee, holding back the tide of the inevitable indefinitely. Both of these interventions are extremely long by historic US standards. Yet serious people talk about one or both of them going on for decades, and then defend them anyway. Surely something has changed for the strange when a country like the United States gets to the point of contemplating decades of war to accomplish aims of such dubious strategic urgency; and when it internalizes a distorted view of itself as a weak and threatened island state surrounded by a sea of enemies, and treats states and disorganized peoples with sick and feeble economies, and relatively paltry militaries, as though they were mortal threats.

It is really not that mysterious what is happening in our world in actual, historical time. The United States, which built a sustained era of global primacy on the ruins of a world war from which it emerged victorious and relatively unscathed, in possession of a populous industrial powerhouse by which it could subordinate the wretched and pulverized global remnant for decades as the latter built and rebuilt, is entering a new phase in its history, when it will consolidate, contract and assume a slightly more modest role as a great power among other powers in a more multipolar and economically dynamic world.

The United States helped build the world that increasingly circumscribes its power. And that’s actually a good and natural thing. My sense is that most everyone instinctively understands and recognizes these historical processes, even those who strike assertive poses and pretend not to believe in them, and even though it is still considered impolite or heretically unpatriotic to acknowledge them. And it is at least possible that these processes can take place in a somewhat rational, non-cataclysmic way. But perhaps it is more likely that the movement will take place with some rough and very destructive jerks.

Maybe this is the way such changes usually go, but it seems that as US power declines the US torments itself with ever more fantastic conceptions pf what can be accomplished with limited power. Iraq and Afghanistan are such torments, and one might guess that only one of two things can happen. Either some great statesman, who understands the movements of history, will use some foresight and pull the plug on these two transitional adventures before they take their greatest toll, and will bravely take the fall for the ruinous entanglements of the final generation of imperial over-extenders. Or else we go along in the way states usually go along, letting events determine us, blundering toward a larger calamity.

It’s probably not going to be pretty here in the US. No matter when the retrenchment comes – this year; five years from now; fifteen years from now – the president who orders it is going to have to deal with the bitter, frustrated imperial dead-enders, possibly even gangs of violent brownshirts, who don’t live in actual history but in a mythical kingdom, and who will revile the leader who dares look reality in the face, and dashes their immortal pretensions.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 16 2009, 2:08AM – Link
Kervick

Four fatal flaws lay in your argument. First, we live in times where SOME wars have become asymmetrical and great dangers arise from the latter. Yet you are stuck to a redundant past of solely symmetrical wars between powerful or well organized nations. Secondly, you assume wrongly and against all documented evidence that both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were “entanglements of the final generation of IMPERIAL OVER-EXTENDERS.” (M.E.) Thirdly all the great statesmen of the past were conservative and of the centre-right. And fourthly, while you admit that al-Qaeda has been ‘defeated’, you loathe conceding that they were defeated in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq which you opposed and you still do.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 16 2009, 9:33AM – Link
Kotzabasis,

Thanks for focusing on what I wrote, and not on me.

I believe the war on terror has been won partly through the kinds of methods that were brought to bear against Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan this week in Somalia – in this case, a commando raid. I have long argued that the real, effective part of the war on terror is based on a combination of improved intelligence, collective law enforcement and apprehension, and covert small-scale military operations against key individuals. It has also depended on infiltrating, shutting down and interfering with financial networks, communications networks and weapons networks. This part of the war on terror began in real earnest under Bush – although it actually began earlier than that – and has continued under Obama. And I generally support it.

I supported the assault on Afghanistan back in 2001, and I freely admit that the assault did play an important early role in the fight against Al Qaeda. I stopped supporting Afghanistan later in the game, as it was transformed into something that, as I see it, had less and less to do with Al Qaeda. I elevated my criticism of the Afghanistan war last fall, after Obama was elected, because I saw his election was likely to bring a dangerous escalation of the war, and also bring some liberal interventionists to power – people like Richard Holbrooke, Susan Rice and Hilary Clinton who have tended to support the use of ambitious military operations to spread democratic liberalism and give a makeover to various parts of the world.

I have arguing been against these liberal interventionists and their grandiose plans for years, especially in connection with the war against terrorism. I have argued that terrorism is a more or less permanent problem, the threat and incidence of which can definitely be minimized, but that can’t be ended by these hugely ambitious and unrealistic plans for “draining the swamps”, or by new “Marshall plans” for the Middle East. My attitude has been that jihadist terrorists don’t attack us because they are poor, or because their societies don’t grant them enough dignity, or for any of the other psychological reasons liberals frequently offer. Terrorism is not a social-psychological sickness to be cured with social therapy. They attack us because they have clear and intelligible strategic aims – mainly to get us out of parts of the world they don’t want us to be in – and have adopted terrorism as the most effective tactic in pursuing those strategic aims. Personally, I would like to give these guys their wish and get our military the hell out of their region altogether. But in the meantime, we have people plotting to kill innocent Americans, and we have to get them before they get us.

The war on terror was not assisted by the war in Iraq, which only created a branch of Al Qaeda where none existed before, and provided a recruiting tool for jihadists by providing a vivid example of US barbarism and iniquity. It was an old-fashioned bomb ‘em up and shoot ‘em up war – not a subtle application of asymmetric warfare. It was based on a crude psychological estimate of the impact of “shock and awe” – in other words, on the beliefs promoted by some that Arabs are dumb, skittish animals who can be deterred by indiscriminate combinations of loud explosions and sexual humiliation. It was not justifiable by any of the standards applied to war by civilized people, on either the left or right. It was a criminal and counterproductive atrocity that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. That war was both a massive blunder and a hideous crime.
I made no implicit or explicit claims about where great statesmen can be found on the political spectrum. So I’m not sure how that part of what you wrote applies to my argument. Still, since you brought it up, I think many people would classify Franklin Roosevelt as a great statesman, and he was definitely not of either the right or the center right.

Kotzabasis says
Kervick
Your second post makes a cogent argument of your position whereas your first one in my opinion was redolent with ideology than with clear cold analysis. Certainly what you say about “commando raids” is true. I myself argued back on October 2001, that Special Forces would play a pivotal role in defeating terrorism. But it’s not enough to ‘hit’ individuals such as Nabhan but more importantly to deprive the terrorists collectively of their ability to be successful in their operations as General McChrystal did—the present commander in Afghanistan—in Iraq with his Special Forces by killing or capturing a great number of al-Qaeda leaders and thus depriving al-Qaeda in Iraq of being successful in its operations, according to Bob Woodward, and hence leading to its defeat.

In regard to Franklin Roosevelt, you are forgetting that he was president of the United States at a period when Americans were most conservative and ‘locked’ in their isolationism after the liberal excesses and capricious follies of Woodrow Wilson. So the highly subtle politician Roosevelt hardly exhibited any leftist tendencies during this peak of American conservatism, even if he was a closet leftist who in my opinion never was.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 17 2009, 1:02AM – Link

So the highly subtle politician Roosevelt hardly exhibited any leftist tendencies during this peak of American conservatism.
OK … New Deal, not leftist. Got it.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 17 2009, 1:13AM – Link
In the context of the Great Depression you depict the pragmatic politics of the New Deal as leftist?

Posted by Dan Kervick, Sep 17 2009, 7:42AM – Link

In the context of the Great Depression, leftist economic policies are particularly pragmatic.

But please come to America and help convince all of the Republicans that FDR was not on the left, as we all think, but was actually either a conservative or on the center-right! Maybe we could even get a single-payer health plan if they swallow that.

Posted by kotzabasis, Sep 17 2009, 8:50AM – Link
Kervick

I can’t let this go for the amusement of your reply.

So you take partly your cue from the obscurantist part of the Republicans who considered Roosevelt to be leftist as a result of your inability to make your own assessment about the latter’s political credentials. Roosevelt was a patrician by birth, education, and temperament. And William Randolph Hearst himself hammers the nails onto the coffin of your argument. It was he who supported Roosevelt’s candidacy for the presidency. Was Hearst also a leftist?

You really confuse pragmatism-which has no political ‘gender’ of either left or right-with leftism. Was the pragmatic New Economic Policy of Lenin that he was forced to implement in 1921 after the inimitable disaster of his initial economic policies, a revolutionary leftist policy?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A short reply to: Hamas vs. the Fundamentalists

By Amjad Atallah Washington Note, August 17, 2009

Atallah in a post to the Washington Note, on January 20, 2009, displayed his inimitable originality as a political thinker when he claimed that the “cease-fire” in Gaza was Obama’s “first foreign policy success.” On August 17, 2009, from among the ashes of his by now burnt out originality he rises like a phoenix to claim that Hamas is showing the first symptoms of a unique metastasis from a virulent fanatic radical organization to a moderate one. The demiurge of this beatific poetically transcendental transformation from the ugly reality of Hamas as an irreconcilable terrorist organization is Hamas itself. By fighting the extremist pro-Al Qaeda Salafist group of Jund Ansar Allah and killing its leader Abdul Latif Musa, on August 14, 2009, Hamas is blazing a new course of political moderation that according to Atallah would be foolish for the US under Obama not to take advantage of that could change the whole configuration of the Palestine Israel conflict.

Thus the offspring of the Islamist fanatical coupling of Ahmed Yassin and Sayyid Qutb, the founder and the spiritual leader of Hamas respectively who both have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, like a poisonous snake is shedding its skin and metamorphosing itself into an amiable friendly python.

Atallah is either unaware of the historical fact or deliberately hides it so he can make his case, that throughout history all widespread and toxic fanatical movements had variable degrees of fanaticism among their members and often created within the general movement their own groups that fought each other to the death. The virulence of fanatical Islam in our times and the internecine and fratricidal warfare that goes and will go within it illustrates in a pellucid manner the above historic fact.

In this context, the attempt of Atallah to transform Hamas into a moderate organization that President Obama could deal with diplomatically and persuade its leadership to stop permanently its deadly attacks on Israel and accept the two-state solution by recognizing Israel is a mockery of serious thinking.