Will America Rise from its ‘Comatose’ State?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A reply to a very clever American Open Salon

The Global Credit Crunch and the Crisis of Legitimacy
By RCMoya612

RCMoya, after your excellent and resplendent analysis I feel, if I captiously quibble about few points, like a bat squeaking in the dark. First, inequality might have “continued its forward march” but I would argue that it did so on a higher level of general economic prosperity in America following the up till now unassailable historical paradigm of capitalism and free markets that has made the poor ‘richer’ in relative terms, as Amartya Sen has contended.

Secondly, America’s “hectoring and ignoring” has its counterpart in Europe and in other continents whose countries were strong allies of the US during the Cold War but with the collapse of the Soviet Union have reappropriated their independence both geopolitically and culturally and expressing this in their own hectoring and ignoring against America, thus continuing the irreversible law of the political and cultural competition of nation-states.

Thirdly, I would argue that as long as America continues to be the centripetal force attracting the “best and the brightest” to its shores and not stifling the Schumpeterian spirit of entrepreneurship and “creative destruction”, it will be able to rise again even from the ashes of a comatose state and will continue to be in the foreseeable future the paramount power in world affairs.

And fourthly, the rejection by Congress of the funding plan that would have a better chance than none to prevent the economy from collapsing was inevitable in the present political climate where reason cannot compete with populist emotionalism and when a swirl of weak politicians, like Nancy Pelosi, and, indeed, Barak Obama, are its ‘slaves’. Only by cleaning out these wimpish politicians from positions of power will the political narrative reassert its legitimacy.

RCMoya says


kotzabasis
October 01, 2008 07:26 AM
Thanks for the points. Interesting thoughts.First, I'd be careful in praising the 'unassailable historical paradigm' of capitalism and free markets. That has never really been the case elsewhere in world--including Japan and Europe, and definitely not in the third world--and yet that has not stopped those countries from reaping the benefits of a globalised economy. Simply put, capitalism may have been successful--it is--but it is not the case that completely 'free markets' have played a central role in the enrichment of advanced economies. That was probably the result of a misleading analysis (an altogether too cheery one at that) of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'--which has monumentally failed more than once since the 1980s.

Second, Europe may have been an American vassal in the early parts of the Cold War--and yet still managed to create economic structures that were different from the United States. Britain, France and Germany have had distinct economic approaches--and that's to say nothing of more interventionist Scandinavia--and in all of these countries (save for the UK) the post-war years were considered an extraordinary period of growth.You're probably right that we're now re-entering a period of political and cultural competition between states. I think this is a good thing, though it'll take some time for Europeans to get used to the idea of a weaker America.Your third point is probably concedable...though only to a point. The 'best and the brightest' only go to America because of its perceived economic vitality. Take that away and there'd be less of a reason to head over. Also, buying into the 'Americans are so entrepreneurial' myth is rather problematic--because some European states, for example, have a greater slice of the economic pie coming from small and medium-sized business owners than America, land of the corporate shopper, has. Maybe it's the contrary situation at present: maybe Europeans have 'stifled' entrepreneurialism here...and in any case releasing it would help, not hurt it.

I'd warn that nothing lasts forever, that nothing is ever guaranteed; if America's financial system DOES go under even further America's future role as a power would be substantially jeopardised.Your last point starts off well...until you reveal your partisanship. The Democrats certainly don't have a monopoly on forceful politicking, to their detriment. I would argue that their greatest weakness is in their 'social democracy light'-style of policies.Yet, all the perceived 'strength' in the world hasn't made the belligerence of the Reagan-Bush-Republican era any more palatable to the world--and, in fact, has in the longer-term probably weakened America considerably.Strength alone cannot substitute for pragmatism, intelligence and good policy.

Kotzabasis says

OK, but you have to answer the intruding historical questions under what economic system Japan and Europe developed and which was the motor of the globalised economy? One would be silly to say that capitalism is an ‘absolute monarch’ and free markets are the ‘Sun King’ of economic development. But we are talking here about basics and not the sometimes necessary state intervention which has been merely, if you allow me to use this metaphor, a changing of an occasional punctured wheel (excepting the present situation) of an omnibus that has been running quite well for a long time on all rough terrains.

And you have to be consistent with your own logic, if you accept the reality of a globalized economy, as you do, which was the offspring of a long gestation starting in the 1980s, how can you imply at the same time that this globalized economy was begotten by the “monumental” failure of the 1980s? The question of Europe is what cemented more the “economic structures” of Europe. Was it the working spirit of capitalism or the working spirit of socialism? And if a mixture of both is your obvious answer, I’ve to remind you that mixtures are not equal and on the scales of economic development capitalism continues to ‘tilt the scales’ in its own favour contra socialism, and that also applied to your economic model in Europe. Perceptions do not have a long life and for more than a hundred years now America continues to attract the best and the brightest on its shores. So its economic vitality must have more solid grounds than perceptions. Again you are inconsistent with your own logic; if the best and the brightest are in America, as you concede, then your “Americans are so entrepreneurial” cannot be a “myth”.

Needless to say “nothing lasts forever and... ever guaranteed” since man’s fate is to live and cope in a world of uncertainty.Lastly, I’m surprised that you consider my judgments on person’s characters, in this case of Pelosi and Obama, and on political parties as being partisan. Under your criterion only a person who made no judgments would be absolutely impartial. The facts are that the Democrats have cut their sails to the populist wind and are running their campaign on the emotional hate and animadversions many Americans have for the Bush administration and by association the Republicans. “Pragmatism, intelligence and good policy are the offspring of strong genes.

Will Obama Sheathe the Sword and Use the Paper Knife of Diplomacy to Deal with Fanatics?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The attack on Mumbai is the continuation of terror by all means. The question is whether the civilized people of the world in this struggle for existence will be expecting the U.S.A., under the new incoming administration, which is the only nation that can defeat these warriors of ‘God’ decisively, and its allies, to also fight terror by all means and whether President Obama will have the timely mettle, resolution, and sagacity to do so. His Clintonian appointees to chief Cabinet positions and his selection of liberal minded ‘consigliore’, who have all been critical of the ‘pugnacious’ foreign affairs policy of the Bush-Cheney administration, do not bode well, despite the fact that all of them are highly intelligent and replete with experience in world affairs.

However, the crucial test for all these people in the proscenium and the eminence grise that will be in the wings and will be advising President Obama, is whether they will have the moral strength and imagination to break from their experience of the past that can no longer apply to an unprecedented unique enemy in the form of fanatical irrational terror, and forge by the power of imagination a policy not only made of carrots but also of the cold usable blade of the sword against this deadly irreconcilable foe. And ultimately, since it will be Obama’s decision, whether the latter will sheath Bush’s sword and instead use the paper knife of diplomacy as the major instrument to defeat state and ‘stateless’ fanatics.

Don’t postpone your opinion on this critical issue

Australian Academic Accuses US and Aussie Forces of Committing War Crimes in Fallujah

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Australian academic Chris Doran in his article on Online Opinion on August 3, 2008, accuses and condemns the Coalition forces in their attack on Fallujah on November 2004 of breaching the Geneva Conventions and of committing war crimes. But in his passionate condemnation he disregards the fact that wars are not fought by holding the sword in one hand and the Ten Commandments in the other. An ineradicable law of war is that its prolongation increases its brutality in 'geometrical' proportions and hence its casualties in civilians and the military.

The action in Fallujah had the strategic goal to shorten the war. Fallujah was a hornet's nest of foreign and local jihadists who were not only manufacturing the lethal car bombs but also sending their suicidal fanatic warriors in other cities of Iraq. The collateral civilian casualties, not in the huge overblown fictional figures presented by the writer of the article, were inevitable in a war that the enemy uses civilians, and, indeed, members of his own family and relatives as a shield. And the question arises who is the real moral culprit and war criminal in such a case. It's obvious however, that Doran in the heat of his pacifist hate of all wars, whether justified or not, has no propensity to even deal with this question, least of all answer it.

Strength of Character is Shown in Critical Circumstances and Obama Fails the Test

Will the American electorate be susceptible to the false idealistic promptings of a confused weak leader?

A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to a Bush contrarian

Only the poverty of thought can make a statement such as the”poor republicans...through no fault of their own.” There is no virtue to be found in human beings not making mistakes. No one is infallible, especially in the multi-variable dimensions of war. The virtue lies in swiftly correcting these mistakes. And this is exactly what Bush did when he adopted and implemented the Surge turning a losing war into a potentially victorious one. This was the “major” and crucial policy that “was successfully implemented and carried out” with all the potential geopolitical developments that could flow into the region with the establishment of democracy in Iraq, and hence justifying fully the Bush Doctrine of democratizing the Middle East as a preventive cure for terrorism.

The liberal intelligentsia with their tongue stuck in the bitterness of being totally wrong with their gloomy prognostications about the outcome of the war, cannot and will not concede this ‘reversal of fortune’ for the Bush administration. But history, which has no taste either for bitterness or sweetness, will give the final verdict on Bush. And dare I say it will be a favourable one.

What Obama proposes to do is to deprive America of this tremendous strategic victory over the extremists of Islam by his pledge to pull out US forces from Iraq before the conditions for such a withdrawal are strategically ripe.

If you were an editor even in the most provincial newspaper and spelled out the obvious as news, you would not have held your position as editor for very long. Bigotry, irrational religious beliefs, and ignorance—like poverty—up to the present inflict even the best and most affluent societies. If educated prosperous America has this bane in its midst you can imagine other less educated and prosperous countries in what state they are in this area. To say however, that either McCain or Palin would select to govern for the irrational beliefs and ignorance of such minorities, is to show that one is completely politically naive and no one can take such person seriously.

And do you really believe that Obama has his “feet on the ground,” when he says that once America starts implementing its own values it will turn the present hate of the world for America into love, into a global loving circle of holding hands, including perhaps the fanatical jihadists?

Always bear in mind the great adage of Friedrich Nietzsche that the character of a person is revealed in critical circumstances, followed by my minuscule one that in hard times only the hard men/women prevail. Obama lacks the strength of character to lead a great nation in these most dangerous times. In the vocation of Statecraft according to his populist policies and faith in changing America he remains an infant and is the ultimate ‘mummy’s boy’. As the worst mummy’s boy is the one who had no mother. (His mother abandoned him when he was an infant to be brought up by his grandparents.) That is why he chose Biden for his vice president instead of the most savvy politically Hillary Clinton, because his wife Michelle didn’t want the latter. It’s Michelle that wears the pants, and if he wins, which I doubt, it will be the first ‘matriarchic’ presidency of the United States.

Your opinion

Who Are the Hidden Culprits of the Economic Crisis?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A retort to: Bush Will Address The Nation

By Steve Clemons The Washington Note September 29, 2008

My dear Steve, I’m saying this with great regret that your ‘amok’ propensity and desire to blame the Bush administration “for the reckless stewardship of America’s economic and security portfolios” for the purpose of justifying yourself of your flippant and irresponsible position on the issues of the war and the economy, is blatantly biased and dishonourable.

In your eagerness to make your case you totally disregard that the roots of the economic crisis lie in Democratic administrations and their caravanserai of Democratic activists, among whom Barak Obama was one who, as Tahoe Editor says correctly, was “suing banks for not taking riskier & riskier loans.” Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (The most ‘populist’ of names), and The Community Reinvestment Act, that are the cornerstone of the economic crisis, were the offspring of Democratic administrations. It was “the Clinton administration’s resurrection of Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Community Reinvestment Act which appears to have been the major single factor ( My emphasis) in the origins of American high-risk sub-prime loans.” Under Clinton “banks were required to provide loans on an affirmative action basis to poor inner-suburban ghettoes” irrespective of the latter’s insecure financial position. And it was the Republican senator Phil Gramm who denounced Clinton’s program as “a vast extortion scheme.”

Indeed, the US Senate finance committee in 2005, after the warning of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan of an imminent financial collapse if Fannie Mae’s activities were not reined in, proposed a bill that would increase scrutiny of Fannie Mae’s accountancy mechanisms. The bill however was opposed by the Democrats, while Obama kept his silence, and was lost.

I’m sure if you had taken the above facts into consideration you would not have condemned so gratuitously the Bush administration for the current economic crisis. Once again it was ‘peanut’ politicians and the ignorant crowd of good intentions that has cast America into the present hell.
As I’ve said four days ago in a post of mine on The Atlantic. com , if the corporate greed of Wall Street and the insouciant complacency and unimaginative stand of regulators have brought the American economy to the brink, it will be obscurantist democratic populism and its weak politicians, as it has been exemplified by the vote in Congress yesterday, that will push the economy over the abyss.

Once again the economically ignorant populace and politicians in their wrath and outrage to punish Wall Street, are raising the psychologist’s demon of “altruistic punishment” by which ironically they will be punishing themselves and most of all America.

Your opinion...
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Steve Clemons September 30th, 2008 7:58 pm

Kotz — thanks for your note, as always. I will try to respond in greater detail later - but I think that you know given our several dramatic (and fun) exchanges that while our views are different and that we probably strongly disagree, I’m surprised that you would call me dishonest and dishonorable. I think that the notion that the Community Reinvestment Act is responsible for banks giving loans that were not credit-worthy is flawed. But I will refrain from calling this view dishonorable or dishonest. I just feel that it is flat out wrong.

Look forward to further exchanges on this and other things soon. I’m off to give a talk about the economic crisis and the reckless stewardship of the Bush administration (or parts of it - as Larry Lindsay, Bob Zoellick, Paul O’Neill and others were all quite capable).
But please — you know much better than to take these debates into territory about personal honor…

best, steve clemons

Con George September 30th, 2008 8:47 pm

My dear Steve–you completely misunderstood me. I was not referring to your “personal honor” which you must know from my posts on your blog how much I admire. I considered your condemnation of the Bush administration for the ills of the American economy not to be “dishonest” but intelectually dishonorable precisely because of your intellectual stature and because you disregarded the facts related to the Community Reinvestment Act. I believe that if you had taken these facts in consideration you would have made a more balanced critique of the Bush administration precisely because of the impartiality and generosity of your nature, thus keeping intact yourself your intellectual honor.

My best wishes as always
Kotz

The Lamentations of Leftist Liberals on the Turn Around of the War

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s hardly surprising, that people like Sameer Lalwani, Juan Cole, and so many others from the liberal unimaginative intelligentsia who have been so abysmally wrong about their prognostications of the war in Iraq, now that the war is being won are petulant and sulky and manufacture shoddy and specious arguments by invoking the indisputable evidence of the sufferings of the war such as civilians killed and refugees, to trump the real triumph of the war after the surge and the new political configuration that is dawning in Iraq auguring a bright future for all Iraqis, that could serve, moreover, as a possible model for the whole Middle East. One would have expected after the dismal military situation that U.S. troops were facing in Iraq before the surge that every American would be proud of what their forces accomplished post-surge under the capable and savant leadership of General Petraeus.

Lalwani attempts to overturn this great event with what: With the art of a conjurer. He turns the retreat of al Sadr’s militia facing decimation by American-Iraqi forces into consolidation of his forces; the attack on Iraqi recruits killing thirty-three of them by a suicide bomber is considered to be to him a show of the continued VIGOR of the insurgency; and the tragic misery and agony of the refugees is a proof to him that the war has accomplished nothing.

Lalwani, Cole, and the aureole liberal intelligentsia, have suffered their intellectual Waterloo in the argument about the war. A Waterloo in whose battle, unlike Napoleon, they were neither by disposition, mettle, and strategic sagacity ever qualified to be in.

Your opinion...

Obama Flicks his Flower on the Tomb of the Fallen

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Has anyone seen at the Memorial Service of 9/11 when both Barack Obama and John McCain were approaching the tomb to render their respect to those who had lost their lives how each of them placed their flower on the tomb Obama by flicking it throwing it and McCain reverentially laying it on the tomb? This action in itself shows the difference in the gravitas of character between the two candidates and the degree of loyalty each has for America.

The indifferent nonchalant attitude of Obama toward the fallen alone should cost him the election.If one cannot show real empathy for the dead he has ever lost it for the living. Obama’s so called empathy for the poor and disadvantaged has the gravity of a flick.

Obama Plays his Victory Fiddle While America is Burning

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Barack Obama in another crucial test of leadership–the others were his withdrawal of troops from Iraq and his diplomatic parlay with Iran—has irretrievably failed. In his response to John McCain’s proposal to suspend their campaign and postpone their debate that is to take place next Saturday and concentrate all their efforts in persuading Congress to pass immediately and urgently, in a modified form, the financial measures of Paulson-Bernanke– measures that were elaborated by the experts in the field and not by primitive “tzu-tzu” practitioners nor by populist nostrums–that would have a better chance than none in saving America from descending into depression, that they should not postpone their debate and by having it they would allow the American people to have their say on the financial package, shows Obama to be abjectly and callously irresponsible to the “main street” people whom he presumably professes to represent and protect, all in the name of a stampede of voters rushing toward him on the heels of the debate that would facilitate him to capture the White House.

In his delirious manic run to catch the fleeing damsel of the ‘oval shape’, he is completely careless and unconcerned that this unprecedented financial crisis since the 1930’s depression that threatens many millions of Americans of losing their jobs and their houses, and, indeed, their life-savings, as there is a high probability if the Paulson-Bernanke measures are not passed promptly and expeditiously by Congress might engender a stampede, a run on the banks by ordinary Americans that would bring the collapse of the whole American economy.

Thus Obama’s sinister aim to have his debate for the purpose of bringing a stampede of votes to his side might turn out to be a stampede on the banks. And while he gives his glorious victory speech to Americans the latter will ingloriously be losing their savings. Hence, his ‘victory’ will rest on a pile of ashes, on the ashes of ordinary Americans’ life savings.

Will the Hate for Republicans Ravish Reason?

A short reply to Professor Paul Krugman and columnist of the NYT

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Well, well professor Krugman, if you take the personalities of Obama and McCain out of the equation what are you replacing them with other than hate? The hate Democrats have toward Bush-Cheney and the Republicans and by association McCain? So, if this is "a race between a Democrat and a Republican and a race that the Democrats will easily win,” to quote you, it will indeed be a sublime race, a contest between hate and reason.

Reason being on the side of those who believe that politically and strategically it would the ultimate inanity to elect a mercurial flashy populist who has his head in the clouds and is a leadership pretender to boot as president of the United States--the paramount protector of the achievements of Western civilization--when America is encountering deadly implacable enemies.
Over to you

Barrack Obama on his Road to Calvary

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A shadow of defeat has been cast over the face of Barrack Obama. In all his appearances, since the ‘ascension’ of Sarah Palin, in Ohio, in Virginia, his face expresses the ineffable feeling—of a would-be Messiah who would ‘change’ America and transform the hate of the world for America into love—that he carries a crown of thorns on his head and is dragging his cross to Calvary on November 4. And his denigrating sexist comment of “lipstick on the lips of the pig” forebodes that he will become more desperate in his campaign.

Palin's Selection a Master Stroke by McCain

By Con George-kotzabasis

Palin’s selection is a political master stroke on the part of McCain. Moreover this astute move is not merely a brilliant manoeuvre on the field of American electoral politics, but also adumbrates what a great president McCain will make.

Palin like a ‘honeycomb’ will attract the feminist swarm of bees, that Senator Clinton stirred up in her campaign, which are disgruntled with Obama and fly away from him, to her own beehive. Dare I say that Palin, among some of the other nails, one of them being race, will be putting the last nail on the coffin of Obama’s presidential aspirations.

In my opinion anyone’s apprehensions about whether Palin has the ability and knowledge and experience to take the reins of the White House if something happened to McCain are misplaced. A person’s character and actions, the latter even in a short time span as is the case of Palin’s short tenure as Governor, are immeasurably more important than knowledge in the accreditation of a president. The character of a person cannot be shared with another person, whereas the knowledge of a person or of many others can be shared with another person. And it lies upon the latter’s personality and character how that knowledge is to be used and what decisions will be caused by it. Palin’s tenure as governor of Alaska shows clearly that she can use her knowledge and that of others benignly, decisively, and effectively for the interests of her constituency. Hence she has the character to be an outstanding reformer and a great president. Voila une femme, to paraphrase Napoleon.

Over to you

Is Clemons Serious a Muslim President in Our Times?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

And at the end a reply by Steve Clemons of the Washington Note

If Obama has a Muslim advisor and America has a Muslim Ambassador to the UN then the corollary to this is, if Clemons follows his logic rigorously, that America whilst is engaged in a mortal fight with Islamist extremists in a long war, could also have a moderate Muslim, like Zalmay Khalilzad, as president.

Is Clemons, as the impresario of the liberal left, staging a burlesque comedy of American politics, hoping the hopeless, that it will have box office success in the present circumstances? (Read the November elections.) But I guess it’s a great virtue and “knightly” intellectual bravery to be optimistic in the most pessimistic circumstances.


Dear Kotzabasis -- In this presidential race, we have had competing the first viable female candidate, the first African-American candidate, and the oldest to ever to run as his party's nominee -- This is historic. Yes, if we had a Muslim president, a gay president, an Asian-American president, a Jewish president, a Hispanic president -- in our future....America would be well off I think if the person in question could prevail over the challenges of the day.
Thanks much for your attention, which is always dramatic, and appreciated.

best, steve clemons
vvvvvvvv

Diplomacy's Endgame with Iran


A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Steven Clemons

Cheney Winning the Inside Battles Again

Washington Note, June 09, 2008


Diplomacy is eminently the best way to resolve conflicts. But beyond a certain point the art of Talleyrand becomes completely ineffective and to continue it with an irreconcilable determined enemy is not only a barren exercise but also extremely dangerous, as one has to fight this enemy in the future when he will be much stronger at an immensely higher cost.


In the case of Iran, diplomacy has reached its barren point. The Ahmadinejad regime should be clearly given the option of immediately ceasing and dismantling its nuclear program or stand facing an indetermined force de frappe at an unspecified time. And it should be made crystal clear to the regime that this attack would be targeting the higher echelons of the government, the military, and its religious leaders. This threat against its triumvirate leadership could steer an existential turmoil in the latter that could lead to a “palace revolt” against the Ahmadinejad leadership replacing it with a moderate one which would yield to the demands of the international community.


Your opinion…

It is Time America Realizes it Cannot Negotiate with God



By Con George-Kotzabasis


In the latest talks between Iranian representatives and the five permanent UN Security Council (SC) members plus Germany last Saturday in Geneva, the chief negotiator of Iran reading from a written text rejected the package that was offered to Iran by Javier Solama, the special envoy of the European Union. Already less than an hour of the talks, Keyvan Imani, a member of the Iranian delegation, casted his doubt over the talks saying, “suspension- there is no chance for that,” in reference to the SC demand that Iran suspends its uranium enrichment. He also downplayed the presence of William Burns in these talks, --which the international media overplayed as being a “bend” in Bush’s diplomacy toward the Iranians in its up till now refusal to participate in any direct talks with the latter—saying that “he is just a member of the delegation.”


Meanwhile, Saeed Jalili, the chief negotiator of Iran, evading the issue of suspension and tongue in cheek indulged himself in literary allusions using a simile to describe diplomacy’s glacial motion as being like a beautiful Persian carpet that moves slowly as it is made and ending with a beautiful result. It’s beyond doubt that the six superpower delegates wouldn’t mind treading and romping on that beautiful Persian carpet, but some of them might be more concerned about the ugly things slowly but surely are clawing on that carpet, such as nuclear weapons, than its ‘aesthetic’ beautiful pattern.


The Iranian delegation also attempted to outsmart their Western and Chinese counterparts in the ‘photogenic stakes.’ They suggested a photo in which Saeed Jalili and Javier Solama will be in front shaking hands and the six superpower delegates standing behind them providing the background. The five Security Council members plus the German one gave this suggestion of the Iranians the short shrift it deserved.


It’s time for America and its allies to realize that they are dealing with an unappeasable, irreconcilable, and duplicitous enemy. Moreover an enemy who unshakably and truly believes that he is implementing the non-negotiable agenda of God. In such situation only a war premised diplomacy threatening Iran’s theocratic and military leadership with obliteration has a chance to create a fissure within the regime, at least among its more moderate elements, ousting the Mullahcracy and replacing it with a regime that would accept the demands of the international community. Only when America places its lethal armaments on the carpet of Iran with the threat that they are going to be used if the latter persists in its intransigency, will the deadlock of conventional diplomacy end. In the event that the theocratic regime continues to walk and talk the path of ‘martyrdom,’ then America and its staunch allies will have no other option but to adopt Cato’s strategy. Delenda est Carthago.


I rest on my oars: Your turn now

Liberal’s Deficit of a Sense of Reality

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Jane Mayer and the reviewer of her book Andrew Bacevich both of them have an unfathomable deficit of a sense of reality and are oblivious of the lessons of history. Like beatific angels they descend from “a fine cloud of solicitous idealism” to critique and accuse the Bush administration of American-made Gulags. Disregarding and forgetting that the normal and complacent days of America ended on 9/11. On this fateful day America was attacked by an invisible deadly enemy whose only transparency was that he was wearing civilian clothes. In such circumstances the Administration was in the morally unenviable position to apprehend people not on hard legal evidence but on suspicion and to hold them for a long period because of the possible great danger. In the darkness of this war against global terror the enlightened civilized processes of the Geneva Conventions and due process became totally obsolete, not by the nefarious practices of the government but by the dicta of reality and history. On the latter criteria, Mayer and Bacevich are irredeemable failures. To quote the great Austrian writer Robert Musil, “to the mind good and evil... are not sceptical, relative concepts, but terms of function, values that depend on the context (M.E.) they find themselves in.”

Further, desperate to make their case against the Administration they throw the latter into the pool of the politics of fear. They are deliberately not making the nuanced distinction between the words threat and fear. While one can threaten even the fearless it does not follow that the threatened reacts out of fear. He merely reacts to a plausible threat like any reasonable person would in the same circumstances. And this is exactly what Americans are doing in the aftermath of 9/11. To claim as Mayer and Bacevich do that the Bush administration deliberately let loose the winds of fear to batter Americans for their own nefarious ends, whatever the latter happen to be, is on their part legerdemain par excellence.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now.

Kevin Rudd Escalating his Political Dilettantism

By Con George-Kotzabasis

In our times when rogue states bristling in their apocalyptic beards, like Iran, could produce stealthily nuclear weapons, to set up an International Commission for nuclear disarmament, as Prime Minister Rudd proposes to do, is the ultimate stupidity that any one could suggest. And in the aftermath of 9/11, the magnitude of such stupidity takes astronomical dimensions. Just imagine that countries such as America, Britain, France, and especially, Israel, which could be the targets of a nuclear attack by an Islamist state or by proxies of the latter, would even consider their nuclear disarmament.

Rudd’s proposal limpidly illustrates that Australia does not have a statesman at the helm but a political dilettante and a populist to boot who is more concerned to ingratiate himself with the celestial wishes of its liberal minded constituency than to deal with geopolitical realities.

Moreover, what is rather surprising and amusing is to see that Gareth Evans is willing to underwrite such political buffoonery by accepting the chair of the International Commission for nuclear disarmament. It seems that his Tasmanian “Biggles” days are not over.

Over to you

Obama’s Plan for Withdrawal Replaces Living Victorious Strategy with Dead Strategy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Obama is no leader but a pretender! The sentence in the first paragraph of his Op-Ed in the NT on July 14, 2008, says it all. “The phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated,” which he trumpeted before the surge, he continues to consider as being wise in conditions when the surge has been successful in subduing the insurgency and decisively defeating al Qaeda in Iraq (his goal), and the Iraqi government meeting 15 out of the 18 benchmarks set up by Congress.

Further, he fabricates a grand fiction when he states that “nearly every threat we face-has grown.” If this was true one would have expected that America would have been attacked at least once since 9/11. And he distorts the real goal of the surge which was to win the war, and inevitably that would involve some strain in the overall number of U.S. military forces, and not because, the reason why he opposed the surge, it would not ease “the strain on our military.” Did Obama expect to win a war without perforce some strain on the military?

Obama’s op-ed is redolent with hypocrisy and cant to justify his pro-surge position, and to transpose this position in the new situation of a victorious war in Iraq as continuing to be politically and strategically viable is laughable. It is no less than the attempt of someone to resuscitate a dead carcass which unceremoniously is fit for burial and to give it a ‘second life’ in the overwhelming liveliness of victory.

Obama’s plan for withdrawal rides on the ignorant and obtuse brain-wave of populism that is against the war justified to an extent by the initial mistakes of its strategists in the conduct of the war. But now that these mistakes have been addressed and corrected by the new strategy of the surge which is defeating the insurgency, for Obama to stick to his populist promise to pull out U.S. troops from Iraq in sixteen months in this new situation, is to lead from the tail and not from the front the American people.

And in American history Obama will be everlastingly cursed for being the only Commander-in-Chief who ignominiously and doltishly withdrew his magnificent brave soldiers from a war at the threshold of its victory. Can you imagine President Lincoln after the Battle of Gettysburg ordering General Ulysses Grant to withdraw his troops from the field of battle and stop pursuing the army of Robert Lee whose ultimate defeat, at astronomical cost of men and materiel on both sides, led to the end of the civil war? Obama is making a mockery of the great tradition of wise, intrepid American presidents. He was wrong in his prediction that the surge would fail, wrong in his assessment that Iraq is not presently the frontline of global terror and al Qaeda, and wrong in his strategy to pull out U.S. troops from a war that the latter are winning. On this score alone, he does not deserve to be the Commander-in-Chief of a Great Nation.

Over to you

NO TRUCKLOAD OF CARROTS WILL PERSUADE IRAN UNLESS IT'S ACCOMPANIED WITH A TRUCKLOAD OF MISSILES


By Con George-Kotzabasis

A response to:

Talking to Iran is our Best Option
By Ivo Daalder and Phillip Gordon of the Brookings Institution, and advisers to Barack Obama

Washington Post, June 29, 2008

We cannot tolerate the survival of a political system which has both the increasing capacity and the inexorable desire to destroy us. We have no other option but to adopt the strategy of Cato. (Delenda est Carthago)
Raymond Aron

Ivo Daalder and Phillip Gordon, the two savants of the Brookings Institution, have a brief to advise Barack Obama to start “talking to Iran without preconditions”, but they should not allowed to do so at the grief of America’s national interests and the security of the civilized world. The rationale of such advocacy is based in “rescuing a failed policy” of not talking to Iran for 7 ½ years that has made the latter, according to our two analysts, stronger and therefore more intransigent toward American and European demands encapsulated in the precondition that Iran suspends its nuclear enrichment program before any commencement of negotiations between the opposing parties. Further they claim that such diplomatic overture by the U.S. would enable the latter to “test that proposition” of the Iranians, that they “seek only the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the right to nuclear technology”.

It’s almost beyond belief that Daalder and Gordon would be proud to present themselves as the enfants terribles on the stage of diplomacy and in the art of Talleyrand, as their suggestion to “test” this dissembling proposition of Iran behind which is attempting to build its nuclear arsenal, is terribly infantile and politically doltish. It’s like a law officer testing a professional thief whether he has stolen the goods of a house by asking him to show him the master key that has opened the door of the house.

As for their claim that for the last 7 ½ years there have not been any talks with Iran is completely in opposition to the facts. The Europeans, and many of them enunciating and voicing the proposals of their American “ventriloquist”, have been speaking with the Iranians openly as well as sotto voce for a number of years. And have put their own, and indirectly American, proposals before them to no avail. Indeed, Daalder and Gordon concede this by saying that “all of them… [The Europeans] repeatedly presented Iran with a list of benefits Iran would receive if it suspended enrichment”. The latest truckload of carrots were transported to Tehran by Javier Solama, European Foreign Policy Chief few weeks ago only to be turned over and rejected by Iran’s unappeasable Mullahcracy. And this rejection was sealed when Gholam Hossein Elham, a spokesman of the government said that Iran would not comply with Security Council resolutions requiring it to stop enriching uranium.

It’s incomprehensible that Daalder and Gordon do not realize that Iran is undeviating in its goal and determination to acquire nuclear weapons as the latter is the sine qua non of Iran’s leadership of the Muslim people and the implementation of the religious doctrine of the Ninth Mahdi, i.e., the creation of a new world order under the Holy Crescent of Islam. This theological doctrinal lunge for power by Iran cannot be stopped by the humdrum conventional instruments of diplomacy, as the two analysts suggest, but only by diplomacy in the carapace of a bristling hedgehog. And such diplomacy can only be effective by setting certain preconditions at the outset before talks can begin. In the event that such preconditions are unacceptable by the Iranian regime, as presently is the case, then the latter must unambiguously understand that since all roads to diplomacy are closed a bridge too close to war is only open.

Further, Daalder and Gordon seem to be ill-equipped for the art of diplomacy since apparently aren’t aware of some of its cardinal principles. Once one has made strongly clear to his opponent one’s position that the diplomatic avenue can only be opened on meeting certain preconditions to back down from this initial stand is to irretrievably weaken one’s position in the diplomatic stakes as one would give the perception to his adversary that one enters the negotiations with cap in hand. The military analyst Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies comments drily that “dropping a unanimous Security Council condition (stop enriching uranium) would simply be interpreted by Iran and American allies as unconditional surrender”. (M.E.)

Do the two advisers to Barack Obama consider that by such “surrender” in the diplomatic field the U.S. would have a chance to achieve by talks the latter’s primary goal, i.e., to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal? Moreover, such advocacy for diplomacy rests on the assumption that the present Iranian leadership under Ahmadinejad is a rational actor, and its participation in such negotiations would be well-grounded in its hope to resolve the problems confronting the two parties in a reasonable manner. Such assumption however is contrary to all the evidence as the long-bearded Mullahcracy of Iran continues to load its inter-state relations and actions with the afflatus of millenarianism. This is illustrated both by its annihilation stand against Israel and its apocalyptic confrontation with the West and the Great Satan America. In such a situation for anyone to advocate the wiles of conventional diplomacy as our "best option" that would accomplish a benign turning point in the relations between the American-European condominium and Iran is to have one’s head in the clouds.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

SHOOTING DOWN LATHAM'S FLIGHTS OF FOLLY

The following essay was written on December, 2003, in the midst of the electoral campaign when Mark Latham was close to dislodging John Howard from the Canberra Lodge. The essay was first published in my book titled, Unveiling the War against Terror: Fight Right War or Lose the Right to Exist, on May 9, 2004, in Melbourne.

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Mark Latham is reputed to be a man of ideas. But his ideas on the war against global terror and on Iraq, as described in his article titled, 'Reversing Australia's March of Folly,' Published in the summer issue of Defender, the journal of the Australian Defense Association, are not flying with the solid balanced wings of an eagle, but with the undulating flaps of a kite threatening to take a dangerous dive.

He fires his grapeshot against America's foreign policy, not as a result of a thoughtful strategy that would replace the presumed flawed strategy of the Americans, but as a result of the reception President Bush was given in Britain, that is, by the fervent mass demonstrations against him. Hence, the cool man of ideas deduces the flawed strategy of Bush, from this emotional heap of burning hate against America, fuelled by a politically variegated throng of old and born again socialists, communists, and anarchists, followed by the ever present caravanserai of fellow-travelers.

Could it be conceivable that Latham, the driest of economists in Labor's ranks, and an unflappable supporter of the free market and free trade, would get his afflatus, divine inspiration, for his stand against the Bush administration, from this politically and historically witless throng of anti-war protestors? Or is this a gig of a consummate dissembler, with the aim to ingratiate himself with this populist bouleversement against the U.S., and with the purpose of augmenting the value of his political stocks?

It is shown pellucidly by his own actions, although this time by the volte face of his former position, since his elevation as leader, that the latter is the leitmotif of all his outrageous and politically senseless statements, such as Bush being 'the most incompetent and dangerous President in living memory' ( If he is consistent with his own logic, then Tony Blair would also be included in this category. ), or that he would not share Australian intelligence with the U.S. Administration, - with whom would he share it, with al Qaeda? More "seriously", with the "Rainbow warriors" of the French But this poseur as keeper of the high principles of the Labor Party and of Curtin, from whom Latham proudly claims to have derived his ideological heritage, is already exposing the great fraud he is, as well as the treachery of his nature. And it will be revealed by his own actions in the near future, if not already, that the leader of the Opposition is not a man of unshakeable principles, but a political chameleon. In his insatiable greed and grab for power, he will abandon and cut adrift all his principal stands, as he is doing already, in the area of foreign policy and in his relations with the U.S. and the war in Iraq, hence proving himself to be a Shylock opportunist. He will do anything to get his pound of flesh in the leadership stakes, this time backstabbing his own principles, unlike when as mayor of Liverpool he was stabbing his colleagues' backs - but he will no longer need to do the latter, since he already rode on the obtuse-donkey backs of those who voted him in as leader.

The above is confirmed by at least two people who knew him well. The first one is a former colleague who was close to him during Latham's tenure as mayor of Liverpool. He said of him, after he called him a bastard that it's all very well for Latham to talk about climbing ladders, but he doesn't say anything about the number of backs he stabbed during his climbing. The second one is his former wife, who stated that Latham would use anyone, including his children, if this would 'enhance his public image'. And Latham himself revealed this sinister trait of using anything that would advantage his position, in his first and dramatic press conference. And in the latter I would aver, symbolically uncovered an even more sordid trait, that of the "political pimp". Flanked on his right by Kevin Rudd, another vehement and populist critic of American foreign policy, although presently with less hardened edges than his criticism had been in the past, and on his "left", by the backdrop of the stars and stripes - which only a few months before when he wrote the above- named article criticizing America, had considered "politically" to be the clothes and colors of a 'skanky ho' , to use his term for a filthy whore from another context ( This is no hyperbole. If he can describe a female journalist who criticized him as a skanky ho, why can't he describe likewise, the U.S. government which is killing women and children, as an administration of ill-repute? ). Nonetheless, he promoted his new self as a supporter of the U.S. alliance "huddled" in these clothes and colors. And with the sangfroid of a political shyster, he gave his reasons for his apostasy from his former principal stand against U.S. foreign policy, whose goal, to quote him, ‘of regime change was killing women and children in Iraq'. The magnitude of this treachery can only be explained not in his stars but in himself...

But let us revert to his article in Defender ‘...March of Folly’, which he also repudiated since his elevation as leader, claiming that when he wrote it he was not fully informed. Such admission however, has profound implications to the leadership of the nation, if he happened to be elected as the next prime minister. That on such a vital issue as national security, he launched his attack against the U.S. and criticized the Howard government, from a state of ignorance. And this ignorance is deeper and more extensive. While he was still fulminating against Bush's war on Iraq, the prestigious American magazine Weekly Standard had published a leaked memorandum written by the third in command of the Pentagon, Undersecretary Douglas Feith, which was presented to Congress, identifying 51 cases of contact between Iraqi intelligence and key and top figures of al Qaeda. Iraq not only had trained terrorists of bin Laden, but also in some cases financed his operations. The editors of the magazine designated the evidence of the memorandum as 'case closed', in regard to the links of Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda.

In view that this information was available, how is it possible that the latter was not in the pending tray of Latham's desk? And if it was, why did it not influence by a modicum his thoughts on the subject of the war? How such an insouciant, heedless and flippant attitude on his part, on such a most important issue, can vouch his credentials to be the next prime minister of this country? Latham has an imprudent tendency to brush off and dismiss events of the past, as water under the bridge, and is wont to talk about the future. He is apparently unaware, that what has happened in the past, especially for politicians, can irreversibly compromise one's future. And this unawareness reveals the caliber of his thinking.

As far as the gist of his argument about global terror, he is depressingly uninspiring and backward in his strategic thinking of how to fight terrorism and whom to have as major and steadfast allies against this great threat to the nation and to the world. He opines that Australia should fight terrorists and not states. The war on Iraq, seems to him to be a serious diversion from fighting terrorists, and weakens a country's ability of fighting them effectively. He believes and argues, that Australia should redirect its strategy and concentrate its forces in the region, 'cleaning out terrorist networks in South-East Asia' and protecting the home front from attacks. But Muslim fanatic terrorism has global dimensions, and you cannot confine it and compartmentalize it in regional ones. By definition it's a global war and one must fight it on a global terrain.

The terrorist’s attacks in Bali, Nairobi, Riyadh, and Istanbul, may have been perpetrated by local terrorists, but they were sired, fomented, and financed from outside these countries, from the global networks of al Qaeda or its affiliate bodies. That is why it's a stupendous strategic folly to believe, as Latham does, that Australia should deploy its forces only in the region. If the protection of Australia is to be genuine and effective and not a dud, then Australia must deploy its forces not only in the region, but deploy them as well, in combination with the forces of its allies, against the mobile centers of terrorism, wherever they are, as well as against the states that support them. It's a war on two fronts, as I've been arguing for two years now. The U.S. attack on Iraq was a quintessential part of this strategy. Moreover, one has to realize, that the only country in the world that can fight and defeat global terror, is America. Countries, such as Australia, therefore, those that are targeted by this lethal foe and are serious in protecting themselves from this mortal enemy, have no other option but to ally themselves to the U.S. with the unbreakable chains of destiny.

It's the ultimate mindlessness, to denigrate and downgrade this alliance, in these most critical times, as Latham did by his intemperate and politically stolid and banal statements against the Bush administration. But such thoughtless statements reveal that Latham's tongue is on a faster track than his mental processes. It's the typical characteristic of intellectual pretenders, and of people who crave to be impressionistic. Statesmen measure their words and they're never loose cannons. It's obvious however, that with the ascension of Latham as leader of the Opposition, verbal glibness and mental flippancy will be the occupants of the leadership of the ALP. Furthermore, it's most unwise to denounce the stand of the U.S. and its war against Iraq, because mistakes and errors have been made by the planners of its strategy. In all wars errors have been made and one must not cover them up, but on the contrary, one must criticize them constructively. No less a figure than Churchill, who was the major strategic planner of the failed Gallipoli campaign, made an error, not to mention others in the First World War. But can one reasonably rebuke the alliance and its war against Germany because of these mistakes?

Tony Blair as a statesman, identified with wisdom and historical insight that the greatest threat of the twenty-first century is this 'emerging nexus of terrorists and rogue states’. That is why with acumen and courage he took a head-dive against the current of public opinion against the war. His Labor leadership caricatures here in Australia, of Crean, Rudd, and Latham, had neither the wisdom nor the courage to do the same and cowardly refused to swim against the tide of populist opinion. But they are fated to be the subject of political cartoonists and not the subject of historians on statesmanship.

History will aver and judge, Bush's, Blair's, and Howard's stand as an historic stand against this necrophilous rush of fanatic barbarians at the gate of universal freedom. Latham, as a fugitive from this historic stand, is totally unfit to lead the nation at these critical times. The Australian public must not allow themselves to be conned and be used by this treacherous political chameleon.



I rest on my oars: Your turn now

Who Has the Right to Declare War?

Reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Now to Say Never Again

By George Williams

On Line Opinion June 18, 2008

Professor Williams with the typical lawyer’s chicanery and the arrogance of historical and political ignorance argues that Parliamentary approval should be the prerequisite for the declaration of war. To do so however is to deprive the sagacious right of statesmen to make the decision for war and give it instead to the “swirl”, to use Paul Keating’s word describing his colleagues in the Senate, of mediocre politicians.

War being an instrument of last resort is not made by a lightly populist decision, as Williams implies, but by a well –informed resolute and wise leadership that leads its people to war as an absolute necessity when a nation is threatened or attacked by a deadly irreconcilable enemy.

Williams’ proposal is neither intellectually and historically wise, nor does it have the depth, prudence, and firmness of statesmanship. It’s instead the proposal of an unreconstructed political wimp pontificating from his left-leaning academic chair and echoing the constant refrain of the illusionist pacifists of No to War, as if the world was and is a loving circle of holding hands.

Your opinion...

Scorpion of Racism Running with Raised Fangs to Sting Obama

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Paul Krugman: It’s a Different Country
Race has become less important in American politics, argues Krugman.

Economist’s View, June 09,2008 http://economistsview.typepad.com/

In the normal circumstances of the last few years in America “racial division” may have “lost much of its sting”, to quote Krugman, by burrowing itself in a hibernating state. But with the nomination of Obama as the Democratic candidate America is no longer in its benign state of normalcy--with the war in Iraq, with economic recession and rising unemployment--and racism will be rising from the slumbers of its hibernating habitat. As Nietzsche has said in another context, the true character of a person is revealed in critical circumstances. Likewise, the true character of a society is also exposed in critical circumstances. This is no longer the case that blacks are moving into a white neighborhood but of a black man moving into the White House. It’s this critical issue that will make the scorpion of racism to raise its fangs and sting Obama.

My prediction is that the white backlash and its auxiliaries, the Latinos and the Asian-Americans, will squash Obama’s ambition to ensconce himself into the Oval Office. America at this stage is not ready to have a black president, especially of one who carries the arrogant public onstentatiousness and spiritual baggage of Jeremiah Wright.

Your opinion

Mustafa Has No Qualms of Being both Muslim and Western but Don't Serve him Pork

Racism for the Mainstream

By Mustafa Quadri

On Line Opinion, May 9, 2008

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

Mustafa destroys his own argument that there is a “pseudo-intellectual industry” that vilifies Islam of being violent, led by the American Daniel Pipes, by his own major premise. If Islam is peaceful, as he insinuates, then the greatest vilifiers of Islam, second to none, are Muslims themselves. The jihadist-terrorists and their mentors, like al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who influence millions of Muslims, being universal murderers incontestably hold the scepter of vilification of Islam in their own hands.

But here is the zinger. Mustafa asserts that "despite there being no consensus on what it means to be Western or Muslim...many Muslims, including myself, have no qualms about being Muslim and Western". Indeed, Mustafa may not have any "intellectual qualms" about committing this intellectual "felony" for which a poster put the handcuffs on him. But if he was served pork what would he be, more Muslim or less Western or vice versa? And whatever the choice, whether to eat it or not, he would knock off his own proposition. Mustafa, like so many other educated Muslims, Waleed Ali is another one, make an intellectual mockery of their own education and of themselves.

Poor Mustafa! With the flood of reasoning issuing from most of the posts above he is drowning in the sweet waters of reason. But I guess it’s better to take leave of this world with a sweet taste than with the "bitter taste" of being both a Muslim and a westerner which is the “bitterest” oxymoron.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

Venus vs Mars


Robert Kagan Protests: Neocons are Not Vampires and Werewolves
By Steven Clemons
Washington Note, May 7, 2008

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

The European neo-realists and liberal internationalists and their American cognates, “dropping the guns” and taking, like grannies, needles in their hands to knit silk ties for their confreres the neocons for the purpose of “needling” them, will go down in history as the court jesters in the intellectual realm of the neoconservatives. It’s the latter with a deep sense of history that are aware of the great threat that fanatical Islam poses to civilization and which only a Mars can neutralize.

Clemons supinely reclines exhausted in his Venus boudoir while the civilized world is threatened with burning in the absence of a Mars. And the little energy he still has uses it to weave metaphors mocking the neocons. Indeed, the war against the jihadists will be won by the Metaphor Special Forces.

P.S. You have to read the article published in the Washington Note to see the meaning of the puns above. http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/

Steve Clemons May 8

George — obviously we disagree, but I do greatly admire your sense of humor and ability to engage now and then on a fun/ironic level now and then unlike some of my other regular commenters.
Hope are well — and thanks for link and comments, as always,

Steve

kotzabasis May 8th, 2008 11:44 pm

My dear Steve-thank you for your generous words. But I have to warn you:The nobility of spirit that you are endowed with some of your supporters are hankering to place on their “revolutionary” tumbril.

My best wishes too,

George

Obama's Oxymoronic Suggestion to Parley with Sponsors of Terror


Hypocrisy On Hamas
By James P. Rubin, former assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration

Washington Post, May 16, 2008

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

Two years is a long time in the life of terrorism! Rubin by giving us the answer of McCain to his question of two years ago that the latter was prepared to talk to Hamas and accuse him therefore with hypocrisy can only do so by disregarding this elementary fact. In these two years Hamas has not even shown a propensity to give the Palestinian people “security and a decent life and decent future” nor “democracy”, to quote Rubin (which incidentally was the rider of McCain’s answer.), and continues to engage unappeasably in violence and terror while it’s in government. In such conditions it would be oxymoronic now for any politician, such as Obama suggested and McCain denounced, to open the door of negotiations with a terrorist government while the door of the war on terror has not closed.

Strategically, politically, and morally, it would not only be dull-witted but also close to treachery for any government that has committed its armed forces to fight global terror at the same time to even hint that it is willing to start negotiations with rogue governments that back and continue to be inflexible in their support and sponsorship of terror.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

TERRORISTS CLAIM THEIR RIGHTS UNDER THE LOOSE GARMENTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYERS

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Supreme Court judge Bernard Bongiorno, who is presiding over the biggest terror trial in Australia of the twelve radical Muslims (The “Dirty Dozen” bombers) who were allegedly preparing themselves to be holy martyrs in their jihad against Australia by killing innocent civilians, has been persuaded by SC (Senior Counsel) of the defendants, Jim Kennan and Mark Taft, that the alleged terrorists are being treated inhumanely by the authorities and are at a state of mental collapse.

Before we go into the ruling of the judge I think it would be appropriate to know few things about the two SC of the accused,. Jim Kennan, and MarkTaft. The former was a minister in the Kane and Kirner Labor governments in Victoria who held the portfolios of Attorney General and Transport in the mid-eighties. Melbournians will remember the Tramways Union strike in 1989 when trams had blockaded the metropolitan streets of Melbourne for more than a month preventing commuters coming into the city and threatening many small shops with bankruptcy. The strike lasted that long only as a result of Kennan being a weak minister as well as of the incompetence and languid state of his advisors. One example which I remember vividly, was his press secretary watching the Commonwealth Games with his feet on his desk whilst John Halfpenny ( the then Secretary of The Trades Union Council), who was leading the strike, was besieging with his goons the minister and threatening the livelihood of many small shop keepers. At the end of the strike, Jim Kennan was removed from the Ministry of Transport and was placed back to his Attorney General’s position. And Bernard Bongiorno was appointed to the Bench of the Supreme Court by the Brack's Labor government in 2000. ( Birds of a feather flock together.)

The other SC Mark Taft was a member of the Communist Party following the footsteps of his father Bernie Taft, who, as the Victorian Secretary of the Party dissolved it in 1991 in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But he dissolved the Communist Party not for the purpose of expressing his political mea culpa for the millions of peoples who were slaughtered by the Leninists doctrinaires Stalin and Mao, but for the purpose of conceiving its bastard sibling the Socialist Forum hoping that its members would become an influential part of the left of The Labor Party. In the latter goal the older Taft succeeded completely, while the younger Taft as a member of the executive of the Socialist Forum and as one of its foremost ideologues, second only to his father, was ideologically grooming many members of the left of the Labor party, among whom were the present Minister of Finance, Lindsay Tanner, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, of the Rudd Labor Government. Now that both SC Jim Kennan and Mark Taft have abandoned the heavy burdens of the public sector, which for both of them were a total failure, and have chosen to be lured by the entrepreneurial temptations of the private sector and gratify themselves with its rich tastes, they decided to open their appetite for the latter with the “aperitif” of being the defenders of the “Dirty Dozen”, in Australia’s biggest terrorism trial. But enough of this minuscule biographical diversion of our two attorneys of defense, and let us now deal with the “unprecedented “ruling of the presiding judge of the trial.

Justice Bongiorno being a practical judge and not an ivory tower one, was not satisfied of being convinced merely by the “theoretical” pleadings of the two SC that the defendants were treated inhumanely by the authorities, especially when they were shackled hand and foot while they were transported from prison to the Court locked in the steel compartments of the prison vans, and wanted to test this allegation in a practical way. So when he visited Barwon prison where the twelve were being held he had himself locked up in “the small steel compartment…in one of the prison vans… to get a better understanding of their treatment”. Convinced now “beyond a reasonable doubt” by his own “travailed” experience during his own “transportation” to Barwon prison that the alleged would-be terrorists were treated by the authorities brutally and inhumanely he issued his ukase to the latter that unless they stopped this “intolerable” treatment of the prisoners his honor would “suspend the hearing indefinitely and consider releasing the men on bail”.

Victoria’s Department of Corrections under this hovering threat expeditiously responded positively to the Jupiterian ruling of Justice Bongiorno and implemented most of his directions. In doing so it negated the possibility that some of the twelve defendants would jump bail and break away from the “forceps” of Australian justice and disappearing in a Muslim country. But it did so paradoxically at the expense of the Judge. As it deprived his Honor of the honorific that Muslims, moderate and radical alike, at least in Australia, would have bestowed on the Justice as an indelible sign of their gratitude for this service, i.e., giving the opportunity to their co-believers to escape from the unjust Australian terrorist laws, by replacing their traditional greeting of Salam with Bongiorno, for ever after.

What was most interesting and amusing moreover, was the forensic evidence of the psychiatrists whose painstaking analysis had found the defendants to be psychologically and mentally disturbed—as if people who were prepared to kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent people for their messianic goals and in chase of the seventy-two virgins were not already incurable cases of mental disturbance--and “believed that their condition would deteriorate as the trial progressed”. Needless to say Justice Bongiorno was deeply influenced by this forensic evidence extracted from the “psychiatrist’s couch” and was a decisive element in his “extraordinary”, to quote him, ruling.

Thus we will be told as an entertaining and jovial story, that the twelve bearded fanatics who were “toying” with ideas how to blow up Australians, now that they are standing before the bar accused of planning this atrocity they have metastasized themselves into mere “naughty boys” playing among the skirts of the “libertine” legal profession and claiming from the loose garments of the latter their human rights

Bongiorno Australia:Have a nice day

I rest on my oars: Your turn now.

The Pride of Superiority is Hidden Behind Hijab


By Con George-Kotzabasis

All veils in Muslim culture cover the “sexual abandon” and profligacy that womanhood embodies, and the temptation to man can only be stifled by not being able, at least temporarily, to see it. But in our modern times with the exodus of many Muslims from their own countries into the sexually promiscuous West the headscarf has a second life with a new meaning. It has become a sexually pure sublimated projection for Muslim women for their real oppression. In contrast to the apparently promiscuous women of the West, Muslim women can feel proud of their sexual “purity” and display it by wearing the hijab. Thus, being slaves in their own households they feel to be “queens” in the domain of the Western world.

Further, it's a projection of their real inferiority, that has been rendered to them by the Words of Allah inscribed in the Koran, for an idealistic dud superiority. While Muslim men chase heavenly virgins since the earthly ones are evanescent, Muslim women pretend to keep intact their earthly vulnerable virginity by wearing the hijab.The pride of being sexually pure has an invaluable price, even if at the end, because of the nature of women provided they are not sexually mutilated, has to be paid with a "promiscuous coin".

This is Shakira Hussein's irresolvable problem as a "Muslim secular feminist" as she claims to be. But the solution is very simple: Cast away this sublimation by throwing out the hijab and be a free woman.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

WHAT LEGACY WILL IRAQ HAVE?

Forget Legacy-Building:Iraq is NO Japan Mr. President

By David Sanger, Washington Note, January 1, 2006


The following retort is republished here as it clearly shows how wrong all the critics of the war in Iraq and its 'unraveling' have been. It's obvious now, except for those who continue to be in a state of denial, that the new strategy of the Surge implemented by the capable and superb commander General Petraeus is defeating the insurgents and is laying down the rudiments of democracy in Iraq. If these offshoots of freedom grow eventually into the tree of democracy in Iraq, then president Bush's objective to start democracy rolling in the Middle East will be glowingly achieved. And the pessimists and the naysayers of the neocon strategy to spread and establish democracy in countries that breed terrorism, will have so much egg on their face that will be a full time job for nannies to wipe it off their face.

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

Legacies do not fall like manna from the sky. Nor are they tailor-made of an original design. They are made by "wearing" for long the hard course of action that will ultimately shape and give birth to the legacy. Moreover, its creator is not one person, but a set of intelligent human beings, who however, are always "escorted" by the jump less shadow of fallibility and serendipity, which inevitably take their toll, but without which no great achievement can be accomplished in human affairs.

The Bush administration, despite some serious mistakes in its strategy (which must creatively and imaginatively be criticized, but not by doomsayer scenarios--which regrettably some readers on this blog are incapable of making a distinction between imaginative critics and doomsayers--is still on the right strategy, both in realizing the prowess and the malice of the enemy and how to confront him. To compare, as Sanger does, this prowess of the religiously fanatic terrorists, whose lethal actions have the great potential of becoming a ceaseless series of successes, with the one off bombings of anarchists, is historically ludicrous.

Secondly, to compare the fate of democracy in the Philippines in 1898, with the fate of democracy in Iraq in the age of TV and of the Internet, when most people in oppressed countries can see how other people live in democratic countries and can virtually breath the air of freedom that emanates from these countries, is to compound this incomparable inanity of Sanger.
Also, John Dower's proposition, "that people know what victory looks like", as he deems Bush's victory to be a fabrication, is overtly contradicted by the polls which showed Bush's ratings for the war jumping from 36% to 46%, after the President's intense campaign to explain the war to the American people. Lastly, David Donald's seemingly poignant statement, about Bush's comparison of the spying intrusions to the "sleeping partners" of the terrorists, with Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, that there was an uproar against Lincoln and a "lot of people believed it wasn't necessary", why is this so surprising, did he expect a unanimous agreement by the American people about such a fundamental, but necessary, reversal of rights even in times of war?

The Administration's strategy in Iraq was to establish an Archimedean point from which it could turn the terrorist's world and its sponsors upon their own heads. By defeating Saddam and the current insurgency, it can defeat by proxy, as Libya has shown, all other rogue states, and hence expedite the defeat of global terror. History has not as yet passed its verdict. But the chances are that the Bush administration will accomplish this historic task, and prove wrong all its doomsayers and shallow, unimaginative critics.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

THE SLEEPING DEMON OF RACISM WILL AWAKE TO BITE OBAMA


The Great Non Sequitur, by Charles Krauthammer Washington Post, March 7, 2008

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

In the "progressivist" euphoria of seeing a black American with an agile mind of capturing the up till now Waspish Whitehouse, most people cannot see the first awakening movements of the sleeping demon of racism rising from its slumbers to bite Obama's ambition to become the next president of the U.S.A. . But the ever watchful Argus-eyed New York Times. which always has its finger up in the air to feel the political cross winds that are battering the American electorate, has already sensed that Obama cannot win the election, despite the fact that he has won most states in the primaries, against John McCaine, and therefore it has "de-barracked" Obama and is barracking for Clinton. The ...Times, on March 9, 2008, under the rubric The Editorial Board's Primary Choices, states, that "the editorial board endorses Senator ... Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination". Thus surprisingly declaring itself against the majority of Democrats who prefer Obama. And the only reason for doing this is no other than in the editorial board's educated guess is that America at this stage is not ready to vote a black American into the Whitehouse.

The next to follow this line of the ... Times will be the super delegates of the Democratic Convention who at the penultimate moment the majority of them will be also endorsing Senator Clinton as their nominee. Thus we will be told, that the flagship of the liberal media The... Times and the liberal super delegates of the Democrats had decided that the best way to repulse this wave of impending racism from falling and drowning their black candidate is to attract this rising wave of racism behind their waspish candidate Clinton, whose tsunami will have a greater chance of raising the latter to the Oval Office.

Moreover, Obama is politically totally unfit to lead a great nation that faces stupendous challenges and dangers in our times with his populist siren songs and idyllic rhetoric to a deeply divided America, issuing from how to deal and handle Islamist global terror, and its corollary, the war in Iraq. And as Krauthammer correctly points out "uniting is not a matter of rhetoric and manner, but of character and courage".

And in this case John McCaine is Napoleon's "voila une homme". As Obama's spine is made up of neon light flashes and has no backbone. But if he does get the Democratic nomination, I too believe he will lose the election. As the presently dormant demon of race will awake from its present slumber at the crucial moment-this time for the good of America and the free world- along with its auxiliaries, the American Latinos and the Asians, and prevent a political dilettante from getting the helm of power in his hands in our turbulent and most dangerous times.

I rest on my oars:Your turn now

Stung by the Scorpion of Fanaticism

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Ali is pop star of intolerance Greg Barns On Line Opinion June 4, 2007

Greg, in your moral equivalence between Christian-Jews and Muslims you nullify your intelligence, your sense of history and reality. Certainly there are fanatic Christians and Jews, but they don't threaten the existence of Western civilization as fanatic Muslims do.

Moreover, life for Muslims is difficult because of their bigoted attachment to an atavistic religion, not because of the "pop star", to quote you, status of Hirsi Ali. Further, by giving fanatic Muslims a piggyback you play the role, in the unfathomable depths of your ignorance, of the tortoise, in the unforgettable fable of Orson Welles, The Scorpion and the Tortoise. When the former convinced the latter that in its transportation on the back of the tortoise from one side of the river to the other, it would be silly to sting it as it itself would drown, nonetheless, midstream it did sting it. And in the dying question of the tortoise why it stung it, the drowning scorpion replied, "this is my nature".

Likewise you will be stung by the "Muslim Scorpion" that you carry on your back.

Abandoning the Field of Battle for Diplomacy is to Admit Defeat


The Smart Way Out of a Foolish War

By Zbigniew Brzezinski Washington Post, March 30, 2008

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis


This is old fogy strategic thinking on the part of a former National Security advisor. For any nation that is already fighting its enemy by means of military operations to abandon the latter and open instead the door of negotiations and diplomacy, as Brzezinski proposes, is to admit defeat, as one would have to negotiate now with a more emboldened and confident enemy from a position of weakness. In such conditions of military “surrendering”, especially to a religiously inspired fanatic enemy, it would be utterly foolish to consider and believe that such a nation, in this case America, could achieve any of its initial goals through diplomacy, other than its conditions of “surrender”, is to make a mockery of the art of Talleyrand

And to accuse McCaine that he proposes for Iraq 100 years of war “until victory”, is a blatant and shameful lie and stains indelibly the intellectual integrity of Brzezinski.

But the Democrats are desperate to win the election and have no shame to immerse themselves in the sewage of their present dirty and populist politics.

I rest on my oars:Your turn now

A Reply To Two Americans Who Blame U.S. Policies For Irruption Of Terror


By Con George-Kotzabasis

This is no time for populist politicians like Obama, nor, could I say, for “aureole” New York Times commentators like Paul Krugman, who are attempting to bait the electorate’s hate of the Republicans. But for politicians with mettle, sagacity, and visual clarity and imagination to deal with the stupendous issues that America faces in a very dangerous world that emanates from the great Islamist threat. It’s for this reason that John McCaine is Napoleon’s “voila une homme”.

It’s an easy intellectual escape, when one is devoid of arguments, or should I say when one is replete with hackneyed arguments, to dub one’s interlocutor’s points as being a “straw man”. You still see war and great dangers emanating solely from states, and you cannot see, due to lack of imagination and historical perspective, those “stateless” invisible enemies who operate both from within and from outside the countries they are attacking are even more dangerous, especially when, the rapid technological development accelerates and consummates their possibility of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and indeed, nuclear ones, and which they will use with fanatic glee against the infidels of the West and the “Great Satan” America.

Further, your contention that Republican policies created terror is your own real straw man. It’s America’s unprecedented success in the history of mankind in the fields of the economy, science, technology, and cultural and political power and its status as the sole superpower that has created the envy and also the hate of many people of the world against it, especially of people with retarded cultures and chiliastic religious beliefs. Residing in countries of corrupt and authoritarian governments, and as a result of this they have been left behind in the race of economic development and tend to scapegoat America for all their ills.

Policies are objectively evaluated geopolitically and morally only within the context they are made. Hopping in bed with ugly and murderous regimes was an unenviable choise that the U.S. perforce had to make during its cofrontation with a powerful planetary enemy, such as the Soviet Union had been. Sure enough, some of these policies alienated many people, but the end result was to save the world from the most brutal of all regimes in the history of mankind, Communism.

There is no costless freedom. And often one has to pay a high price for its keep, politically and morally, not to say bloodily. Thucydides tour de force History of the Peloponnesian War, clearly depicts the intricacies of geopolitics and the unholy alliances nations have to make to prevent their downfall.

I rest on my oars:Your turn now

BOB CARR SAILS HIS INTELLECTUALLY FLOATLESS PLOT AGAINST THE MOUNTAINOUS SEA OF McGUINNES

By Con George–Kotzabasis

The intellectual lightness of Bob Carr’s critique of Paddy McGuinnes lies in the opening of his article published in The Australian, on January 30, 2008., ” ‘Don’t get too close to that crowd of Quadrant’, instructed Paddy McGuinnes…The year …is fixed in my memory as 1976 or 1977, when I was an employee of the Labor Council of NSW”. ( A period when the latter was employing standover goons from the Sydney underworld to bash and threaten the lives of left-wing members of the Labor Party, and which McGuinnes dubbed as the right-wing thuggish Labor Council of NSW.) As if this statement of McGuinnes in 1976-77, would be the ‘fixed’ Gospel truth about Quadrant from which McGuinnes would never deviate with the passing of time. Carr claims that “Quadrant’s anti-communism was too unfashionable for him.”[McGuinnes] As if the latter was picking his political “fashions” from the ‘cat walks’ and designs of other conservatives and was intellectually incapable of designing his own anti-communism, which he did, and during his journalistic career brilliantly articulated and exhibited.

Carr claims that “McGuinnes contribution was a different one” and “deliciously counterproductive”, which the Labor party relished. He was the Godfather of the three deadly sins that would cast the Howard government into the political abyss of Hades: Climate change denial, support for George W. Bush in Iraq, and loss of workers’ rights. “For ten years, whatever Howard did or said he would be supported by a group of columnists…none more bottled-up angry with Labor than McGuinnes”. This was Howard’s “Praetorian Guard”. And “when the electorate wanted Howard to ratify Kyoto and wind back the commitment in Iraq, the symbiotic link with Praetorians made it impossible for the emperor to shift”. It was this attachment of Howard to the orthodoxies of the Praetorians “that did him in”. Carr caps his argument by saying that “McGuinnes and his allies had won their man for their program, but their program had lost Australians”. And “McGuinnes was haunted by ghosts… Women from the Push days, his Labor Party buddies from the past, above all the imaginary leftists who seemed to occupy a large part of his mental space”.

Well let us deal with Carr’s argument about Paddy and Howard’s Praetorian Guard that “did him in”. The three issues that presumably ousted the Howard government, i.e., climate change, the war in Iraq, and WorkChoices were present during Kim Beazley’s tenure as opposition leader without in any way increasing his polls against Howard , So there must have been other factors that brought the Coalition government down that Carr hardly even attempts to probe. And all the pre-election polls had shown that at least the two issues of climate change and the war, scarcely made any ripples in the calm lake waters that the electorate was paddling its canoe. The issues that led to the defeat of the former government did not emanate from the “program” of McGuinnes and his allies, but from a number of tactical mistakes made by the Coalition prior and during their lackluster electoral campaign and its inability to cut Rudd’s populist wings that would make the pigeon land, in the guise of an eagle, on the Lodge.

On the two pivotal issues of security and economic management, on which the Coalition had no peers in the political spectrum and was politically unassailable, the Howard government failed to concentrate the mind of the electorate. Instead of making these two issues the axis upon which the safety and continued economic prosperity of the nation depended, it squandered this political capital it had in its hands by ‘hoarding’ the first, that is, by keeping silent about the great importance of the security of the country during the electoral campaign¬—and considering that the war in Iraq was being won by the Coalition of the willing with hardly any Australian casualties, which was vital to the security of the West, the reticence of this fact was politically astonishing---and by treating the second, i.e., economic management, as a ‘safe haven’ in the electorate’s mind and a safe protectorate that could not be ‘stolen’ by the me tooism economic conservatism of Kevin Rudd.

Rudd owes his victory to the humdrum desires--that had nothing to do with the war or climate change--of Howard’s battlers and to the self-employed tradesmen, both groups drenched with middle-class conservative values. Once Kevin 07 established in the minds of these two groups his economic conservatism coupling this with his promises of lower food and petrol prices as well as ending the ogre of Work Choices, which the unions’ advertising campaign successfully managed to depict, then Rudd was bound to win the race, as the unbreakable momentum of all the polls had shown during the long campaign, without steroids.

Howard’s campaign strategists committed the error of thinking that they could take the wind of the sails of Rudd first by a profligate and luxurious spending, and secondly, by tampering with the Work Choices legislation with the aim of making it more palatable to the electorate, and in the process bungling it, which instead of making it acceptable to the latter it created the strong impression of Howard’s guilt about Work Choices as being an anti-working class measure and hence generating a great distrust of Howard. From this point on whatever Howard was saying was falling on deaf ears and no monetary offers lining the pockets of the electorate would change the latter’s choice to have a go with Rudd. Indeed, “the electorate had moved”, to quote Carr, and ‘de-latched’, from Howard not because of Kyoto and the war in Iraq, as Carr claims, but to the failure and inability of the Coalition’s strategists to expose the falsity of Rudd’s so called “new leadership” and to take the wind off the sails of his bloated populism, as it’s written in Kevin Rudd’s stars that his “new leadership” will be led by the weathervane of populism.

Carr ends his tirade against McGuinnes by stating that the latter "was haunted with ghosts…above all the imaginary leftists who seemed to occupy a large part of his mental space”. As if he himself and the left in general, were free of their own ghosts planted in their dragons’ teeth by that great intellectual landlord absentee from history Karl Marx, class struggle, the proletariat, capitalist exploiters, the universal man, who would work during the day, play the harp in the afternoon, and write and “practice” poetry during the night. Not to mention its more modern up to date fads such as "make poverty history” in countries such as Africa where political corruption is rife and when one gets on the sleaze racket of a governmental position it becomes a way of life and where a free rein of insatiable cleptocracy reigns.

Just-in-time news, Bob Carr has drowned…It was never wise for lake swimmers to swim in the mountainous sea of Paddy McGuinnes.

"LIES" ABOUT THE WAR THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL

By Con George-Kotzabasis


The following article is an extract from my book published in Melbourne on May 2004, titled Unveiling The War Against Terror. The essay was written on October 2003.


In the practical decisions of life it will scarcely ever be possible to go through all the arguments in favor of or against one possible decision, and one will therefore always have to act on insufficient evidence. Werner Heisenberg German physicist and founder of the Principle of Uncertainty.


A chirping sound and fury of a swarm of crickets from their grassy, weedless, "manicured estates" of politics, the media, academes, and bishoprics are endeavoring to muffle the sound of reason as to why America and its staunch and historically insightful allies went to war against Saddam Hussein.

The critics of the war in their impassioned fiery endeavor to impugn and discredit the Bush, Blair, and Howard governments, are far from being morally and intellectually hampered from using meretricious arguments to make their case against the war. The English essayist Chesterton observed, 'where is the best place to hide a leaf? His answer was ‘in a tree'. The opponents of the war observe, 'where is the best place to hide the truth? Their answer is ‘in a lie'. Hence, they fabricated the biggest lie of all, with the aim to conceal the truth about the war. After their lugubrious doomsday cries and forecasts about hundreds of thousands of casualties, of humanitarian disasters, floods of refugees, and bogged-down Vietnams, all of which failed to materialize, either in Afghanistan or Iraq, they now "pin-up" their arguments on the Americans' unsuccessful efforts to find weapons of mass destruction ( WMD ), and on the inability of its armed forces to win the peace in Iraq. As if these two goals could be accomplished in parallel with the ending of major combat operations, in a regime which brutally oppressed its own people for thirty years, and which practiced the concealment of its development of WMD in the form of an exact science. And which, despite its swift defeat in the war, it still has a paladin of sturdy supporters, whose lament of losing power is inevitably transformed into a vigorous opposition to the American-led coalition forces.

The peaceniks, desperate to find a straw to save themselves from intellectual drowning in this ocean of failed predictions and "displaced" conceptions, have now concocted this lie, that the American, British, and Australian administrations were mendacious to their peoples about the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the civilized world. In this forlorn effort to justify their position, brazenly and shamelessly distort David Kay's report to Congress about Hussein's WMD, by focusing on the present fact that no such weapons were found, and triumphantly deduce from this, that Hussein was not an imminent threat against the West. But in this ignominious exercise, they totally disregard the other crucial elements of his findings, that clearly substantiate, that the regime retained intact an infrastructure that could develop WMD at short notice.

The eminent columnist of the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in his column of the ...Post on 10 October wrote, that Iraq maintained 'an infrastructure ( laboratories, equipment, trained scientists,detailed plans ) that could "break out" and ramp up production of [ WMD ] when needed... Just in Time... That David Kay found the infrastructure but as yet no finished product'. And again, as reported in the Washington Post on 7 October, David Kay had found strains of organism in a scientist's home that could be used to produce biological agents. He had also found documents for resuming uranium enrichment efforts for the development of nuclear weapons, and a clandestine network of laboratories that contained equipment for continuing chemical-biological weapons research, as well as SA-2 surface-to-air missiles which could be transformed into ballistic missiles with a range of 250 miles, exceeding the 150 miles range which Iraq was allowed to have by the U.N. .

This is the thundering truth about Hussein's secret program to activate the development of WMD, whenever his regime thought it would be safe to do so, that the critics of the war are vainly attempting to muffle and still. The ABC presenter of the 7.30 Report, Kerry O'Brien, in his interview of the U.S. Ambassador, Tom Schieffer, was picking selectively from the Kay report to make his flimsy case about the unnecessariness of the war in Iraq - who obsessively and indefatigably has been doing since even before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq - and leaving out the key elements of the report which verified without any doubt, that the Hussein regime had the capability to develop and produce WMD at a time of its own choosing.

It is inconceivable, that while Iran, Hussein's arch enemy and rival in the region, had plans to develop nuclear weapons, Hussein would not have known this, and had he known it, he would commit geopolitical hara-kiri, by choosing to go into "nuclear hibernation". That he would stop unilaterally and altruistically all his plans to develop the same weapons. Such an action on his part, would strategically have placed him in a most vulnerable position, and would have made him a hostage to his primary foe in the region. Moreover, such conduct would entail, the discarding and abandonment of all his ambitions and grandiose plans to be the new Saladin of the Arab world, which would be completely out of character. This kind of transubstantiation from a ruthlessly ambitious dictator to a votary of the Dalai Lama, would be the mother of all miracles.

This logic just does not click. Yet it is by this reasoning that the opponents of the war are constructing their case against it. As their core argument was and is, that Hussein was never an imminent threat against the West, and crown the "correctness" of their contention on the fact that no WMD have been found. But I dare say, that not before long, this crown will be a crown of thorns around their heads, and there will be no intellectual resurrection from the naivety that nailed them on the "believers" cross of the bloodthirsty dictator. That this sleight of hand artist was able to dupe and blindfold them in regards to the clandestine network of laboratories and scientists he had in place, and could produce WMD on his orders at the appointed time, will be to their eternal shame.

As for the word 'imminent', that also is a spurious invention of the opponents of the war. Neither Bush nor Blair, nor any other senior member of their administrations, ever said that Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the free world. What President Bush said, was that Hussein's development and possession of WMD and his links with terrorism, posed a grave and gathering danger against the civilized world. In a world of global terror however, this future gathering danger is not years ahead but too near at hand not to consider it as imminent. Indeed, in a world of unleashed fanatic terror, all the actions that the latter could launch are imminent. The terrorists pose a continuous threat to the world, therefore it would be the culmination of foolishness on the part of those who are been targeted, not to take these threats as imminent. The rogue states too, which directly and indirectly support terrorists, are themselves deeply enmeshed in this web of imminence. On a scale of a continuum of threats, what is imminent? What can happen in one day, in one week, in one month, in one year, to paraphrase the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld? It is this hard question, that the critics of the war are avoiding from answering, as a result of their intellectual flabbiness and lack of moral and political integrity.

Statesmen who face a great portentous danger, as presently posed by an 'emerging nexus between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and weapons of mass destruction', to quote Secretary Rumsfeld, will not await for the elusive perfect intelligence, perfect information, before they take decisive and unrelenting action against a formidable and deadly foe. In the realm of human affairs uncertainty is the absolute sovereign. It is in this context of uncertainty that political leaders, prudently and intrepidly, but not foolhardily, have to make their determining and momentous decisions.

In the case of the war against Iraq, the Bush and Blair governments had to decide on the sort of action they would take on the basis (a) of the information they had received from their intelligence agencies, whose assessments were based on the calculus of probability, not on certainty (the latter being unattainable) that Iraq possessed WMD, and had plans in place to develop nuclear weapons, and that Hussein would not be squeamish in using them, either directly against his enemies, as he had done in his war against Iran and on his own people, or through proxies, i.e., terrorists. And (b) on Hussein's demonstration of his geopolitical ambitions for the region and the ruthless means he would use to achieve them, and the links he had with global terror.

No wise and responsible political leadership, in such critical conditions, would tarry its crucial decisions, until the interminable debates of the experts, as to whether, in the present case, the aluminium tubes were for uranium enrichment or for rocket construction,- and if they were to be used for rockets, the latter could be carrying WMD - had reached majority or unanimous agreement as to their use. ( Even such an agreement could never be foolproof and could only be tested in the real conditions to which it would be applicable. Moreover, as experts in intelligence can make mistakes in their appraisals, so too experts in other fields are not immune from making mistakes.)

This is the resounding truth why Bush, Blair, and Howard, decided to go to war in Iraq. And the latter is not only pivotal to the future defeat of global terror ( if one is serious in defeating global terror, one also has to fight its state sponsors. It is a war on two fronts. ), but also, in its strategic goal to prevent the "apocalyptic" coupling of terror and rogue states.

The ominous and deadly challenge of fanatic terrorism\ demands leaders of Gulliverian stature, not Lilliputians. The imposing lesson of history is, that in hard times, such as our own, it is the "hard men" that prevail. The flaccid and indecisive leaders, who wait for the will-o'-the-wisp of perfect intelligence and information, before they commit themselves to decisive action, are cast aside and thrown among the debris of history.

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