Obama Diminished the Trust of his Allies and Increased the Confidence of his Enemies

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Barack Obama has been elected as president of the most powerful nation in the world that since the end of the Second World War has been the bulwark of freedom against its infernal enemies, i.e., the former Soviet Union and its allies. In the twentieth-first century Western civilization is threatened by a new implacable and irreconcilable enemy, fanatical Islam; and the USA is the only nation in the world that can defeat this foe. But president Obama has already failed both tests of “knowing thy enemy,” and as a sagacious strong respectful leader. He has weakened America both before the eyes of its friends and allies and, most dangerously, its enemies.

The nations of Eastern Europe are rapidly losing their trust toward the US that the latter will protect and defend their interests and security, since Obama’s withdrawal of the missile defence shield from Poland and Czechoslovakia and his concessions to the Russians. And the enemies of America, such as Iran and its multiple terrorist proxies are heartened and have increased their confidence that in Obama they have before them a giant eunuch who is incapable and unwilling to use force, even as a last resort, against them. Since Obama has replaced America’s superpower ‘Jupiterian’ bolt diplomacy with olive branches toward them.

The “dangerous scenarios,” of which you are concerned with, are already in their incubatory stage: a nuclear armed Iran that would start a proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region with all the great dangers that would issue from such proliferation, especially in a region that is replete with the votaries of fanatical Islam. Thus to your question what kind of advice one would give to Obama in such an impending crisis, it would be the most heavily ‘armed advice’ that would fall on his shoulders. But Obama has neither the spine nor the balls to carry such heavy advice on his morally rickety frame, and least of all bring it to fruition as a last resort. Thus any strong advice given to a congenitally weak president would be a barren exercise.

Building Mosque on Ground Zero an Insult to Majority of Americans

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Everyone can observe, other than the mentally disengaged, how intellectually and politically insecure Clemons is with his original Obama “gets it right” position in regard to the building of the Mosque on Ground Zero when he continues serially to recruit cognitively nondescript people, like Glassman, and even Arab American Muslims, in support of the ‘maiden’ stupid statement of Obama.

In the context when even Muslims behind the project have second thoughts about its location and are considering its withdrawal, as reported in the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Clemons’s dogged persistence to find supporters for this ‘crescent’ laden white elephant clearly emphasizes how mentally and politically disengaged Clemons is from reality.

To Clemons, sadly and tragically, 70% of Americans, who oppose the building of the mosque, are a lynching “mob.”

American Liberal Annoyed by Australian 'Snow Flakes' Falling on his Head

American says,

I have no idea about the substance and accuracy of the report itself. But I'm not sure I understand how the release of this news would be supposed to put a better face on the war. Doesn't the story instead create the impression that the war is a classic imperialist war, with US over in Afghanistan prospecting for mineral riches, when they are supposed to be hunting down terrorist "safe havens"?

Australian says

Kervick like an eager bambino susceptible to all thrilling excitements seen his hobbyhorse “classic imperialism” on the rugged mountains of Afghanistan rushes to ride it for a playful trot.


American says,

Kotzabasis, you didn't read my comment very carefully.

I will elaborate on the point I was making. Since the James Risen story was published, there has been a flurry of comment in response to the story. Much of that comment is skeptical about the timing and purpose of the release of information on which the story is based. The common theme of these sceptical comments is that this release is somehow designed to make the war in Afghanistan look better or more justified.

The problem with this line of sceptical argument is that the Risen report about minerals in Afghanistan, whether accurate or inaccurate, whether overblown or proportional, whether suspiciously timed or not, does nothing at all to make the war look any better. That's because the war is supposed by its defenders to be justified as an essential fight against dangerous jihadist terrorists, Taliban extremists and their enclaves in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Any story line that clouds that message actually *undermines* the justifications for the war offered by the administration and its supporters. Surely the people who are telling us that we need to be in Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda and to combat the evil oppression of Taliban-style Islamic government do not want us thinking that the war is really driven by greed.

So my implicit point was not that the war actually *is* an imperialist war for booty, but rather that if there is any deliberate timing to the release of this information about the discovery of mineral riches in Afghanistan, then a better explanation for that release is that it is designed to *undermine* support for the war by making it look like the US's interest in fighting it is driven by a desire to exploit and profit from Afghanistan's mineral wealth.

On a separate point, your comments on this blog are about 95% concerned with the other commenters on the blog, and only about 5% concerned with the actual events and issues you claim. I think you should try harder to keep your personal characterizations to yourself and focus on issues.


Australian says,

Only for phantasmagorical ideologues of the Left could the war be anything other, post 9/11, than a war against “dangerous jihadist terrorists.” To imagine now with this ‘serendipitous’ discovery of minerals, if it’s true, that this could “undermine” the “support” and justification of the war could only be imagined by someone with a ‘cloudy’ mind., since only such a mind would come to the conclusion that this was just another “classic imperialist” venture.

The reason why I sometimes refuse to deal with the content of the commentators, including some of your own, is that they are a banal regurgitation of the intellectually and politically bankrupt dogmas of the pathological Left. And this engenders in me a frolicsome mood to deride directly the amateurish violinist who pretends to give a classical performance (Read political analysis) with discordant sounds and intellectually cacophonous notes. Now you know the secret about my playful mood sans ‘French letter’.

American says,

Kotz, you really are an ass. You do more than I ever could, by virtue of your own demeanor, to discredit everything you say. So I will have nothing more to do with you, and will let your disordered personality speak for itself. Feel free to fire at will with the insults.


Australian says,


My dear Kervick, TO EACH HIS OWN. And your raising the white flag against my arguments, in your refusal to engage me, speaks volumes about your character and intellectual weight.

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



The following was written just prior to Obama's election as president and is republished here hoping the readers of Planetary...will find it to be of some interest.

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 of 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

Et Tu Brute Might Be the Fate of the Obamanesque Caesar

By Con George-Kotzabasis


The November 2 mid-term elections have swiftly brought to the ears of the American Caesar of socialistic policies the ominous warning of the soothsayer, “Beware the Ides of March.” Not only within a short span of time a large part of the electorate have rejected the big government and interventionist policies of the pretender, who was cast as an Olympian President by the liberal prattling crowd of the east and west coasts and who himself ‘hubristicaly’ transformed his “community organiser” status , covered under ivy leaves, into the Olympian gods of Poseidon and Asclepius who would stop the rise of the oceans and heal the planet, but also a sizeable part of his own party and especially some of its leaders who have sat and supped on his ‘political banquets’ and have tasted the bitterness of his failure as president, are presently detaching themselves from his discredited presidency and are considering not to support his nomination as president in 2012. A recent poll has shown that among Democrats 47 per cent believed he should be challenged in his renomination.

As the misguided and unloved policies of Obama, such as the massive restructuring of health-care, cap-and-trade, and his 800 billion-plus stimulus that failed to reduce unemployment, have given rise to the hurricane winds that will continue to threaten the further uprooting and dislodging of many Democrats from their positions of power as well as the loss of the presidency in 2012. Thus under this threat it might be the ‘conspiracy’ of his own colleagues and friends, the Democrats, that may lead to his political assassination and bring to Obama’s lips in his last breathing, the words “et tu Brute.”

Multiculturalism: How a Pet Idea Became a Dinosaur

The following paper was first written and published in the IPA Review (Institute of Public Affairs) in 1996, Vol. 49/2. It's republished here as Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel applied to Multiculturalism the last rites to its demise: According to the Chancellor, Multiculturalism is kaput. "The approach to multiculturalism to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other has failed, utterly failed."



By Con George-Kotzabasis

Once upon a time an amateurish “astrologer” by the name Al Grasby, who happened also to be Minister of Immigration, discovered accidentally, in the Australian firmament of immigration a new star:the Star of Multiculturalism. Al was a man who had a lot of “pets”, “lay” ideas, but this one was going to be a whopper. Within a decade, it would become for wave upon wave of migrants who landed and settled in this country, their lodestar. It would provide guidance and solace for the travails they would endure in the initial stages of settlement, as well as give the celestial energy by which they would cultivate their cultures in their new homeland.

No one had suspected that this discovery of our amateur astrologer was from its beginnings a Fata Morgana and that before the end of the second decade of its chequered existence it would be a falling star. The idea that lay behind the discovery was magnanimous and filled to the brim with the ideals of humanity and the spirit of tolerance. But, like all ideas with such pe(t)digree it was impregnated with the seeds of its own destruction at its conception. This, however, was unbeknown even to its eminent founding fathers, who had spent, with such profligacy, prodigious amounts of corporeal and spiritual energy to give it wings. And it must have been a dolorous and painful experience for them to see that all that their huge efforts had led to was the tragedy of Icarus. But it would not be the first time in history that frivolity in the form of a pet idea would have had such an ending.

It would be stating the obvious to describe Australia as a country whose people are of an exotic provenance. However, to transform a descriptive term into a socio-cultural value, with which migrants would nurture and uphold their cultures in this country for the long duration, as well as transmit them to their progeny, would be an exercise in intellectual alchemy. To have believed that Australia, uniquely, could become a multicultural society was quixotic.

According to its founders, multiculturalism would not only encourage the cultivation and secure the continuation of this rich diversity of cultures, but it would also contribute to the creation of a uniquely tolerant society. In both of these two admirable aims, multiculturalism would be found to be wanting. The achievement of these grandiose aims was based on the premise that Australia somehow was chosen, by some sort of divine predestination, to break itself from the vise of history.

Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, one of the intellectual founders of multiculturalism, who since has abandoned it, asks the historically germane question regarding the concept of “Many Cultures One Australia”, as proposed by the Centenary of Federation Advisory Committee for the year 2000:“…can it represent a victory over the divisive atavism which has cursed the human experience for so long?” In other words, was it ever conceptually plausible that multiculturalism, or any of its variations, would exorcise this “curse” of history and function as equal before the cascading force of the culture of modern capitalism?

No lesser figure than Karl Marx, whom some of the protagonists of multiculturalism would be proud to consider as their mentor, predicted that the elemental force of capitalism and its culture would sweep away, on a vast scale, the dead weight of traditions and cultures that riveted their peoples to the obfuscation, ignorance, and bigotry of a hoary past. How could anyone be oblivious of the fact that the Darwinian natural selection process of the biological world also applies, with some modifications, in the cultural world, by means very often, of a ruthless competition of cultures, whose crown of victory ineluctably passes to the head of the stronger culture and to the one that is most suitable to the needs and aspirations of people living in a particular society? How could anyone with a modicum of knowledge of human history, disregard the “sanguine” fact that most wars were, whatever their other causes, at the same time wars of different cultures and religious beliefs? Even when there happened to be wars of the same culture, it was a conflict between different interpretation of beliefs, as the Thirty Year War between Protestants and Catholics in the seventeenth century illustrated. In view of the above, one must have had the “courage” of ignorance, to have considered and proposed the possibility of a multicultural Australia.

As to its laudatory goals of tolerance between different cultures and their flourishing within the strongly-established mainstream of Anglo-Saxon culture, to what extent are these goals feasible? There is no doubt that Australia has an exemplary record in its tolerance of different cultures. The strong sense of egalitarianism introduced into Australia by the early colonists, an array of judicious governmental and educational policies, and the experience of an expanding tourism in and out of Australia have combined to imbue Australians, despite some pockets of bigoted obscurantism, with a strong sense of respect and acceptance of foreign cultures.


ETHNIC CONFLICTS WITHIN AUSTRALIA


But whilst the host culture can be genial and tolerant, one cannot say the same for the “metic” cultures. The tolerance of cultures, like the characters of persons, are tested and adjudged in critical and difficult circumstances. Conflicts and historical hatreds between Arabs and Jews, between Greeks and Serbo-Macedonians, between Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats, between Turks and Kurds, have been transplanted into this country. The extent to which these conflicts can mobilize these hostile communities against each other and induce them to lobby governments in support of their countries, furnishes a striking example that multiculturalism and its ideals are a mirage.

What is more disturbing, however, is that governments, for electoral reasons, can become hostages to the “blackmailing” demands of certain ethnic communities, who have the advantage of numbers. Hence, governments in Australia can become unofficial allies of certain countries which are embroiled in hostilities, or even in war, through the pressure resident communities can exercise upon them. The reality, therefore, is that leading organizations of ethnic communities, whose countries back home are engaged in hostilities or war, can become surrogate diplomatic corps, negotiating and acting on behalf of the interests of their own countries with Australian governments.

It’s obvious therefore, that a nation under the umbrella of a multicultural society cannot be protected from the thunderbolts cast by the atavistic wrath that some nations have against each other. The idea of a multicultural society, from the day of its inception, was child’s play, building castles in the sand. It was an idea that should be stillborn. But, due to a mushrooming crop of ethnic communities and councils along with their leaders’ adeptness to coax and seduce politicians and governments, who felt that in return for their political favours they would be rewarded with the ethnic vote, it continued to flourish. Thus it was that ethnic community leaders were able to ensconce themselves within the precincts of political power. As a result of governments’ willingness, especially that of Labour, to adopt and implement many of the schemes of the supporters of multiculturalism, a swarm of drones and mediocrities, both from the ethnic and Anglo-Saxon communities, invaded and captured ministerial and departmental positions, which were cast as the incubators from which would rise the policies of multiculturalism.

The Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA), in the Prime Minister’s office under the Hawke government, was the hatchery par excellence. Thus came into existence the teeming breed of the “professional ethnic”. To solidify the hold they had upon governments, they needed to have the “august” voices of academia speaking in favour of their multicultural proposals. And for those multiculturalists who entered the universities and upon whom some benign force allotted them professorial chairs, Plato’s proviso for his academia that no person without knowledge of mathematics should enter here, did not apply. It was not surprising, therefore, that nothing profound emerged from those noisy, creaking wobbly chairs. Moreover, few academics– with some exceptions, like the courageous professor Blainey–would dare to “pluck the wings” off this flock of intellectual usurpers. Even today, despite the abandonment of the concept of multiculturalism by such eminent persons as professor Zubrzycki and Justice Gobbo, cackles about multiculturalism still can be heard in, and out of, the rooms of academia.


THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF MULTICULTURAL


The Gordian knot of multiculturalism was tied by its four principles, as outlined by the Australian Council of Population and Ethnic Affairs: “Essential for a successful multicultural society were social cohesion; respect for cultural identity and awareness of Australian’s cultural diversity; equal opportunity and access for all Australians; and equal responsibility for, commitment to, and participation in Australian Society.” The achievement of each of these principles however, depends on the acceptance of the social, economic, political, and philosophical values of Australian society, i.e. the cultural values of an advanced technological democratic society. But many of the cultures of our ethnically diverse population do not espouse these values. Therefore, if those four basic principles were to be realized, these cultures would have to debunk a great chunk of their own values and adopt the values of Australian society. Ironically, the realization of these four basic principles would not lead to a multicultural society, but to a society of one dominant culture, which fits the requirements of a modern society, with moderate variations, however, in its original cultural milieu. As through a syncretic process, the home grown culture will absorb the best that other cultures have to offer, but like a river with many currents, it will be the mainstream, the stronger current that will determine the meandering course of its direction. It’s certainly correct to believe that the diversity of cultures enriches the experience and enlightens the minds of people. But it’s erroneous to believe that you can build a society or a nation on a medley of cultures.

Al Grasby’s pet idea was destined to have a transitory, but nonetheless, a grotesque existence, for it was written in its star that it would share the fate of the dinosaur.


The article was first written and published in the IPA Review (Institute Of Public Affairs) Vol. 49/2 1996

Limits of Imagination Transformed into Limits of Power

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Steve Clemons and Ben Katcher are using the ‘shamanistic’ art, the art of a conjurer, to turn the limits of imagination into “the limits of American power.” The “aborted attempt” of the Obama administration to “persuade the Israelis to enact a “settlement freeze”, has nothing to do with US power limits but with lack of imagination and political insight on the part of Obama and the State Department not to foresee the political implausibility of trying to impose such a doltish demand on the Netanyahu government. It’s a dismal failure of policy and not a limit of American power as Clemons and Levy in their conjurers’ role aver.

As for Daniel Levy’s ”asymmetries of power,” WigWag’s post is instructive and unassailable in its historical logic. All defeated nations in wars were due to asymmetries of power.

The Finger of Obama Forced to “Press the High-Fear-Button”

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Ben Katcher is the court jester of The Washington Note (TWN) followed by a long thread of other TWN jesters, from Norheim to Carrol. While all the late, and belated, actions of Obama emanate from an unabated fear which forces him to “press the high-fear-button,” closing his embassy in Yemen out of fear of a terrorist attack, deploying U.S. Special Forces in the country fearing that the latter would become a training terrorist base that would threaten the Western world, according to the latest statement of his Secretary of State, and the new rules prompted by the fear of the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack that would involve 14 nations undergoing extra screening in airports, Katcher claims, that Obama refuses to “use fear for his personal political advantage,” as if by protecting--even if Obama doesn’t take these harsh measures out of personal belief but out of political expediency-- like Bush, America from the real fear of a terrorist attack, would not also be for Obama’s personal political advantage.

Í'm republishing this article hoping the readers of this blog will find it to be of some interest.

THE FEAR GAME OUR LATEST SENSATION


Ross Gittins - The Age November 16 2005


A reply: Con George-Kotzabasis


Ross Gittins with his piece in The Age has reached the dismal lows of his training as an economist. He digs, typically of his profession, and brings up statistics to make his “game” against the fear of terror. Like as if, the actions of fanatic terror could be gauged and explained by statistics.


He must have been temporarily impaired by a bout of aphasia when he wrote his article. Statistics are good in studying and comparing the normal and ordinary conduct of human or animal behavior, not the abnormal skewed behavior of either of the latter. Millenarian fanatic terror and the fear it produces upon its victims, does not fall under the category of normal behavior. Nor is it a “passing” sensation, as he claims. It’s an everlasting feeling that will not go away until its threat is considerably diminished, if not eradicated.


Moreover, one cannot quantify - as apparently Gittins attempts to do - the extent and volume of the threat by any scientific means, and least of all by statistics. The extent of the danger of global terror can only be measured by students of history who have distilled their knowledge from the sublime pages of Herodotus, the great Edward Gibbon, and Samuel Huntington, not to mention others for the lack of space, and by the power of imagination, attributes that are obviously missing from Gittins. Doesn’t he perceive or realize, that the present terrorist “mole-hill” threat could give birth to a mountain full of “mushrooms”? Doesn’t he perceive the exponential increase in casualties by a possible nuclear attack, once these zealots possessed nuclear weapons, which they would use with glee against the decadent West? Doesn’t he realize, that this is an existential struggle for Western civilization? And finally, does he seriously believe, that the Bush administration went to war, with all the uncertainties wars are replete with, and the great loss of lives and resources, for the purpose of saving a lesser number of American lives than those falling off from a ladder?


In the annals of Australian journalism, Ross Gittins’article will be forever pilloried for its analytical flippancy and intellectual banality.

Engineers of New Versions of Socialism Never Die


By Con George-Kotzabasis

Some have noticed, that whenever Clemons posts a ‘provocative’ post such as the present one “Grotesque Nationalism” presumably for the purpose of bringing into port the spiritually and cognitively leaking armada of anti-America Americans and anti-free marketeers, who are too scared and cowardly, and spiritually and intellectually too enfeebled, to be motivated to sail into the Schumpeterian heavy seas of “creative destruction,” and makes a bungle of an apparently serious post he stands to be corrected. And as ever with such posts it’s the resourceful, doughty, and politically and historically savvy American Jewess, Nadine, who corrects him, and so many others, like Dan Kervick, who in another post being intellectually disabled to give a serious answer to Nadine’s unassailable facts that Israel is engaged in defensive wars and not in expansive wars as Kervick claims, and whom Nadine accuses of being a “disgrace” to Western civilization. And to this accusation Kervick deploys a queasy defence by saying that for eighteen years he taught the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Leibniz, Hume, and Russel, as if such philosophic pedigree absolves him from his incompetence to answer cogently Nadine’s argument.


Why Clemons is in need to fall back from the total failure of “high octane socialism” to even the weakest low octane version of socialism in the face of a brilliant constellation of economists, such as Amartya Sen of Britain, who cogently argue that it was capitalism, with all its shortcomings that Adam Smith himself noted, in the last hundred years that has substantially decreased relative poverty and has incrementally increased the standard of living of the masses. In any version socialism has proven to be an irreversibly bankrupt policy.

McChrystal Could not Fight War with Obama's Contradictory Strategy

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Drew, you seem to place formality above entelechy, the vital element of war. Throughout history an ethic, no matter how laudable and worthy, in critical circumstances is degraded to a lower status if it is not made totally inutile. Winning the war is the primal goal and that can only be achieved by professionals, not by ‘drone’ like Bidens. You also seem to forget, that it was precisely this unconditional devotion to “conditional civilian control” that lost the war in Vietnam. My position is, so you won’t misunderstand me, certainly a general has to abide the commands of the executive branch, but no general worth his salt who has the ultimate responsibility of deploying his troops to win a war, a responsibility that has been given to him by his Commander-in-Chief, is obliged to execute commands that are contradictory in winning the war without expressing his deep concerns critically about the incongruence of the war plan that was designed by the Executive. One cannot increase the Surge by thirty thousand more troops and at the same time announce a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in two years time. This is the fundamental contradiction of Obama’s doltish strategy in Afghanistan. No one but a modern Tiresias could predict that the war against the Taliban would be won in two years or that the Karzai forces would be able to handle the insurgency by their own steam. Obama set the scene for a strategy that for the next two years American blood and valuable resources would be spend not for the goal of victory, but for the purpose of a withdrawal. This is the quintessence of McChrystal’s criticism of the Obama administration although he did not explicitly express it in these words.


Moreover, McChrystal could no more “undermine the executive branch” that was already undermined by itself. Also your accusation of McChrystal of being incompetent and of losing the respect of his troops by commanding them to patrol without cartridges in their guns, except maybe in some rare circumstances, is incredulous and is closer to phantasy than reality. McChrystal and Petraeus were the sagacious heroic victors of the war in Iraq. That one of the architects of this unprecedented victory, that even the wise Kissinger considered it to be unattainable, would lose the respect of his soldiers is pure phantasy. Further, that a most competent commander of the elite Special Forces, a “killing machine,” would put his soldiers at risk is beyond belief. I am curious to know the evidence from which you deduced this transformation of a deadly ‘seal’, who all his life has been trained for the tasks of the infernal world, into an unarmed Gandhian votary.

No More Free Suntans in Sunny Greece


By Con George-Kotzabasis

As Drew correctly states none of the classical liberal economists, Smith, Mises, Hayek, and I would add in this brilliant constellation Mill, Bawerk, and Schumpeter, ever argued that the free market was perfect and “market failure” was inconceivable. On the contrary they argued that the three cardinal principles of the free market were imperfect knowledge, uncertainty, and risk. How could any rational and economically literate person accuse the classical liberal economists of contending that the free market were free from market failure, when their whole argument was premised on the above three principles? Moreover, they did argue, that market failure could be cured mainly by the ‘elixir’ of the free market, and not by unqualified and ubiquitous government intervention.


It is the critics of the free market that engendered the ‘straw man’ of the perfect market so they could knock it down easily without any effort of critical thinking, which of course they lacked, and replace it with the socialist planning nostrums or, a la Kervick, with the hybrid panacea of the “mixed economy,” whose avatar was and is modern Europe, and which presently is at the threshold of economic bankruptcy. The sun is still shining in sunny Greece, but there are no more free suntans for its denizens.

Hamas’ Rockets are No “Peashooters”

By Con George-Kotzabasis reply to:
Watching Death Day and Night So Close By...
By Steve Clemons Washington Note

All those who continue to approach this tragic conflict, which emanates from an array of past soft failed policies implemented by the U.S., the EU, and their Middle East allies, with olive branches in their hands and a new “credible peace negotiation process” wishfully hoping that once they lay this conflict on their Procrustean bed of peace they will put this conflict to sleep for ever after, are like “certain octogenarians who hurl themselves at women to whom they are no longer capable of doing any serious danger”, to quote Marcel Proust.

Clemons who is an expert fisherman who finds and fishes aggressors from the depths of the ocean has found the aggressor of Gaza being Ehud Barak the Defense Minister of Israel who, according to Clemons, is “itching to manage a war.” So to Clemons the threat to more than half a million Israelis who live and work in the proximate range of Quassam rockets is merely an Israeli ‘itch’.

Another one on TWN, not an octogenarian but in one’s robust youthful prime, sails through the Clashing Rocks of the Bosporus without his dove and the help of Orpheus’s music and without his Medea, unlike Jason, on erroneous routes in search of the Golden Fleece of peace in the Middle East. Dan Kervick, in his well-crafted narrative but badly-crafted strategic thinking, argues that it’s an error to think that by killing few bad actors and destroying their organizations one could resolve the problem, as those who have been killed will be replaced by other “Hamases”.

On this issue, he is unwilling--for understandable reasons who loathes to concede, that despite the heavy price, Iraq has been a tremendous success of the Bush-Cheney administration-- to learn the lessons of the Surge in Iraq and the irrefutable evidence as presented by Bob Woodward in his new book, that it was the clandestine operations of Special Forces that killed al-Qaeda and al-Sadrist operatives in Iraq that has brought the country on the threshold of democracy. Where are the signs that those leaders of the insurgency in Iraq that have been killed are to be replaced by others? Haven’t they who escaped the deadly American grip all run to Afghanistan and Pakistan? Providing the Iraq government and its Western allies are vigilant and are prepared to take severe measures at the first signs of an al-Qaeda or al-Sadrist resurgence in the country there will be no renascence of a new insurgency in Iraq.

As for Kervick’s smart Alec comment that Israel is shooting at Palestinian “pea-shooters”, one can only say that he makes a farce out of a great danger. Hamas acquired dozens of Iranian-made Fazr-3 missiles that could reach nuclear warheads at Dimona. Are these “pea-shooters”?
More seriously, Brzezinski says that the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed to rise to a level of strategic, forward-looking maturity to solve this problem and therefore the burden must fall on others such as the US and Europe and their Arab allies. I would agree with this proposition but with one important rider. The burden must be extended beyond its diplomatic purview. They must put troops on the ground. They must place an international garrison of troops in areas of Palestine where recalcitrant elements of Hamas and other terrorist organizations operate and continue to launch their rockets into Israel not as peace-keepers but as peace-enforcers, with the mandate that this international garrison will operate as an occupying power with the use of its military armaments that are related to such a status against Palestinian militants.

This is the hard way to peace and to the establishment of a Palestinian state and not in the misguided search for diplomatic Golden Fleeces of Peace.

Hic Rhodus hic Salta

To Link Israel Palestine Conflict as the Cause of Militant Islam is to Fall Victim to Islamist Propaganda

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Reply to: Israel/Palestine and Iran: Linkage Should be Hard Wired by Obama Team
By Steve Clemons The Washington Note August 07, 2010

Clemons’s piece is political metaphysics at its best. “Brilliant leadership,” “strategic leaps,” “visionary re-crafting,” “mystique,” all ripe fruits ready to fall from the tree of abstractness. No definition of their meaning in concrete terms, no concrete description of the characteristics of these “strategic leaps,” which he mentions half a dozen times, and how they are going to be affected. In short, fire crackers thrown over the tumultuous geopolitical terrain of the Middle East and beyond.

Further, to link the Israel/Palestine conflict as pivotal to the issues of the Middle East and of the Arab world, is to link it to Clemons’s simulacra and not to the real cause of Islamist radicalism that will remain fanatically athirst for its eschatological goals even in the aftermath of a resolution of the I/P bellicosity. Clemons’s proposal that this erroneous idea of the “linkage,” that apparently could even resolve the impasse with Iran, “should be hard wired” to the Obama team, makes him a fall guy to Islamist propaganda. And the seriousness of Clemons’s dissertation finishes with the fall of the curtain on a vaudevillian act: Does he seriously believe that if Obama possessed “strategic skills” he would not have them exhibited and used them by now?

Churchillian Leadership in our Times

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Jeffrey Sachs, the famous American economist who after the collapse of the Soviet Union put the latter on the capitalist track, is of course correct to pin point the non-commissions and omissions of political leadership. But leadership of Churchillian stature does not arise from collectivities such as the UN and the World Bank, but from the ‘soloist’ reflections, sagacity, resolution, and guidance of individual statesmen.

In the present world, and most dangerous, scenario, what is missing is the vocation of politics being in the hands of virtuoso politicians imbued with the Nietzschean ethos of the “will to power” determining the affairs of mankind. And parallel to the latter, is the necessary ‘euthanasia’ of the populist wimpish politicians, such as Barack Obama, and Kevin Rudd.

All Favor the Common Good the question is how it Comes About

Posted by Dan Kervick, Jul 31 2010, 2:08AM - Link

I'm sorry, Kotzabasis. But your abstemious interpretation of the permissible pursuit of the common good as something that can only be the emergent result of individual action in a laissez faire economy is an anachronistic projection of latter-day libertarian values onto the much more nuanced views of the founders of the United States, many of whom were quite eager to build their new nation through energetic government, and with a far-sighted concern for the public good and national interest.

You seem not to understand the traditions of classical republicanism, civic humanism and the contractarian theories of government that formed the wellspring of American political thought. Governments are instituted to promote positive values and pursue the general welfare, not just to protect individual liberties and establish a system of "thou shalt nots".
Jefferson supported mandatory public education; he authorized the Cumberland rd. John Adams established a system of socialized medicine for seamen...

Nadine says,

BTW, I think you misunderstand kotz (often easy to do). He is not arguing that the government should have no part in building infrastructure. He says that proper government function is to safeguard individual property and liberty and trade. As long as you keep the principle in mind, you can certainly debate about what sort of infrastructure is proper to be left to government. But there should be a due process for that debate; government must be checked from just deciding and grabbing for itself without a check and balance. That's what Madison was worried about, government propensity to take more and more power to itself. The Constitutional framework was intended to be that check; but this has been steadily hollowed out and vitiated by 100 years of progressive legal thinking.

Posted by kotzabasis, Jul 31 2010, 7:43AM - Link

Nadine, thanks for clarifying my position.
Kervick

I am not suggesting the disutility or euthanasia of government as the latter is a necessary and vital institution in the affairs of its people. I am only saying that it is not its business to enact the common good as the latter spontaneously rises from the rational actions of people in their every day working affairs in the context of an unhampered free market, without however being free from some necessary at times regulation. It goes without saying that government must take initiatives both internal and external for the general welfare of the country such as education, building roads and hospitals etc and ensuring that the vital interests of the nation are protected from external or internal enemies. But all these initiatives of government which contribute to the enhancement of the common weal merely consummate the wishes of its constituents, the government does not impose them upon the latter by legislation. In democracies no government can ever succeed in implementing its policies unless these policies have some resonance among its constituents and its opinion makers, the fourth estate.

Only in certain critical circumstances, such as war, statesmen, with that unique Nietzschean combination of intellect, moral clarity, and fortitude, can go against the stream, but by their nature they are accountable neither to men nor God but to History, although, like Winston Churchill, they can still be vulnerable to the vagaries of a volatile electorate.

Carrots 'Debased Currency' in Diplomacy with Iran

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Reply to: Remembering Our Goals In Iran

By Andrew Lebovich The Washington Note May 25, 2010

One can trace a masochistic pleasure in Andrew Lebovich. He often has a craving to replace facts with fictional occurrences to his detriment, like in this case “...breakthroughs with hostile countries often occur not as a result of threats or harsh measures alone...” Present then a factual example where this has occurred, as Nadine asks.

Professor Kupchan’s proposal is a ludicrous absurdity. In this moonshine diplomacy with Iran he will be asking the latter to replace its libido dominandi to be the major power of the region and of the Muslim world with carrots, i.e., of “curbing the drug trade ...which flows into Iran” and with a “new security architecture in the Persian Gulf.” Is it conceivable to him that while Iran is risking even the great possibility of being bombed either by Israel or the U.S. in its determined pursuit to acquire nuclear weapons under whose carapace will render it supremacy in the region, it will negate this strategic goal by accepting Kupchan’s carrots?

Hardline Approach to Israel Will Harm U.S. Strategic Interests

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Those who recommend, like Dan Kervick, a reduction of aid to Israel and an open reference to its nuclear weapons by the U.S., because of an errant and arrant announcement of the Ramat Shlomo construction plans by a subordinate Israeli authority, are political and strategic dilettantes and should abstain from delving with the complex and dangerous issues of the Middle East that are beyond their understanding.

America at this moment is losing blood and valuable resources fighting a determined and dangerous enemy, which indirectly includes Iran, having only one steadfast and unflinching ally in this fight, the state of Israel. It would be unprecedented in the annals of war that a country that was involved in war would chastise its major ally in the hope that such chastisement would appease its implacable enemies. Such recommendation should be rejected tout court for its strategic ignorance and stunning dim-wittedness. As the outcome of such proposition would be to intensify and further increase the demands of the Palestinians against the Israelis, and hence push the negotiations and peace process further away and with the great danger of turning it into a war process between the Palestinians and Israelis. And the second part of the proposition, that the U.S. should bring up the state of Israel’s nuclear weapons, and to do so in the context of the Iranian ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, will injudiciously provide, if it was adopted by the Administration, an additional excuse to the Iranians and enhance the determination of the Mullahcratic regime to acquire its nuclear arsenal. Thus the Obama administration will be totally defeated in two of its major strategic goals, i.e., to clinch a deal with the Palestinians and Israelis, and to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

With such friends as Clemons and Kervick, why would Obama need to have enemies?

Fanatics are Deaf to the Dictates of Reason

By Con George-Kotzabasis

I don’t know if Tamils were the first suicide bombers prior to the Palestinians—perhaps some other commentator in this thread could disabuse my ignorance-- but my comparison was between Christians and Muslims so your point is completely pointless.

As for American pilots being suicide-bombers in the Battle of Midway, one must really overstretch one’s imagination. You totally disregard the elementary fact that America had never had a self immolating or suicidal cult in its culture, as there is definitively a suicidal cult among Muslim fanatics. So your riposte is intellectually “post less” as it cannot find the address of reason.

Certainly, stating the obvious, Muslims are human, and even the fanatics among them. But the latter, like all fanatics of whatever religion or ideology, are unreasoning humans and therefore are deaf to the dictates of reason. So your appeal to them will be a complete futile and barren exercise by you. Lastly, Thomas Hardy’s poem, by which you thought would strengthen your argument, is totally misplaced as it applies to reasoning combatants

Romantics on Politics and War

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Just one example, was it “hate and anger’ that drove the war against the Nazi axis? To place all wars under the rubric of “hate and anger,” and to misinterpret Clausewitz like you do, is doltishly foolish. But in the end for leftists and centre left inclined like Steve Clemons, empirical reality is spurned by pure, noumenal politics. The heart stands in moral judgment over the intellect. Facts do not stand in cognitive judgment over romantic ideas.

American Liberal Annoyed by Australian 'Snow Flakes' Falling on his Head

American says,

I have no idea about the substance and accuracy of the report itself. But I'm not sure I understand how the release of this news would be supposed to put a better face on the war. Doesn't the story instead create the impression that the war is a classic imperialist war, with US over in Afghanistan prospecting for mineral riches, when they are supposed to be hunting down terrorist "safe havens"?

Australian says

Kervick like an eager bambino susceptible to all thrilling excitements seen his hobbyhorse “classic imperialism” on the rugged mountains of Afghanistan rushes to ride it for a playful trot.

American says,

Kotzabasis, you didn't read my comment very carefully.
I will elaborate on the point I was making. Since the James Risen story was published, there has been a flurry of comment in response to the story. Much of that comment is skeptical about the timing and purpose of the release of information on which the story is based. The common theme of these sceptical comments is that this release is somehow designed to make the war in Afghanistan look better or more justified.


The problem with this line of sceptical argument is that the Risen report about minerals in Afghanistan, whether accurate or inaccurate, whether overblown or proportional, whether suspiciously timed or not, does nothing at all to make the war look any better. That's because the war is supposed by its defenders to be justified as an essential fight against dangerous jihadist terrorists, Taliban extremists and their enclaves in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Any story line that clouds that message actually *undermines* the justifications for the war offered by the administration and its supporters. Surely the people who are telling us that we need to be in Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda and to combat the evil oppression of Taliban-style Islamic government do not want us thinking that the war is really driven by greed.
So my implicit point was not that the war actually *is* an imperialist war for booty, but rather that if there is any deliberate timing to the release of this information about the discovery of mineral riches in Afghanistan, then a better explanation for that release is that it is designed to *undermine* support for the war by making it look like the US's interest in fighting it is driven by a desire to exploit and profit from Afghanistan's mineral wealth.

On a separate point, your comments on this blog are about 95% concerned with the other commenters on the blog, and only about 5% concerned with the actual events and issues
you claim. I think you should try harder to keep your personal characterizations to yourself and focus on issues.

Australian says,

Only for phantasmagorical ideologues of the Left could the war be anything other, post 9/11, than a war against “dangerous jihadist terrorists.” To imagine now with this ‘serendipitous’ discovery of minerals, if it’s true, that this could “undermine” the “support” and justification of the war could only be imagined by someone with a ‘cloudy’ mind., since only such a mind would come to the conclusion that this was just another “classic imperialist” venture.

The reason why I sometimes refuse to deal with the content of the commentators, including some of your own, is that they are a banal regurgitation of the intellectually and politically bankrupt dogmas of the pathological Left. And this engenders in me a frolicsome mood to deride directly the amateurish violinist who pretends to give a classical performance (Read political analysis) with discordant sounds and intellectually cacophonous notes. Now you know the secret about my playful mood sans ‘French letter’.

American says,

Kotz, you really are an ass. You do more than I ever could, by virtue of your own demeanor, to discredit everything you say. So I will have nothing more to do with you, and will let your disordered personality speak for itself. Feel free to fire at will with the insults.

Australian says,


My Dear Kervick, TO EACH HIS OWN. And your raising the white flag against my arguments, in your refusal to engage me, speaks volumes about your character and intellectual weight.

Imperative Principle of Warfare

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Any truce between Hamas-Hezbollah and Israel serves one purpose only, its use for rearming the terrorist organizations and engaging Israel in the future from a stronger position. The vocation of a good strategist is to identify an irreconcilable deadly enemy that cannot be placated and relentlessly destroy him before he becomes stronger. The Israelis despite all their cleverness are as yet apparently unaware of this imperative principle of warfare.

Transform Hamas into Moderate Organization
Mockery of Serious Thinking

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A short reply to:

Hamas vs. the Fundamentalists

By Amjad Atallah TheWashington Note,
August 17, 2009

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

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

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

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

Reply to Two ‘Strategists’ of the Washington Note on the
Resolution of the Palestinian Israel Conflict

By Con George-Kotzabasis

My dear Steve,

You seem to be afflicted with an incurable cancerous growth in your continued rambling ‘cogitations’ of equating “the recklessness, immaturity and sheer stupidity of leadership on of all sides.” To perceive a political equivalence between a fanatic religiously motivated Palestinian leadership and a rational secular Israeli leadership is to cancel your own intelligence.

Dan Kervick’s rationale is ‘perfect’ from his side of the coin until he flips it on the other side and destroys his argument by his own suggestions. On the one hand he advocates a “strong prescriptive diplomacy from the OUTSIDE, along with clear and credible promises of sanctions and incentives,” (M.E.) and on the other, “the US could do more to support and publicize international investigations into war crimes stemming from the Gaza conflict, whichever side is accused of committing those crimes.” That is, while he is putting either Palestinians or Israelis against the wall and 'shooting them for war crimes', he still believes, after his provocative and ‘incendiary’ suggestion, that the “international community” will be able to force the two parties to the negotiating table that will “result in a durable peace.”

It’s obvious that Kervick is an impresario in vaudevillian strategic scenarios. And of course he will not reply to this post and address and bridge this huge gap in his argument as he lacks the moral and intellectual fortitude to do so.

P.S. In the first paragraph the quote is from Jim Lobe, but Steve himself is a strong believer in this political equivalence between the two parties as he argued recently in his posts.

Dan Kervick says,

Kotzabasis,

My view is that the imposition of an international final disposition plan will require mobilizing governments and their peoples to be prepared to impose firm sanctions on one or both sides, if either side fails to abide by the mandated terms of the plan.

This is challenging since the Arab world is full of apologists for Palestinian terrorism and gangsterism, and the American and European side is full of apologists for Israeli ethnic cleansing, brutality and collective punishment. But pressing the international legal case against violators on both sides will diminish their reputations. It will be harder for American supporters of Israel and Arab supporters of the Palestinians to cry "foul" over sanctions if some Israeli and Palestinian soldiers and leaders are on trial before international tribunals for their crimes.

If the global public case is more effectively built that these are *two* outlaw enterprises, that will give foreign governments the political cover they need to take a harder line and threaten sanctions. The case is actually quite easy to make. We just need the Israelis' and Palestinians' many global allies to stop running so much interference for them.

You should re-read my proposal, because I explicitly rejected an approach based on "getting the parties to the negotiating table". My view is that we are at the point where the international community needs to mandate a solution, and then impose it on the parties with carrots and sticks. There is no longer anything to negotiate. We all know the shape of the solution, and this long-running gang war is a dangerous and costly threat to peace and stability.

I am not sure what you are talking about when you shout about shooting people for their war crimes. I assume you are speaking figuratively. I am only contemplating jail sentences and the threat of jail sentences. The important thing is to start putting people on trial.

Kotzabasis says,

I was wrong in regard to his moral fortitude but not wrong in regard to his intellectual argument.

Obama is Responsible for his Failures not his Advisors

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Steve Clemons risen from his tub, after a nightmarish nap about the happenings of the White House, lit Diogenes lamp and stepped out in the full daylight searching desperately for the man, the “true” Obama, who would perform the “strategic leaps” and forswear the “incrementalist policy paths” of failure, when already under the brightness of the sun Obama has been shown to be a political novitiate sans political acumen, sans imagination, and a weak and timorous character to boot. To expect such a person, as Clemons does, to take bold steps and make strategic leaps, is to remarkably indulge in an exercise of Fata Morgana. The trouble for Obama does not lie in the method he is using to implement his policies, i.e., incrementalist or leaping, but in the wrongness of these policies in themselves. Already he has made some “strategic leaps” with his open door diplomacy toward Iran only to fall and break the backbone of this ‘olive branch’ diplomacy in the abyss of mullahcratic intransigence, as well as in his “strategic” attempt to change the ‘narrative’ of global terror by so called ‘smart policies’, ‘soft power’, and apologies to the aggrieved that would change the views and conduct of the fanatical enemies of America toward it. It is the combination of crafting wrong fallacious policies in domestic and foreign affairs primarily and the “knife throwing” ethos of Chicago politics, as embodied in Rahm Emanuel that is sinking the Obama presidency and not the strong grip his four advisors, namely, Axelrod, Emanuel, Jarret, and Gilps, have upon Obama. It is in his personal ‘portfolio’ that the problem is couched. His egregious lack of CEO skills, as another commentator above suggests, his lack of experience and character which are completely out of sync with the position of a chief executive with the stupendous demands in insight, imagination, decisiveness, and fortitude that Obama does not possess that make him a ditto Carteresque effete president and therefore politically dispensable.

Hence the problem cannot be resolved, as Clemons erroneously believes, by replacing some of his advisors but only by replacing Obama himself from the presidency by the end of the three long years ahead. But the liberals loath to admit where the solution lies as they will have to ‘lock’ themselves for their intellectual offense of electing Obama in a ‘sing-sing’ in a resounding choir of mea culpas. As I’ve said a year ago, more than half of America elected as president a lemon as a result of their pathological hate for The Bush-Cheney administration and by association the GPO. Now they are reaping the winds of that fateful sickly stupid decision. The lemon is in the process of being squeezed out, but the danger lies that by the end of this process America might be squeezed out of its own strength.

Senator Schumer’s Correctness in Criticizing Obama’s Doltish and Inconsistent Diplomacy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Would Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, and by implication Steve Clemons, expect Robert Gibbs to say that Barack Obama agrees “with what Senator Schumer said? It is astonishing to see Clemons diverting the issue of the total freeze of settlements, which Schumer correctly criticized as a grave error on the part of Obama contra Israel, to what Schumer’s stand was to Jesse Helms and to John Bolton “few years ago.”

Clemons is entitled to his opinions but he is not entitled to his facts. The facts are that the foolish imposition of the total freeze of settlements on the Netanyahu government by the Obama administration’s lack of foresight that it would be politically unrealizable for Israel and that it would evolve and become for the Palestinians, as it did, a rigid condition for their participation with any talks with Israel, was the major factor that derailed Obama’s engine of diplomacy from its track that would bring the two belligerents to the negotiating table. It was precisely this quintessentially wrong and injudicious policy of Obama that Senator Schumer rightly criticized as being the reason of the administration’s abysmal failure in the Middle East. Another fact is that Obama’s diplomacy is inconsistent, rewarding his enemies and penalizing his friends. While he claims that his diplomacy is indiscriminate and is based on soft and smart power coming on doves’ feet and extends his hand in a velvet glove to the enemies of America, he carries a bludgeon in his hand in his relations with his strongest and most loyal ally, in this case Israel.

Throughout history there has never been a case when a nation engaged in war with implacable enemies would chastise and alienate its most steadfast and reliable ally for the purpose to placate its enemies. Obama will go down in history as the only leader who not only doltishly and doggedly opened the door of diplomacy to an enemy such as Iran which has been training in its own country members of the Taliban and supplying them with weapons--as well as its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah--to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, but who was also willing to sacrifice the vital interests of his most staunch ally against Islamist terror, Israel, on the altar of this spineless, strategically unprincipled, and totally fallible diplomacy.

The above emitted the two following responses:

Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 27 2010, 6:54AM - Link

Kotzabasis, WigWag seemed to be wondering a few days ago why those posts in which you make a serious, debatable point are ignored. But can there be any doubt why people habitually turn you off, when so many of your posts consist in cowardly, third-person personal characterizations of other contributors, lamely shouted out to no one in particular?



Posted by WigWag, Apr 27 2010, 9:45AM - Link

Actually why the interesting point Kotz made is never debated is rather plain. His point was an astute one, but as I am sure Kotz would be the first to admit, it was hardly an original one. Kotz was making precisely the same point Schumer was; that by offering to conduct their negotiations for them, the Obama Administration provides an incentive for the Palestinians not to negotiate at all. Kotz, Schumer and many other sage observers have also made the point that by making demands on Israel that Obama knew, or should have known, that it wouldn't comply with, it was Obama himself who was making his stated goal of getting negotiations started much more difficult.

Steve Clemons in his diatribe against Schumer never responded to this point and Dan Kervick hasn't either. Neither has any other serious commentator as far as I can tell.

It seems to me that the lack of response to the Schumer/Kotz allegation is evidence of the fact that the point is irrefutable.

If it's not, someone should give it a try.

Moonshine Political Romantics Runaway from Sunny Reality

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Because all three of you in your political and intellectual weakness and lack of depth are strengthening the dangerous fantasies of soft power as an antidote to the dangerous realities emanating from apocalyptic fanaticism that are hovering over the head of Western civilization and threatening it with ‘decapitation’. Of course such an existential threat you and Kervick, if not Clemons, would diagnose it as paranoia. But anyone who has studied history, without being a prisoner of it, might come to the conclusion that the art, the vocation of a statesman is to identify promptly an irreconcilable implacable enemy and destroy him before he becomes stronger.

Already the soft power fantasy as embodied in the new foreign policy of Obama is irreversibly failing. In the diplomatic overture to Iran, in resolving the Middle East conflict, and in clinching a concord cordial with Russia, of which Obama was so confident that he would have the support of the latter on the issue of Iran. Now we have Putin and his Foreign Minister Lavrov declaring that they would veto any resolution in the Security Council that would impose new sanctions on Iran.

Clemons, Kervick, and you, with your characteristic geopolitical and strategic myopia and romanticism could not foresee the failure of this new foreign policy of Obama based on ‘loving- holding hands’ and soft power that is unravelling now before everyone’s eyes.

Will Petraeus Accept Running as Obama's Vice-President?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

No intelligent eminent American would accept running as VP, least of all General Petraeus, with a by now politically bankrupt president as Obama, whose political stocks will be totally dwindled by 2012.

Steve Clemons speculation that Petraeus would accept such an offer by Obama if it was made stands in blatant contradiction to his own thinking. Only a few days ago he was flagging his much discussed post “...Sinking Obama Presidency” and presently he wants to place Petraeus on this sinking Titanic and the highly intelligent Petraeus would assent to take a ‘voyage’ that would lead to his own drowning. There is no “maybe” about such an event happening as Clemons muses and such a possibility would indeed be “crazy.”

Clemons has to make up his mind whether the Obama Presidency is sinking or floating.

The Value of Human Action Stems from its Goal

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Yes Nadine, Norheim is pretentiously “morally pure” as any person of inveterate weakness would be. You have noticed of course that whenever he finds himself deplete of cogent arguments he resorts to smart ‘Alecry’, as above. And you must have noticed that Kervick too, the disciple of David Hume is not immune from this intellectually debilitating disease, as his above laconic comment reveals. And his hypocrisy in his “quick question” is astounding, as if his own cascading passionate defence and suggestions of where America’s real interests lie could be supplanted by “...no other life.”

Passion and intellect are vital forces of human action and envelope one’s life. And their value depends on the aims and goals one expends them on. Nadine expends them passionately by defending the justified concerns of Israel of being deluged and destroyed by fanatical Islam and in protecting an outpost of Western civilization in the midst of resurgent barbarity from the malevolence of the prattling and historically ignorant classes that for a long time now attempt to turn the defender against aggression, Israel, into the aggressor. Norheim and Kervick, likewise, are passionately expending these vital forces for their own aims and goals. The difference being between Nadine and Norheim-Kervick that while the former is fighting injustice and malignity the latter are fighting for their manmade phantoms and for the cause of black magic. As their Archimedean point for ‘shifting the world’ is no other than the voodoo politics of a bygone ‘progressive’ demi-monde socialist era.

The above piece emitted the following responses


Posted by Paul Norheim, Mar 26 2010, 1:59PM - Link

Kotzabasis' intellectual mission at the Washington Note seems to be to weaken Dan K., Steve C. and myself. I think he's been working on this for a couple of years now. Steve creates a new post, the commenters argue about the topic, and in comes Kotz saying that we are weak and delusional.

By claiming that we are weak, not strong, Kotz somehow expects that we get weaker than we were before he made his claim. And by repeating this claim, by typing it again and again from somewhere in Australia, and posting it on a thread read thousands of miles from his home, he hopes that we slowly get weaker and weaker. Voodoo!

Although I can't speak on behalf of Dan and Steve, I would like to inform Kotzabasis and TWN's readers that it actually works. I have no idea how (there must be some black magic going on here), but immediately after reading Kotz's last post, I felt weaker! And I also felt Kotz's increased strength. Weird!

Repeat your claim once a week, Kotz, and I'll be completely paralyzed around June or July. And you yourself will gain an enormous intellectual strength and willpower; before Christmas, you'll become a veritable intellectual Superman in your fight against Islamo-fascism and the delusional left.

Voodoo!
Go for it, Kotz!

Posted by Dan Kervick, Mar 26 2010, 4:49PM - Link

Paul, it turns out that one only needs to change two proper names in a famous poem by William Blake to capture Kotzabasis's sentiment fairly clearly:______
Mock on, mock on, Kervick, Norheim:Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!You throw the sand against the wind,And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a Gem,Reflected in the beam divine;Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,But still in Israel’s paths they shine.
The Atoms of DemocritusAnd the Newton’s Particles of LightAre sands upon the Red Sea shore,Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

Kotzabasis says,

Kervick

It would be insolent to argue against the great poet William Blake. But you forget that the wind is 'contrarian' and can blow Aeolus like the other way and “blind” the mocked eye. That is why you cannot see “Israel’s tents” shinning “so bright.”

Nipple-fed Liberals Hate and Lambast General Petraeus

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s the “leg-breaking soldiers in fatigues,” to quote Dan Kervick who denigrates them, that are indefatigably and with great sacrifices defending liberal values and the democratic and entrepreneurial mores of Western societies from the mortal danger that rises from the barbaric atavism of fanatical Islam. But it is not surprising that the ideologues of the serially bankrupt left, like Kervick, would lambast great Americans, like General Petraeus, with their vitriolic sarcasm.

It’s obvious that Kervick as a hubristic member of the gang of General “Betraeus” is divinely apportioning from his Olympian abode his moral legless strictures upon great successful Americans who stand on, and leap with, strong legs. And it’s clear that Kervick with his intellectually and morally rickety feet cannot stand and ‘fight’ on the superb motto of Virgil, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito”. But what other could one expect from nipple-fed liberals?

The above emitted the following comments on The Washington Note

Posted by Dan Kervick, Mar 07 2010, 6:44AM – Link

“…defending liberal values and the democratic and entrepreneurial mores of Western societies from the mortal danger that rises from the barbaric atavism of fanatical Islam.”

Mortal danger … right. You might as well say that the English language faces a mortal danger from Portuguese. Your sense of proportion and connection with the real world are seriously impaired.

From my own seat here in America, I don’t see many fanatical Muslims about. What I do see is a danger to liberal values rising from the diseased fears of the neurotically terrified. My concern is not with David Petraeus, who is just doing a job the civilian government gave to him, but with the poisonous weakness of the cowardly right, who seem ready to hand over their most valuable possessions to soldiers like Petraeus, if the latter promise to protect the relatively insignificant hides of the former.

Posted by kotzabasis, Mar 07 2010, 5:23PM – Link

Kervick

The reason that you don’t see the great danger “to liberal values,” and indeed to civilization as we know it, issuing from the few “fanatical Muslims” that you see is due to your lack of imagination. This is an asymmetrical conflict or war in the context of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear ones and one doesn’t have to see a myriad of fanatical Muslims to perceive the mortal danger to these values.

And do you consider within this context, that the professionals of HUMINT(Human Intelligence), not amateurs and dilettantes like you, who warn that in the near future there is a high probability that these few fanatical Muslims will be armed with WMD and nuclear ones are disconnected from the “real world” and “are seriously impaired” by “the diseased fears of the neurotically terrified,” to quote you? Who in this case is “seriously impaired” in one’s sense of reality? And in your continued inveterate sickly sarcasm you degrade and make a vaudevillian mockery of this stupendous danger by turning it into a protection of the “hides” of the rich.

What is the Message of Massachusset's Call?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Massachusetts result showed pellucidly that the American electorate-whites in large numbers-has turned into a shoal of piranhas threatening to tear the flesh of Obama and the Democrats. What it craves for is economic and political stability, the preservation of conservative values, not the ostensibly unstable progressive left-wing policies of a picaresque president. In this context, any implementation of progressive economic policies by the Obama administration will solely employ the gravediggers that will dig its grave.

Liberals Favour Show Trial for Mastermind of 9/11


By Con George-Kotzabasis


“The administration has long” wrongly “argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried in civilian court.” Clemons of course would be loathe to admit that Obama’s administration might have realized its great mistake politically and strategically to prosecute Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court and is ready now to be corrected for its stupendous error by “the dark side,” to quote Clemons, methods of former vice-president Cheney and chief of staff of the Bush administration David Addington, which politically and strategically were always on the correct side.


Liberals who tend to support a civilian prosecution for the mastermind of 9/11 are fugitives from reality and are impresarios of a burlesque show trial, since members of the administration like Press Secretary Gibbs and Attorney General Holder already publicly declared him to be guilty. And as Nadine hints to the critics of military tribunals, among who is Clemons himself, and who are in favour of a show trial for Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court, the way to hellishly bankrupt arguments is paved with good intentions.

Political Frolics of American Liberals

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Maureen Dowd is merely an ‘avatar’ of many other top commentators such as Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, of The New York Times, etc. who claimed that President Bush told lies about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

No lies “about Iraq’s involvement with Al-Qaeda.” Saddam was aware of the increasing influence and appeal of Al-Qaeda in the Arab world. It takes little imagination to see that for this political reason alone he had an interest as the most powerful leader of Arab Sunnis to have al-Qaeda on his side, and for the purpose of controlling it. That is why his Intelligence agents had contacts with representatives of bin-Laden from early on during the short domicile of the latter in Sudan and providing his jihadists with training in Iraq.

As for serious argument you shoot yourself on the foot. The Bush administration did not tell “lies about WMDs”. It presented partly its case for war to the American people on false intelligence information. And as you well know, all the other Intelligence Services of the West, including that of France and Germany, believed that Saddam had WMDs. So if Bush was telling lies, so were doing President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder. To transform false information into lies as you do, and so many others from the Liberal intelligentsia continue to do, is to do so at the expense of one’s intellectual integrity.

And to compare “home accidents” with the ceaseless deliberate killing by the jihadists of innocent civilians, reveals how much out of your depth you are.
As for your support of the political frolicking of Spain under Prime Minister Zapatero as a serious way to fight global terror, shows your own credentials as political ‘frolicker’ par excellence.

Liberal Hearts Beat for Guantanamo Detainees

By Con George-Kotzabasis

One can always count on Steve Clemons of The Washington Note and his consort nipple-fed intellectuals to misplace their soft heart to the side of the detainees at the expense of the innocent killed by these irremediable religious fanatics. This is the main reason that despite Clemons’ great and fervent desire to be a policy architect in geopolitical affairs within the corridors of power will always be frustrated by the dictum of political necessity that moves without the beats of one’s ‘humanitarian’ heart. Misplaced humanitarians have always the disposition to sacrifice life on the altar of their sanctimonious divinely unchanged norms.

But in the end for leftists and centre left inclined like Clemons, empirical reality is spurned by pure, noumenal politics. The heart stands in moral judgment over the intellect. Facts do not stand in cognitive judgment over romantic ideas.

The Misjudgement of Liberals about Obama

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Some of us were aware from the beginning even before Obama was elected president that he was weak and a coward and said so ab ovo. Many liberals, including Dan Kervick, were from long ago sleeping with the American beauty, Obama, and with the misjudgement that he would make a great president, only to wake up in astonishment long after that they were sleeping with a skeleton rattling his cowardly bones who would bring obloquy to the White House.

Obama’s obeisance to the Russians by withdrawing the installation of missiles from Eastern Europe, and his kow-towing to the Saudi king, were the first signs that he was a weak and timorous president. And the Iranian regime exploited and is exploiting to its full advantage Obama’s weakness in its vigorous and recalcitrant pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Gentle Folk Attempting to Analyse the Realm of Geopolitics

By Con George-Kotzabasis

You are one of those admirable genteel souls who attempt to cogitate and philosophize and be judgmental about the morality of realpolitik but who are completely ignorant and oblivious of the fact that the contemporary practitioners of geopolitics, as all their predecessors, are the direct descendants of the ‘feudal knights’—omnipresent throughout human history—”who made literal mincemeat of their enemies, leaving the clergy to handle the morals”, to quote the great Austrian writer, Robert Musil.

One would have expected you to at least be consistent with the logic of your own argument. If you are going to blame the U.S. of “propping up local despots”, who at most repressed their own peoples, and which perforce had to do during its deadly contest with the Soviet Union—it is a luxury to believe that one can chose one’s allies in critical situations-- you have to praise the U.S. for having defeated the foremost dictatorships of our times, Nazism and Communism, not to mention Imperial Japan, which threatened to repress the freedom of mankind. Why have you ‘slipped’ from this consistency and irresponsibly imply that the perception of many people of the U.S. as the “Great Satan” could be justified?

As to your facts which some of them are imprecise, such as giving land to “interlopers” i.e., the Israelis, and the ones that are correct, you draw the wrong conclusions from them as a result of lack of imagination? The establishment of the Jewish State was the result of the “Balfour Declaration” re-affirmed by the Mandate of the League of Nations and was not the offspring of imperialist interests, if this is what your loaded word “interlopers” implies. And the upheavals of 1917 in Russia what did they bring in their wake? The rise of the most brutal millenarian movement, Communism. And the upheavals of the Middle East, what do they presage? The rise of another more brutal millenarian movement, Islamofascism. This is what the West must prevent at all costs, if it has learnt the lessons of history. And to achieve this one has to do it tragically in the mien, the spirit, and in the full armour of the ‘feudal knights’.

Terrorism Continues to be Top Risk

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The reason that they are not in the list might be not because they are not a “top risk” but because terrorism is immeasurable. One must bear in mind that there are issues and events that can be estimated by the calculus of reason and others that cannot. Al-Qaeda and international terrorism fall in the latter category. There are no statistics for natural disasters, plagues, and deadly viruses of which one can make an estimate when, where, and to what degree they will break out, since they are said to be ‘acts of God’. Islamic terrorism is the ‘act of God’ par excellence since its practitioners reverently believe that they are executing the orders of Allah.

No calculus of reason will ever measure the degree of fanaticism, its crescendo, and its virus like spread in the Muslim communities inhabiting the world. And the great danger of terrorism lies, unlike natural disasters which are intermittent, in the fact that it’s a continuous threat without knowing in advance where and when it will break out. But despite this hand of invisibility that perpetrates these murderous actions of terror, it can be defeated by intelligent and decisive action. Eroding and continuously diminishing the ability of terrorists to be successful in their operations might put the mouse of doubt into their hearts nibbling at their belief that they are the instruments of Allah and thus gradually force them to abandon their eschatological cause.

The Finger of Obama Forced to “Press the High-Fear-Button”

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Ben Katcher is the court jester of The Washington Note (TWN) followed by a long thread of other TWN jesters, from Norheim to Carrol. While all the late, and belated, actions of Obama emanate from an unabated fear which forces him to “press the high-fear-button,” closing his embassy in Yemen out of fear of a terrorist attack, deploying U.S. Special Forces in the country fearing that the latter would become a training terrorist base that would threaten the Western world, according to the latest statement of his Secretary of State, and the new rules prompted by the fear of the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack that would involve 14 nations undergoing extra screening in airports, Katcher claims, that Obama refuses to “use fear for his personal political advantage,” as if by protecting--even if Obama doesn’t take these harsh measures out of personal belief but out of political expediency-- like Bush, America from the real fear of a terrorist attack, would not also be for Obama’s personal political advantage.