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.