Hyping the GITMO Boys Threat
By Steve Clemons
http://thewashingtonnote.com/ May 29, 2009
A short reply: By Con George-Kotzabasis
It’s more likely that “in twenty or thirty years from now” the “historic reflections” will be on the boys and girls of such as the Washington Note who delved in the sphere of geopolitics with their infantile ideas, as this post of Steve’s so pellucidly reflects. And the vaudevillian plays staged on Broadway “on the topic” ‘The Naughty Boys and Girls of the Washington Note’ will have as captions ‘Terrorists as suspects but not proven.’ There is no scarcity of Ivy League cast political comedians in Washington DC.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Dangers in Obama's Diplomacy: The Folly of Talking Wise and Acting Wise without Being Wise
By Con George-Kotzabasis
The above title is a paraphrase from William Shakespeare: “The folly of acting love and talking love, without being in love.” Statecraft like ‘romanticized’ love if exercised without wisdom can have the fate of Love’s Labour’s Lost as depicted in the great comedy of Shakespeare. President Obama by churning a wave of diplomatic exuberance, on whose crest Secretary of State Clinton and numerous envoys will be ‘surfing,’ is hoping to bring the irreconcilable and implacable enemies of America to a conciliatory peaceful agreement of “live and let live,” while placating the rest of the world from the 'dreadful' belligerent and war policies of the Bush-Cheney administration by a profligate exhibition of true American values. That is respect for the law and international conventions, seeking the resolution of geopolitical conflicts through international institutions and through consensual consultations with its allies, and living up to the great principles and values as engraved in stone by America’s founding fathers. But in this romanticized attempt in diplomacy he may become a fool of wisdom by playing out his own tragicomedy at the expense of American interests and security as well as of the rest of the civilized world.
The change of venue of the Constitutional lawyer from Harvard to the White House has transformed the attorney-at-law into a revisionist historian if not a fabricator of at least recent American foreign policy. Stephen Sestanovich, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, argued four years ago cogently and brilliantly in his essay American Maximalism, that all the great victories of the USA in geopolitical affairs in the last thirty years under presidents Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton were accomplished by maximalist hard policies and more often than not in opposition to its European allies. Thus the USA as a ‘soloist’ in the concert of its European allies accomplished the downfall of Soviet Russia under Reagan, the reunification of Germany under Bush senior-- which to many international observers was a “masterpiece of the diplomatic art”--against all the protests of the European powers including the UK, and the defeat of the genocidal Milosevic in the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts under Clinton, when the latter decided to intervene militarily beyond the confines of diplomacy which he considered to be futile. In all these three conflicts it was American ‘maximalist’ intransigence, decisiveness, and leadership that won the day. In the case of the fall of the Soviet Empire it was Reagan’s uncompromising and immovable position on the “zero option,” i.e., the elimination of all Soviet intermediate-range missiles that was the major factor. Gorbachev himself in a private conversation with Germany’s foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that the turning point of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the lost battle with NATO over nuclear missiles in Europe. Thus it was ‘Reagan’s zero’ that brought the Soviet colossus down.
This is the danger that is enwrapped in Obama’s bouquet of olive branches that his diplomatic ‘couriers’ are delivering in the bosoms of America’s erstwhile enemies, Iran and Syria. That President Obama will be revising these past proven by history successful maximalist policies of the USA in the false hope that Iran and Syria will reciprocate genuinely, and not ingenuously, with likewise measures of amity toward the U.S., and not reading instead on the leaves of those olive branches American weakness which they will exploit to the utmost in achieving their strategic goals, and in the case of Iran by prolonging the negotiations, will render it the invaluable time to acquire nuclear weapons to the ultimate detriment of America’s geopolitical interests and those of its allies, and the dangers that will arise from a nuclear armed Iran with its apocalyptic aims written on its ‘crescent star.’
It’s impossible to believe that this wishful thinking of President Obama that by opening the door of diplomacy to Iran and its sundry terrorist proxies he could reach a peaceful agreement with them, as well as persuade the Ayatollah regime to desist from acquiring nuclear weapons, has not yet being drowned in the flood of recent evidence. The Swat valley agreement between the Pakistan government and the Taliban that presumably would have led to peace in that region, did not last more than a month. Instead of the Taliban laying down their arms as was stipulated by the agreement, it deployed its forces in an incursion of other areas abutting the Swat valley since its leadership had regarded that the Pakistani government was forced into the agreement as a result of weakness. Also, the voluntary and unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza strip of Israeli forces in 2004 by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was regarded by Hamas as a clear sign of weakness on the part of Israel instigating it to continue fuelling the second Intifada that started in 2000 and firing ten thousand rockets into Israel. In view of this incontrovertible and unassailable evidence of the conduct of the Islamist extremists that few serious and acute observers had already predicted the formers’ reaction, i.e., that any negotiations initiated by Western powers or the U.S. with the Islamists would be considered to be by the latter a clear indication of prostrating debilitation on the part of the infidel West. Thus to the Islamists any overture of diplomacy that was set in motion by Western powers would be used merely as a gambit in their irreversible goal to subdue their enemies. Dar al-Islam would employ duplicity and taqqiya throughout any future negotiations in its attempt to defeat Dar al-Harb, the infidels.
Obama’s ark of diplomacy, unlike Noah’s ark, will not survive the flood of deception, guile, and lies that Iran will bring onto the negotiating table. He will find out that his Muslim opponents are masters in dissembling as they have been educated to it by their long proud tradition that will cover any shame, any dishonourable action, as they cover their women with burqas, which could mar their individual or tribal pride. President Obama’s advocacy of a new foreign policy based on diplomacy will evaporate at the first touch with reality. His seductive universalist campaign to ‘change’ America in the eyes of the world by reappropriating the high moral ground that was presumably lost by Bush, and showing respect to Muslims by pouring oil in the turbulent poisonous pond of the holy warriors of Islam, will end up as a tragic idyll. But the stupendous danger is that in this foolish voyage of diplomacy he will bring the shipwreck of America as a great power. The Shakespearean farce will modify under Obama’s directorship into a great American tragedy. And America and the free world will pay a heavy price at the ‘box office’ of geopolitics to see President Obama’s play of “talking wise and acting wise without being wise.”
I rest on my oars:Your turn now
By Con George-Kotzabasis
The above title is a paraphrase from William Shakespeare: “The folly of acting love and talking love, without being in love.” Statecraft like ‘romanticized’ love if exercised without wisdom can have the fate of Love’s Labour’s Lost as depicted in the great comedy of Shakespeare. President Obama by churning a wave of diplomatic exuberance, on whose crest Secretary of State Clinton and numerous envoys will be ‘surfing,’ is hoping to bring the irreconcilable and implacable enemies of America to a conciliatory peaceful agreement of “live and let live,” while placating the rest of the world from the 'dreadful' belligerent and war policies of the Bush-Cheney administration by a profligate exhibition of true American values. That is respect for the law and international conventions, seeking the resolution of geopolitical conflicts through international institutions and through consensual consultations with its allies, and living up to the great principles and values as engraved in stone by America’s founding fathers. But in this romanticized attempt in diplomacy he may become a fool of wisdom by playing out his own tragicomedy at the expense of American interests and security as well as of the rest of the civilized world.
The change of venue of the Constitutional lawyer from Harvard to the White House has transformed the attorney-at-law into a revisionist historian if not a fabricator of at least recent American foreign policy. Stephen Sestanovich, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, argued four years ago cogently and brilliantly in his essay American Maximalism, that all the great victories of the USA in geopolitical affairs in the last thirty years under presidents Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton were accomplished by maximalist hard policies and more often than not in opposition to its European allies. Thus the USA as a ‘soloist’ in the concert of its European allies accomplished the downfall of Soviet Russia under Reagan, the reunification of Germany under Bush senior-- which to many international observers was a “masterpiece of the diplomatic art”--against all the protests of the European powers including the UK, and the defeat of the genocidal Milosevic in the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts under Clinton, when the latter decided to intervene militarily beyond the confines of diplomacy which he considered to be futile. In all these three conflicts it was American ‘maximalist’ intransigence, decisiveness, and leadership that won the day. In the case of the fall of the Soviet Empire it was Reagan’s uncompromising and immovable position on the “zero option,” i.e., the elimination of all Soviet intermediate-range missiles that was the major factor. Gorbachev himself in a private conversation with Germany’s foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that the turning point of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the lost battle with NATO over nuclear missiles in Europe. Thus it was ‘Reagan’s zero’ that brought the Soviet colossus down.
This is the danger that is enwrapped in Obama’s bouquet of olive branches that his diplomatic ‘couriers’ are delivering in the bosoms of America’s erstwhile enemies, Iran and Syria. That President Obama will be revising these past proven by history successful maximalist policies of the USA in the false hope that Iran and Syria will reciprocate genuinely, and not ingenuously, with likewise measures of amity toward the U.S., and not reading instead on the leaves of those olive branches American weakness which they will exploit to the utmost in achieving their strategic goals, and in the case of Iran by prolonging the negotiations, will render it the invaluable time to acquire nuclear weapons to the ultimate detriment of America’s geopolitical interests and those of its allies, and the dangers that will arise from a nuclear armed Iran with its apocalyptic aims written on its ‘crescent star.’
It’s impossible to believe that this wishful thinking of President Obama that by opening the door of diplomacy to Iran and its sundry terrorist proxies he could reach a peaceful agreement with them, as well as persuade the Ayatollah regime to desist from acquiring nuclear weapons, has not yet being drowned in the flood of recent evidence. The Swat valley agreement between the Pakistan government and the Taliban that presumably would have led to peace in that region, did not last more than a month. Instead of the Taliban laying down their arms as was stipulated by the agreement, it deployed its forces in an incursion of other areas abutting the Swat valley since its leadership had regarded that the Pakistani government was forced into the agreement as a result of weakness. Also, the voluntary and unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza strip of Israeli forces in 2004 by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was regarded by Hamas as a clear sign of weakness on the part of Israel instigating it to continue fuelling the second Intifada that started in 2000 and firing ten thousand rockets into Israel. In view of this incontrovertible and unassailable evidence of the conduct of the Islamist extremists that few serious and acute observers had already predicted the formers’ reaction, i.e., that any negotiations initiated by Western powers or the U.S. with the Islamists would be considered to be by the latter a clear indication of prostrating debilitation on the part of the infidel West. Thus to the Islamists any overture of diplomacy that was set in motion by Western powers would be used merely as a gambit in their irreversible goal to subdue their enemies. Dar al-Islam would employ duplicity and taqqiya throughout any future negotiations in its attempt to defeat Dar al-Harb, the infidels.
Obama’s ark of diplomacy, unlike Noah’s ark, will not survive the flood of deception, guile, and lies that Iran will bring onto the negotiating table. He will find out that his Muslim opponents are masters in dissembling as they have been educated to it by their long proud tradition that will cover any shame, any dishonourable action, as they cover their women with burqas, which could mar their individual or tribal pride. President Obama’s advocacy of a new foreign policy based on diplomacy will evaporate at the first touch with reality. His seductive universalist campaign to ‘change’ America in the eyes of the world by reappropriating the high moral ground that was presumably lost by Bush, and showing respect to Muslims by pouring oil in the turbulent poisonous pond of the holy warriors of Islam, will end up as a tragic idyll. But the stupendous danger is that in this foolish voyage of diplomacy he will bring the shipwreck of America as a great power. The Shakespearean farce will modify under Obama’s directorship into a great American tragedy. And America and the free world will pay a heavy price at the ‘box office’ of geopolitics to see President Obama’s play of “talking wise and acting wise without being wise.”
I rest on my oars:Your turn now
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Anti-Terrorist Laws to Protect Australians Baneful to Soft Intellectuals
By Con George-Kotzabasis
Professor of jurisprudence George Williams demonstrates conclusively that it’s not the vocation of constitutional lawyers to either “understand thy enemy” or protect the public from his more than probable lethal attacks. He woefully laments that the anti-terror laws enacted by the previous Howard government and continue to be implemented by the present one without any revision, “imprison people for words rather than actions”. This quote of his reveals clearly that he is oblivious of the historical fact that it’s more often than not that it’s “words” that inspire and lead to action. And this happens to be truer in the case of terrorists who are inspired by the words of their fundamentalist imams and perpetrate their atrocious actions.
Further he seems to be unaware that in all critical situations and especially in war times, individual and collective liberties are ineluctably constrained. A simple example would be that in a collision of several cars in a highway the motorists’ ‘liberty’ to use this highway is temporarily abrogated. Likewise the anti-terror laws are a temporary repeal of few liberties until this great Islamist threat hovering over and lurking under the cities of Western civilization is extinguished.
By Con George-Kotzabasis
Professor of jurisprudence George Williams demonstrates conclusively that it’s not the vocation of constitutional lawyers to either “understand thy enemy” or protect the public from his more than probable lethal attacks. He woefully laments that the anti-terror laws enacted by the previous Howard government and continue to be implemented by the present one without any revision, “imprison people for words rather than actions”. This quote of his reveals clearly that he is oblivious of the historical fact that it’s more often than not that it’s “words” that inspire and lead to action. And this happens to be truer in the case of terrorists who are inspired by the words of their fundamentalist imams and perpetrate their atrocious actions.
Further he seems to be unaware that in all critical situations and especially in war times, individual and collective liberties are ineluctably constrained. A simple example would be that in a collision of several cars in a highway the motorists’ ‘liberty’ to use this highway is temporarily abrogated. Likewise the anti-terror laws are a temporary repeal of few liberties until this great Islamist threat hovering over and lurking under the cities of Western civilization is extinguished.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Churchillian Leadership in our Dangerous Times
By Con George-Kotzabasis
The eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs is of course correct to pin point the non-commissions and omissions of political leadership. But leadership of Churchillian stature does not arise as he claims from collectivities such as the UN and the World Bank, but from the ‘soloist’ reflections, sagacity, resolution, and guidance of Statesmen.
In the present world scenario what is missing is the vocation of politics being in the hands of virtuoso politicians 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 woeful populist politician, a la Obama and Rudd.
By Con George-Kotzabasis
The eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs is of course correct to pin point the non-commissions and omissions of political leadership. But leadership of Churchillian stature does not arise as he claims from collectivities such as the UN and the World Bank, but from the ‘soloist’ reflections, sagacity, resolution, and guidance of Statesmen.
In the present world scenario what is missing is the vocation of politics being in the hands of virtuoso politicians 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 woeful populist politician, a la Obama and Rudd.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Iran: Know thy Enemy
By Con George-Kotzabasis
President Obama with his latest commitment to the war in Afghanistan seems to be harking to the realists of his political and diplomatic advisors, such as Richard Holbrooke, and is readying himself to debunk the bunk of his leftist supporters of ending America’s military involvement in the hot spots of the world and adopting and continuing the bellicose policy of the former Bush administration against the terrorist extremists. In his announcement of his ‘new’ policy in Afghanistan he very closely repeated Bush’s words that as President he would not allow Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorists that the latter would use once again to attack the American homeland. Hence he clearly coupled the war in Afghanistan with America’s security and therefore made it very difficult for the anti-war movement to continue influencing the silent majority, as it did against the Bush administration, toward a pacifist position since such a position would be senseless and stupid to anyone whose life was under a direct threat. Obama therefore placed himself in a politically strong position that even an increase of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan could not erode since this is the price that America will have to pay for its security. One therefore can say “hats off to Obama,” to quote Robert Kagan from his piece in the Washington Post, for his new strategy in Afghanistan.
What is most worrying however is in verity the president’s new policy in regard to Iran. In his keen propensity to detach himself from the ‘fisticuffs’ policy of his predecessor which he considered to be wrong and politically infertile, Obama, as he had promised during the presidential campaign, is opening the door of diplomacy to the ‘Mullahcratic’ regime hoping that the latter will be susceptible to the diplomatic blandishments and calls of reason that the U.S.A. and Iran could ‘live and let live’ with each other if they had the will and wisdom to change the belligerent attitudes of the past toward each other. This is a laudable aim but the question is whether it will resonate with the Theocratic regime in Tehran. President Obama in his direct address to the Iranian people, in their new year’s day, went out of his way to praise the Islamic Republic and the cultural achievements of its people. But what is in a name when one could praise in the same terms the united republics of the USSR, the republic of Mao’s China, the republic of Cambodia under Pol Pot, and a sundry of ‘genocidal’ republics in Africa with the only difference being that the scale of atrocities are not as high in Iran as they have been with the above blood-lusted republics. But who knows, with a future nuclear armed Iran the latter could surpass them all on the scale of wickedness.
It’s this great danger that a nuclear armed Iran would pose to Western nations and to the U.S. that the latter as the supreme power in the world must prevent. And the ambition of Tehran to acquire a nuclear armoury is un-ambiguous and unyielding. Only few days ago President Ahmadinejad in his address to the Iranian people proudly proclaimed that Iran would not cease its nuclear programme as its achievement is the deserved status of a great nation. It’s obvious that Ahmadinejad took his lines directly from the speech of Obama who praised so exuberantly the Islamic Republic and its cultural achievements. But in the hope of the President that by paying homage and offering peace to the Tehran regime it would de-couple the latter from its religious fanatic nucleus and its great hate toward America, Obama shows himself to be irretrievably naive and abysmally ignorant of the duplicitous enemy he is facing.
The foremost intelligence apparatus in the Middle East the Israeli one had its chief Major General Amos Yadlin saying early this month, ...”Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb.” Moshe Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, saying that “the jihadists interpret compromise as weakness.”(M.E.) He cited the withdrawal from Gaza four years ago which many had thought at the time it would debilitate the conflict, instead it encouraged it. And this is exactly how the Iranian leadership sees Obama’s ‘open door’ diplomacy, as a screeching sound of American weakness, as in its eyes the relative isolation of the U.S. among its allies, Russia and China and its inability to persuade the latter to take harder sanctions against them limpidly demonstrates this weakness. And this enfeeblement of the U.S. is further exemplified in Iran’s view by the North Korean defiance in its rocket launching, which, only few months ago in the last days of the Bush administration, was participating in direct talks with U.S envoys in regard to its nuclear programme--that that stalwart and hawk-eyed in foreign affairs John Bolton had predicted with characteristic insight that the talks would come to nothing. If miniscule N. Korea could so brazenly defy the U.S., in spite of the commitments it made during the negotiations, what the great Islamic Republic of Iran would do in future negotiations with the Americans?
President Obama and his close advisers are incapable of realising that an enemy who sees the United States as being politically compelled to negotiate from a weak position cannot be forced by diplomatic means to accept the demand of the Americans and their allies that Iran must cease the development of its nuclear programme. Hence Obama’s administration is setting up its tent of diplomacy in a barren desert where the Iranian diplomatic camels will come empty of any reciprocal ‘gifts’ to the peaceful and morally generous gestures of the Obama administration. It’s inconceivable to imagine, that if not Obama, that some of his close and more astute consigliori are unable to anticipate the futility and dangers of diplomacy with a foe who considers himself to be negotiating from a position of strength. The only result that can come out from such negotiations with the Iranians is for the Americans to come out as losers from this parley or walk out of the talks with the tail in-between their legs in a scornfully embarrassed state.
This will be the fate of President Obama’s diplomatic overture with the Iranian theocratic regime as an outcome of his total inability to “know thy enemy,” a prerequisite, according to the great Chinese strategist and sage Sun Zi, in defeating one’s mortal enemy. But the final judgment on President Obama--the constitutional lawyer and former community organizer, a rookie in the art of statecraft and who in his Prague address beyond proclaiming, with humility soaked in weakness, America’s decline, indulged himself also to make some trite ‘brandy(ed)’ derisive comments about the two great statesmen Churchill and Roosevelt who defeated the Axis powers--who as a result of the pathological hate—which neutralized even the ingrained racism that many Americans have toward blacks--that a great part of the electorate had toward Bush-Cheney and by association the Republicans, was swept by this bitter wind into the Oval Office, will be rendered by a Shakespearean Sovereign, King Lear: “Nothing comes out of nothing.”
I rest on my oars: Your turn now
By Con George-Kotzabasis
President Obama with his latest commitment to the war in Afghanistan seems to be harking to the realists of his political and diplomatic advisors, such as Richard Holbrooke, and is readying himself to debunk the bunk of his leftist supporters of ending America’s military involvement in the hot spots of the world and adopting and continuing the bellicose policy of the former Bush administration against the terrorist extremists. In his announcement of his ‘new’ policy in Afghanistan he very closely repeated Bush’s words that as President he would not allow Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorists that the latter would use once again to attack the American homeland. Hence he clearly coupled the war in Afghanistan with America’s security and therefore made it very difficult for the anti-war movement to continue influencing the silent majority, as it did against the Bush administration, toward a pacifist position since such a position would be senseless and stupid to anyone whose life was under a direct threat. Obama therefore placed himself in a politically strong position that even an increase of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan could not erode since this is the price that America will have to pay for its security. One therefore can say “hats off to Obama,” to quote Robert Kagan from his piece in the Washington Post, for his new strategy in Afghanistan.
What is most worrying however is in verity the president’s new policy in regard to Iran. In his keen propensity to detach himself from the ‘fisticuffs’ policy of his predecessor which he considered to be wrong and politically infertile, Obama, as he had promised during the presidential campaign, is opening the door of diplomacy to the ‘Mullahcratic’ regime hoping that the latter will be susceptible to the diplomatic blandishments and calls of reason that the U.S.A. and Iran could ‘live and let live’ with each other if they had the will and wisdom to change the belligerent attitudes of the past toward each other. This is a laudable aim but the question is whether it will resonate with the Theocratic regime in Tehran. President Obama in his direct address to the Iranian people, in their new year’s day, went out of his way to praise the Islamic Republic and the cultural achievements of its people. But what is in a name when one could praise in the same terms the united republics of the USSR, the republic of Mao’s China, the republic of Cambodia under Pol Pot, and a sundry of ‘genocidal’ republics in Africa with the only difference being that the scale of atrocities are not as high in Iran as they have been with the above blood-lusted republics. But who knows, with a future nuclear armed Iran the latter could surpass them all on the scale of wickedness.
It’s this great danger that a nuclear armed Iran would pose to Western nations and to the U.S. that the latter as the supreme power in the world must prevent. And the ambition of Tehran to acquire a nuclear armoury is un-ambiguous and unyielding. Only few days ago President Ahmadinejad in his address to the Iranian people proudly proclaimed that Iran would not cease its nuclear programme as its achievement is the deserved status of a great nation. It’s obvious that Ahmadinejad took his lines directly from the speech of Obama who praised so exuberantly the Islamic Republic and its cultural achievements. But in the hope of the President that by paying homage and offering peace to the Tehran regime it would de-couple the latter from its religious fanatic nucleus and its great hate toward America, Obama shows himself to be irretrievably naive and abysmally ignorant of the duplicitous enemy he is facing.
The foremost intelligence apparatus in the Middle East the Israeli one had its chief Major General Amos Yadlin saying early this month, ...”Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb.” Moshe Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, saying that “the jihadists interpret compromise as weakness.”(M.E.) He cited the withdrawal from Gaza four years ago which many had thought at the time it would debilitate the conflict, instead it encouraged it. And this is exactly how the Iranian leadership sees Obama’s ‘open door’ diplomacy, as a screeching sound of American weakness, as in its eyes the relative isolation of the U.S. among its allies, Russia and China and its inability to persuade the latter to take harder sanctions against them limpidly demonstrates this weakness. And this enfeeblement of the U.S. is further exemplified in Iran’s view by the North Korean defiance in its rocket launching, which, only few months ago in the last days of the Bush administration, was participating in direct talks with U.S envoys in regard to its nuclear programme--that that stalwart and hawk-eyed in foreign affairs John Bolton had predicted with characteristic insight that the talks would come to nothing. If miniscule N. Korea could so brazenly defy the U.S., in spite of the commitments it made during the negotiations, what the great Islamic Republic of Iran would do in future negotiations with the Americans?
President Obama and his close advisers are incapable of realising that an enemy who sees the United States as being politically compelled to negotiate from a weak position cannot be forced by diplomatic means to accept the demand of the Americans and their allies that Iran must cease the development of its nuclear programme. Hence Obama’s administration is setting up its tent of diplomacy in a barren desert where the Iranian diplomatic camels will come empty of any reciprocal ‘gifts’ to the peaceful and morally generous gestures of the Obama administration. It’s inconceivable to imagine, that if not Obama, that some of his close and more astute consigliori are unable to anticipate the futility and dangers of diplomacy with a foe who considers himself to be negotiating from a position of strength. The only result that can come out from such negotiations with the Iranians is for the Americans to come out as losers from this parley or walk out of the talks with the tail in-between their legs in a scornfully embarrassed state.
This will be the fate of President Obama’s diplomatic overture with the Iranian theocratic regime as an outcome of his total inability to “know thy enemy,” a prerequisite, according to the great Chinese strategist and sage Sun Zi, in defeating one’s mortal enemy. But the final judgment on President Obama--the constitutional lawyer and former community organizer, a rookie in the art of statecraft and who in his Prague address beyond proclaiming, with humility soaked in weakness, America’s decline, indulged himself also to make some trite ‘brandy(ed)’ derisive comments about the two great statesmen Churchill and Roosevelt who defeated the Axis powers--who as a result of the pathological hate—which neutralized even the ingrained racism that many Americans have toward blacks--that a great part of the electorate had toward Bush-Cheney and by association the Republicans, was swept by this bitter wind into the Oval Office, will be rendered by a Shakespearean Sovereign, King Lear: “Nothing comes out of nothing.”
I rest on my oars: Your turn now
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Loving Concept of the Intelligentsia: Moral Equivalence
Con George-Kotzabasis
Steve Clemons’ post, by adopting Brzezinski’s “both sides of the...divide...,” has all the faults of the politically, historically, and intellectually bankrupt concept of moral equivalence by expanding it into political, diplomatic, cognitive, and intellectual equivalence between the two warring sides of the Palestinian fanatical extremists and the civilized Israelis.
And how irretrievably naive is to be a fugitive from reality that geopolitics or any conflicts are anything else than a zero-sum game. Leave the kinder-garden Steve and re-read Clausewitz or Metternich! And only a permanent tourist of Disney Land could believe in the possibility of a Gandhi-esque way exercised by Palestinian moderates that would oust the fanatics of Hamas and al-Fatah and would lead to peace between Palestinians and Jews through the road map of moderation.
Con George-Kotzabasis
Steve Clemons’ post, by adopting Brzezinski’s “both sides of the...divide...,” has all the faults of the politically, historically, and intellectually bankrupt concept of moral equivalence by expanding it into political, diplomatic, cognitive, and intellectual equivalence between the two warring sides of the Palestinian fanatical extremists and the civilized Israelis.
And how irretrievably naive is to be a fugitive from reality that geopolitics or any conflicts are anything else than a zero-sum game. Leave the kinder-garden Steve and re-read Clausewitz or Metternich! And only a permanent tourist of Disney Land could believe in the possibility of a Gandhi-esque way exercised by Palestinian moderates that would oust the fanatics of Hamas and al-Fatah and would lead to peace between Palestinians and Jews through the road map of moderation.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Debate between American and Australian about the Merits of the War in Iraq
American says:
For those who think we need to redouble our efforts to “win” the war in Afghanistan, I take it they mean we need to do whatever it takes, militarily and financially, to build a stable Afghan state run headed by a secure and US-friendly government. I have two problems with this idea. First, I tend to doubt that the US has the wherewithal to accomplish such a goal in such a rugged, decentralized and forbidding country - no matter how much our surge surges. The whole idea seems fantastical.
Second, I don’t see how even achieving this fantastical aim would really help with the Al Qaeda issue, since I find it hard to believe that any Afghan government that we can realistically imagine taking shape will have the capacity to prevent Al Qaeda elements from gathering in remote locations and forming bases. As a basis for comparison, can we realistically imagine an Afghan government with even half the capacity of a state like Pakistan? Hardly. And yet Pakistan itself is not in control of large swaths of its country. Pursuing the quixotic state-building plans of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is a distraction from the methods that actually work.
My understanding is that we have been engaged in a global campaign against jihadist terrorism for several years now, and the main practical method is to rely on intelligence to stay one step ahead of the folks who actually pose a threat, and then disrupt their efforts, kill their leaders and interdict their operations. We’re probably going to have to keep doing that sort of thing for quite some time, just as the effort against organized crime in the US never really ends. If Al Qaeda cadres build some kind of training base in Afghanistan, we go in and blow it up. If they build another one, we blow that one up too. We use predators and covert methods. The same is true of al Qaeda redoubts in Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen, right? We are going to have to do this no matter what kind of government we get in Kabul.
I can’t believe that at this late date American political leaders and opinion leaders are still deluded by the theory that the chief enabling cause of terrorism is “state sponsorship”, and so that our aim is too manufacture strong states where none exist now. This seems wrong-headed to me. I’ve used this analogy before, but the militant jihadist movement seems something like the anarchist movement of a century ago. Parts of that movement were violent. Was the solution some sort of state-building process in Europe and the United States? No. There were already strong states in Europe and the US. But it is of the nature of terrorist groups to slip between the cracks in the sovereign power of states.
Anarchist terrorism was basically a law and order problem. The idea was just to stay ahead of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks, and outlast the movement as its ideological fervor gradually dissipated and it burned itself out.
We should never have gotten involved in state building in Afghanistan. Now we have a generation of American leaders who are invested in that project, and see their personal honor and the national honor as riding on its very unlikely success. They need to get real.
Australian says:
Ben Katcher’s intellectually malodorous, and disingenuous, argument has reached the other shores of the Pacific. While he claims that “pouring more troops…into Afghanistan means fewer resources to pursue our other national security objectives across the globe,” he does not mention any of them by name other than the economic crisis mentioned by Dennis Blair. Hence his statement that “strategy is about priorities and trade-offs,” while true in general, is a contrived fiction when he applies it to international terrorism since these other priorities remain nameless. The reason why he does not name them is that if he had identified these priorities and contrasted them with the priority of global terror he would embarrass himself for being ludicrous.
Dan Kervick’s paragraph that contains “we use predators and covert methods,” which incidentally is an idea that I suggested myself too eight years ago, is very interesting although he contradicts himself further down on his post when he contrasts present terror with anarchist terror in the past and says for the latter that it “was basically a law and order problem,” which he first ventilated in a riposte to me on TWN three years ago. Surely, Kervick, who has learnt his logic by sitting in the spacious intellectual laps of Hume and Russel, could not cogently argue that “predators and covert methods” fall in the ambience of “law and order.”
American says:
'Surely, Kervick, who has learnt his logic by sitting in the spacious intellectual laps of Hume and Russel, could not cogently argue that “predators and covert methods” fall within the ambience of “law and order.” '
I do. When I say that terrorism is a law and order problem, I don’t mean that the only tools to be used are the methods of the criminal justice system. Those latter tools have proven effective in many cases, including operations interdicted in the UK and Canada. But given the limits of applying these tools across borders and inside rugged countries, sometimes more aggressive means must be employed. What I mean is that terrorism is fundamentally a problem of a limited number of militant “outlaws”, and that the strategy for addressing it should focus on that fact, rather than be distracted by extravagant projects for state improvement and state overhaul.
What I am most skeptical of is the idea that the problem of terrorism is a conventional military problem that calls for the use of conventional military operations - in the form of armies, invasions and occupations - against either states or sub-national “armies”. And I am especially skeptical of the idea that the way to address the problem of terrorism is to launch massive - and generally very unrealistic - state-building operations in the hope that some day the dangerous backward parts of the world will be filled with well-functioning and capable states that will be able to suppress all of the militants operating inside their territories.
There are other means that need to be used as well, including denying the terrorists the ideological foothold that multiplies their influence and capability. That means not doing so many things that provide evidence of the very charges the terrorists make. To counter jihadist charges that the United States is hostile to the interests of Arabs and Muslims across the world the United States should stop behaving as if it is indeed universally hostile to the interests of Arabs and Muslims.
Australian says:
“When I say that terrorism is a law and order problem, I don’t mean that the only tools to be used are the methods of the criminal justice system.” Dan Kervick.
Your quote states the obvious. Of course one does not fight terrorism only with police methods but the question is out of all the methods which are the most effective by which one can defeat the jihadists. And while your paragraph in your previous post that mentions “predators” and all the other ‘hard things’ that one has perforce to do against the jihadists is full of strategic clarity, by reverting back to your old argument of three years ago that the present terrorists are similar to the anarchist terrorists of the past and can be interdicted by ‘police’ methods, you unconsciously downgrade the seriousness of your ‘hard things’ position.
Moreover, you are locked in the fallacy of a rational person who premises his actions that his enemies that ‘round’ him up are also rational and if he shows by his actions, in our case America, that he is not against Arabs and Muslims this will bring a definitive change in the attitudes of the jihadists. This is a ‘straightjacket’ delusion that has lost all contact with reality. Islamic fanaticism will not be influenced, soothed, abated, or defeated by moral examples or olive branches but only in the field of battle and that is why a military deployment against it is a prerequisite. In short, it’s just another but more effective method in defeating the jihadists in a shorter span of time.
American says:
C-G Kotzabasis,
I’m talking about the hearts and minds issue. There is a hard core of dyed-in-the-wool militant jihadists with an uncompromising Salafist ideology. They are not going to be swayed by US public diplomacy, or by forseeable changes in US policy. They can only be dealt with forcibly. They must either be captured or killed, and their plans must be disrupted.
But the hard core is surrounded by concentric circles of people who are associated with the hard core by various degrees of fellow-travelling or sympathizing or onlooking. The extent to which the jihadists are able to expand their movement to get material or moral assistance from people in the out rings depends on how well their message resonates.
In my view, the jihadists have been the beneficiaries in recent years of a number of wrong-headed US policies that help their message resonate strongly. If hundreds of innocent people in Gaza have their lives snuffed out in an over-the-top Israeli attack, some as a result of deliberate crimes, with nary a peep from the US Congress, then when your friendly neighborhood jihadist says, “Muslims lives mean nothing to the Americans,” that message is going to get much more play on the street than it would if the US Congress had stepped up and condemned the excessive use of force.
Australian says:
Dan Kervick,
Certainly the “hearts and minds issue” is a core issue. But the “concentric circles of people,” will not be influenced by US Congress pronouncements and condemnations, in this case of Israeli actions, if they perceive, which they will, that this change of American policy arises from the weakness of the latter and from the strength of the “hard core” “militant jihadists” in their war with the US. The concentric circles of support for the militants will only disappear by depriving the latter of the ‘aura’ of being seen as the victors (The ethos of Arab pride trumps all.) against the American hegemon. And that entails the imminent and decisive defeat of the militants in the field of battle, as it happened in Iraq to the Sadrist militias and al Qaeda.
Furthermore, your concentrated reasoning loses its force since your policy contains these two incongruous parts: The first one will destroy by predators and covert operations (Which will be seen in the Muslim world as American excesses) the incubators of “Salafist ideology”, which are the madrassas, while the second, will denounce American and Israeli excesses. Do you seriously believe that such denunciation will have greater influence upon fellow-travellers and sympathisers, than the destruction of the madrassas in which many civilians will be killed, and will win their hearts and minds?
Join the debate
American says:
For those who think we need to redouble our efforts to “win” the war in Afghanistan, I take it they mean we need to do whatever it takes, militarily and financially, to build a stable Afghan state run headed by a secure and US-friendly government. I have two problems with this idea. First, I tend to doubt that the US has the wherewithal to accomplish such a goal in such a rugged, decentralized and forbidding country - no matter how much our surge surges. The whole idea seems fantastical.
Second, I don’t see how even achieving this fantastical aim would really help with the Al Qaeda issue, since I find it hard to believe that any Afghan government that we can realistically imagine taking shape will have the capacity to prevent Al Qaeda elements from gathering in remote locations and forming bases. As a basis for comparison, can we realistically imagine an Afghan government with even half the capacity of a state like Pakistan? Hardly. And yet Pakistan itself is not in control of large swaths of its country. Pursuing the quixotic state-building plans of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is a distraction from the methods that actually work.
My understanding is that we have been engaged in a global campaign against jihadist terrorism for several years now, and the main practical method is to rely on intelligence to stay one step ahead of the folks who actually pose a threat, and then disrupt their efforts, kill their leaders and interdict their operations. We’re probably going to have to keep doing that sort of thing for quite some time, just as the effort against organized crime in the US never really ends. If Al Qaeda cadres build some kind of training base in Afghanistan, we go in and blow it up. If they build another one, we blow that one up too. We use predators and covert methods. The same is true of al Qaeda redoubts in Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen, right? We are going to have to do this no matter what kind of government we get in Kabul.
I can’t believe that at this late date American political leaders and opinion leaders are still deluded by the theory that the chief enabling cause of terrorism is “state sponsorship”, and so that our aim is too manufacture strong states where none exist now. This seems wrong-headed to me. I’ve used this analogy before, but the militant jihadist movement seems something like the anarchist movement of a century ago. Parts of that movement were violent. Was the solution some sort of state-building process in Europe and the United States? No. There were already strong states in Europe and the US. But it is of the nature of terrorist groups to slip between the cracks in the sovereign power of states.
Anarchist terrorism was basically a law and order problem. The idea was just to stay ahead of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks, and outlast the movement as its ideological fervor gradually dissipated and it burned itself out.
We should never have gotten involved in state building in Afghanistan. Now we have a generation of American leaders who are invested in that project, and see their personal honor and the national honor as riding on its very unlikely success. They need to get real.
Australian says:
Ben Katcher’s intellectually malodorous, and disingenuous, argument has reached the other shores of the Pacific. While he claims that “pouring more troops…into Afghanistan means fewer resources to pursue our other national security objectives across the globe,” he does not mention any of them by name other than the economic crisis mentioned by Dennis Blair. Hence his statement that “strategy is about priorities and trade-offs,” while true in general, is a contrived fiction when he applies it to international terrorism since these other priorities remain nameless. The reason why he does not name them is that if he had identified these priorities and contrasted them with the priority of global terror he would embarrass himself for being ludicrous.
Dan Kervick’s paragraph that contains “we use predators and covert methods,” which incidentally is an idea that I suggested myself too eight years ago, is very interesting although he contradicts himself further down on his post when he contrasts present terror with anarchist terror in the past and says for the latter that it “was basically a law and order problem,” which he first ventilated in a riposte to me on TWN three years ago. Surely, Kervick, who has learnt his logic by sitting in the spacious intellectual laps of Hume and Russel, could not cogently argue that “predators and covert methods” fall in the ambience of “law and order.”
American says:
'Surely, Kervick, who has learnt his logic by sitting in the spacious intellectual laps of Hume and Russel, could not cogently argue that “predators and covert methods” fall within the ambience of “law and order.” '
I do. When I say that terrorism is a law and order problem, I don’t mean that the only tools to be used are the methods of the criminal justice system. Those latter tools have proven effective in many cases, including operations interdicted in the UK and Canada. But given the limits of applying these tools across borders and inside rugged countries, sometimes more aggressive means must be employed. What I mean is that terrorism is fundamentally a problem of a limited number of militant “outlaws”, and that the strategy for addressing it should focus on that fact, rather than be distracted by extravagant projects for state improvement and state overhaul.
What I am most skeptical of is the idea that the problem of terrorism is a conventional military problem that calls for the use of conventional military operations - in the form of armies, invasions and occupations - against either states or sub-national “armies”. And I am especially skeptical of the idea that the way to address the problem of terrorism is to launch massive - and generally very unrealistic - state-building operations in the hope that some day the dangerous backward parts of the world will be filled with well-functioning and capable states that will be able to suppress all of the militants operating inside their territories.
There are other means that need to be used as well, including denying the terrorists the ideological foothold that multiplies their influence and capability. That means not doing so many things that provide evidence of the very charges the terrorists make. To counter jihadist charges that the United States is hostile to the interests of Arabs and Muslims across the world the United States should stop behaving as if it is indeed universally hostile to the interests of Arabs and Muslims.
Australian says:
“When I say that terrorism is a law and order problem, I don’t mean that the only tools to be used are the methods of the criminal justice system.” Dan Kervick.
Your quote states the obvious. Of course one does not fight terrorism only with police methods but the question is out of all the methods which are the most effective by which one can defeat the jihadists. And while your paragraph in your previous post that mentions “predators” and all the other ‘hard things’ that one has perforce to do against the jihadists is full of strategic clarity, by reverting back to your old argument of three years ago that the present terrorists are similar to the anarchist terrorists of the past and can be interdicted by ‘police’ methods, you unconsciously downgrade the seriousness of your ‘hard things’ position.
Moreover, you are locked in the fallacy of a rational person who premises his actions that his enemies that ‘round’ him up are also rational and if he shows by his actions, in our case America, that he is not against Arabs and Muslims this will bring a definitive change in the attitudes of the jihadists. This is a ‘straightjacket’ delusion that has lost all contact with reality. Islamic fanaticism will not be influenced, soothed, abated, or defeated by moral examples or olive branches but only in the field of battle and that is why a military deployment against it is a prerequisite. In short, it’s just another but more effective method in defeating the jihadists in a shorter span of time.
American says:
C-G Kotzabasis,
I’m talking about the hearts and minds issue. There is a hard core of dyed-in-the-wool militant jihadists with an uncompromising Salafist ideology. They are not going to be swayed by US public diplomacy, or by forseeable changes in US policy. They can only be dealt with forcibly. They must either be captured or killed, and their plans must be disrupted.
But the hard core is surrounded by concentric circles of people who are associated with the hard core by various degrees of fellow-travelling or sympathizing or onlooking. The extent to which the jihadists are able to expand their movement to get material or moral assistance from people in the out rings depends on how well their message resonates.
In my view, the jihadists have been the beneficiaries in recent years of a number of wrong-headed US policies that help their message resonate strongly. If hundreds of innocent people in Gaza have their lives snuffed out in an over-the-top Israeli attack, some as a result of deliberate crimes, with nary a peep from the US Congress, then when your friendly neighborhood jihadist says, “Muslims lives mean nothing to the Americans,” that message is going to get much more play on the street than it would if the US Congress had stepped up and condemned the excessive use of force.
Australian says:
Dan Kervick,
Certainly the “hearts and minds issue” is a core issue. But the “concentric circles of people,” will not be influenced by US Congress pronouncements and condemnations, in this case of Israeli actions, if they perceive, which they will, that this change of American policy arises from the weakness of the latter and from the strength of the “hard core” “militant jihadists” in their war with the US. The concentric circles of support for the militants will only disappear by depriving the latter of the ‘aura’ of being seen as the victors (The ethos of Arab pride trumps all.) against the American hegemon. And that entails the imminent and decisive defeat of the militants in the field of battle, as it happened in Iraq to the Sadrist militias and al Qaeda.
Furthermore, your concentrated reasoning loses its force since your policy contains these two incongruous parts: The first one will destroy by predators and covert operations (Which will be seen in the Muslim world as American excesses) the incubators of “Salafist ideology”, which are the madrassas, while the second, will denounce American and Israeli excesses. Do you seriously believe that such denunciation will have greater influence upon fellow-travellers and sympathisers, than the destruction of the madrassas in which many civilians will be killed, and will win their hearts and minds?
Join the debate
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