Radical Liberals Condemn and Disparage Technocrats

The following exchange took place between an American radical liberal and me on the appointment of the two technocrats Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos as prime ministers of Italy and Greece.

Bruce Wilder says,

You seem to have lost the essential premise: the “looming economic catastrophe” is largely the creation of the technocrats, and “all the misery that implies” has been embraced by the technocrats with all the enthusiasm an 18th century physician had for purgatives and bleeding.

Con George-Kotzabasis says,

Bruce Wilder, your “essential premise” walks on crutches. In a physical crisis in which you might lose your leg you don’t stop from going to a surgeon just because there are bad surgeons about. To label all surgeons (technocrats) as incompetent and refuse to go under their knife is to lose your leg. That is why your argument, factually and intellectually, waddles on crutches.

Bruce Wilder says, 11.13.11 at 6:09 pm

Con George-Kotzabasis @ 105

If your life was threatened by a growing cancer, affecting your lungs or your kidneys, and you went to a surgeon, and the surgeon said, “To save your cancer, I recommend amputation of your leg,” I would hope you would run from the room, with your legs still intact.

These particular neo-liberal technocrats are just these sorts of mad incompetents, prescribing senseless maiming in place of a treatment plan. There are, apparently, no politicians available, to stand up and veto the insanity, “brave” and “charismatic” or otherwise.

The corruption and incompetence of the politicians—indeed, the whole polity—in Greece and Italy—played nearly as critical a part in the epidemiology of crisis as the neoliberal technocrats. It is worth remembering that the popular support for the European project has often rested on the hope of improving the quality of governance and institutions. For all the grousing over the minutiae of Brussels and the trivia of Strasbourg, the hope of European Union was always to promote high-minded, principled liberal institutions as a prophylaxis against authoritarianism and populist corruption. This was, I suspect, always a very big part of the appeal of the euro: German monetary policy for the South, an internationally respected currency immune to runaway inflations, etc. The Italians, as I recall, embraced the euro ahead of every other country; they were overjoyed to be rid of the lira, the joke currency of Europe, so inflated in value that coins were impractical—phone booths required a special token and street vendors gave candies in place of change. The euro is very popular in Greece as well, and I suspect that that popularity, as much as the fecklessness of politicians, is a factor in preventing Greece from taking the obvious step of unilaterally embracing default in abandonment of the euro. (Purely from a technocratic point-of-view, the equivalent of a competent surgeon would be a technocrat doing the preparations in secret, which would make a unilateral return to the drachma feasible. That’s the “right” thing to do for Greece, from a “technical” standpoint and from the standpoint of protecting Greece from the “amputation” of privatisation and a prolonged deflation. An efficient calculating machine would have been crystal clear from the outset that, on the numbers alone, Greek default was inevitable; delay could only prolong and intensify the suffering.)

The Big Picture, here, may well be that economic and institutional centralization has found its limits, at least for the moment. Certainly, the neoliberal architectural principles employed over the last 25 years are a bust. Are we so stupid that neofascism must follow? Many would say that authoritarianism was always an implied part of the neoliberal agenda.

110

Con George-Kotzabasis 11.14.11 at 2:10 am

Bruce Wilder
In serious discussion it is wise to enter it carrying a sieve in one’s hands to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Your crystal clear “efficient calculating machine” that would implement your proposal of default, would be no other than a wise, brave, imaginative, and humane TECHNOCRAT. So what exactly you have against technocrats? They are OK if they adopt your plan and only transported to Hades in toto for their mortal sins, if they don’t! Default was and is always an option. The distinguished economist Deepak Lal and exponent of the Austrian School of economics, long ago suggested such a schema. Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti both presumably have this option in their arsenal to be used as a last resort if everything else fails. But before they use this ‘nuclear’ option, they must try, and be given the right by all objective analysts and commentators, to resolve this economic crisis by ‘conventional’ means that could avoid a default which would open a big hole in their countries GDP and throw their people into pauperization for decades to come.

111

Bruce Wilder says, 11.14.11 at 2:37 am

Instead of “support the troops”, we are now asked to support the neo-liberal technocrats.

Con George-Kotzabasis, are we to take no account of the part the technocrats played in “designing” the euro? Are we to take no account of the failure of the ECB to carry out bank supervision or to regulate derivatives? It is a little late in the progress of neoliberal disaster capitalism to be attributing good faith, let alone expertise, to these bozos.

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

I'm republishing the following article for the readers of this new website.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

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

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

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

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

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

Over to you

How to Overcome the Impasse of the Written Pledge Demanded by the EU from Greece's Major Politicians

By Con George-Kotzabasis—November 23, 20011

The following proposal was sent to the Greek leader of the Opposition Antonis Samaras on 11-23-2011.

Dear Mr Samaras,

The following proposal might overcome the impasse of the signed guarantee without Greece losing its dignity and amour propre

The German politicians, like the Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schauble, who illogically and doltishly insist and persist in their demand that the leader of the Greek Opposition, Antonis Samaras, sign the Memorandum of the 26^th of October as a condition of releasing the sixth packet of financial assistance to Greece, can be likened as an intellectually unguided German torpedo that sunk the Lusitania of Greek dignity and respect that are embodied in the democratic constitution and parliamentary institutions of the country. It was to the latter institutions and to the interim transitory government led by Lucas Papademos that the leader of the Opposition had made an explicit, unequivocal, and unconditional commitment to accept and implement (Subject to some modifications in regard to its implementation.) all the obligations emanating from the Memorandum. Therefore one is nonplussed with this EU demand for a written pledge by the leaders of the three major parties when all of them accepted all the conditions of the Memorandum unequivocally and unconditionally in Parliament and by giving their vote of confidence to the Interim Government of Lucas Papademos who was to initiate the implementation of the decisions of the 26^th of October.

Surely the Germans are not so stupid, or they could be, as to disregard this essential and irremovable commitment the major parties made to the conditions of the Memorandum and demand in its place a formalistic signature. One therefore cannot avoid the suspicion that there might be a hidden agenda behind this ostensibly doltish demand, i.e. the “Sarajevo assassination” of Greece by the Germans, its ousting from the Eurozone by forcing Greece to default and to depart from the European Union. The leader of the Opposition must eschew from falling into this trap, if indeed, such a trap is set in the wings by the leaders of the European Union. But the “assassination of Greece” from the Eurozone could trigger an internecine economic war in Europe that could not be contained, as the sires of such a sinister plan might have hoped, and would lead both to the destruction of the euro and the European Union. Thus it is incumbent on Antonis Samaras’ statesmanship to be not only the saviour of Greece but also the saviour of Europe. This could be accomplished by the following stratagem. The leader of the Opposition giving a written guarantee of the acceptance of all the conditions of the Memorandum as demanded by the troika, but not sending it to the leaders of the European Union but sending it to the Greek Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos. And the latter will convey to the European leaders the consummation of the signed guarantee by the major parties that the former demanded as the sine qua non for the release of the sixth instalment. Hence, the consignment of the written guarantee within the precincts of the Papademos Government will shun any genuflection on the part of Greece toward Europe that would stigmatize and slur the dignity and amour propre of Greece.          

      

Will America Come Out of its Comatose State?

I’m republishing the following post, that was written on October 3, 2008, for the readers of this blog.
By Con George-Kotzabasis

A reply to a very clever American Open Salon

The Global Credit Crunch and the Crisis of Legitimacy-September 30, 2008

By RCMoya612

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

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

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

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

The intellectual Cheating of Liberals

A short reply to a Liberal –By Con George-Kotzabasis

Clearly your vocation in the ‘market of argument’ is to be a peddler in non sequiturs. Why are you shifting the ground of the argument, is it because your pockets are empty of all coins of counter reasoning on the issue? The question as was initially put by Steve Clemons’s use of the John Bolton quote was not whether Israel’s and America’s wars were self-defensive or not but whether there was “moral equivalence” between the deliberate and non-deliberate killing of civilians. Clemons by cheating intellectually, by speciously transforming this argument of moral equivalence into an argument of devaluation of “Muslim and Arab lives” has made himself intellectually and morally persona non grata.

Talleyrand, eloquently and boldly said the following in the face of Napoleon, when the latter deposed the legitimate Ferdinand II and placed his own brother Joseph on the throne of Spain, “Sire, un enfant de famille may gamble away his last farthing—the heritage of his ancestors—the dower of his mother—the portion of his sisters—and yet be courted and admired for his wit—be sought for his talents and distinction—but let him once be detected in cheating at the game, and he is lost—society is forever shut against him.” You likewise, in partaking in this Napoleonesque cheating of Clemons “at the game,” have become your own ‘guest’ as an intellectual and moral pariah.

World Affairs Guru Picks Up Liberal Bastinado to Flail U.S.A.

I'm republishing the following that was written on May 2008 on this new blog hoping its readers will find it to be of some interest. 

A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Mahbubani Responds: Western Intellectual and Moral Cowardice on Israel/Palestine is Stunning

Washington Note, May 29, 2008

Professor Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore argues, with his impeccable credentials as an expert in international affairs, of a dawning shift of economic and political power from the round-eyed transcontinental continents of the West to the slant-eyed continent of the East. And in the eyes of Mahbubani it seems that the U.S. after reaching the peak of power and dominance in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will inevitably fall from the top branch of the tree of power (like Newton’s apple?) pulled by the gravitational force of Asia. Therefore “America should prepare well for a post-American world order”. 

This pending decline of the West and of America is not mainly based on economics that western bears compete with Asian tigers on the global market, but primarily on politics and on the art of political leadership. Although Mahbubani gracefully acknowledges and applauds “the liberal international order which has benefited humanity”, which was the creation of the West and the American hegemon, he claims that presently “Western geopolitical incompetence poses the biggest threats to our international order”. He pinpoints four areas where this incompetence is blatantly demonstrated. The blunders of the war in Iraq and its concatenation to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo bay, the Israel/Palestinian conflict,  the dialogue between the West and the Rest, and global warming. All the four issues of course are the same that the liberal intelligentsia is using to condemn and chastise the Bush administration. Hence Mahbubani by picking up the liberal bastinado to beat the U.S.A. shows himself to be vacuous of any originality in his analysis, since all he does is to replicate and regurgitate the animadversions of the international coterie of liberals who like Charon, are preparing to transport the Bush administration and its Republican successors to Hades. Lastly, he blames and rebukes the U.S. for lacking the will and astuteness in its exercise of global  “governing”  to avail itself the inherent “benign characteristics” of power. Thus implying that in its political engagement with the rest of the world the U.S. is far from being a benign superpower.

The imprescriptible rule in power politics is that there are no benign characteristics in the implementation of power but only pragmatic ones. This is especially so when a nation in its greatness, such as the U.S., is burdened with the historical responsibility to tilt the balance of the world toward peace and to be the supreme arbiter between other belligerent and warring nations. In such a complex context while it’s possible for the U.S. to be benign in its relations with other nations some of the time, it’s impossible of being so all the time. The mere scale of its responsibilities and of having so many balls in the air, forces it to make its judgments on pragmatic grounds and to the highest degree possible with the precision of a juggler that dexterously keeps all balls in the air without letting any of them crashing with each another. And in this magnitude of the scale of its operations it’s inevitable that the U.S. is bound to commit mistakes, especially in the “fog of war” as it has happened lately in Iraq. But the greatness of a nation lies not that it doesn’t make mistakes in its exercise of political, economic, and military power, but in its ability to promptly acknowledge and correct its mistakes, as the U.S. has presently done with the implementation of the new strategy in Iraq that has critically changed the course of the war and which is leading to an American victory.

It’s an easy call for Professor Mahbubani to make his strictures against America ex cathedra without being directly involved in the quotidian, complex, intricate affairs of the world as the U.S. is as the sole superpower. In such involvement there are no magic or scientific prescriptions that can remedy the maladies of the world. There are no precise scientific instruments that can neither timely diagnose the ills of the world nor provide the instant remedies that can cure them. This is the reason why often in world conflicts the “surgeon” is the major domo. Only his dexterous handling of the knife can prevent a situation from getting worse. The Serbian-Bosnian conflict was a clear example. Conversely, the lack of political resolve to use a surgical strike against the Hutu regime in Rwanda led to the genocide of the Tutsis, as it’s also presently happening in Darfur.  But while no surgery is infallible, surgical strikes are unavoidable when a nation confronts an irreconcilable implacable foe. Israel has demonstrated this both in its attack on Iraq’s nuclear plant and on Syria’s incipient one, lately. And an impending attack either by America or Israel on Iran’s nuclear plant might be the next one.

Mahbubani completely ignores this narrative of the complexity and intractability of global conflicts and the often insuperable difficulties that a nation that tries to resolve them finds itself in. To him it’s the incompetence of the U.S. leadership that cannot resolve these problems, and, indeed, due to this incompetence exacerbates them and threatens the stability of the international order. He accuses the West, and by implication the U.S., of “stunning intellectual and moral cowardice” on the Israeli Palestinian conflict and of standing aloof from the “collective punishment” (Me.) of the people of Gaza. Without giving a tad of consideration first that this collective punishment is a result of the intransigency and deadly bellicosity of Hamas, and secondly, in not acknowledging that next to the genocidal punishment of the people of Israel the collective punishment of the Palestinians, even if Israel was to be blamed for, is infinitesimal. Notwithstanding this great threat posed to Israel, Mahbubani claims only the plight of the Palestinian people is the “litmus test” for the West and America.

Further Mahbubani casting himself in the role of “Theodicy”, condemns America for its double standards, for its evilness of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Like a bronze statue impervious and unaffected by the ravages of the weather, Mahbubani is impervious to the ravages of war. He does not recognize that war being the greatest atrocities of all inevitably atrocities of all kinds follow its trail. Even most of its civilized and disciplined combatants will yield to the ugly rules of war—no war can be fought clinically--especially in this case fighting an invisible enemy clad in civilian and often in women’s clothes and who can be identified only at the instance of their terrorist actions. Moreover the religious fanaticism of this “apocalyptic” enemy who believes he follows the orders of his God makes him impervious to any reasonable persuasion that would extract from him information that could save thousands of lives. In such an existential struggle it’s inexorable that human rights and values are secondary and are replaced by human existential rights and values. There are no absolute human rights and the latter are always relative to a particular situation. In the sinking of the Titanic the human rights of men were secondary to the human rights of women and children. Throughout history the values and laws of mankind have a concrete existence and not an abstract one. Their abstract existence is for philosophers but not for philosopher-kings.

Professor Mahbubani by picking the liberal bastinado to beat the U.S. shows himself to be just a follower and an aficionado of the dernier cri, the fads of the global liberal intelligentsia. And he cannot usurp least of all take up legitimately by the power of his intellect and imagination the position of a philosopher-king. He is just a pharisaic sophist superciliously weaving his thesis on the decline of the U.S.A. and its replacement by Asia.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

Reply to Diehard Liberal Pacifist who is Against Intervention in Lybia

I’m republishing this short piece that was written at the earliest stages of the “Intervention” by NATO and the U.S. in Libya, illustrating how wrong the Liberal-Pacifists were about the outcome of the intervention that led to the collapse of the Gaddafi dictatorship.
By Con George-Kotzabasis

Distortion and lack of imagination are not a good way to make your case. On your first point, where in the world has there been even a blip of demonstrable opposition to the Coalition’s intervention in Libya? On your second point, only one bereft of a modicum of imagination cannot see that despite the fact that the “goal of the coalition” is not the “defeat of the dictator,” nonetheless the implementation of the no-fly zone by the Coalition nolens volens enervates the loyalist forces and invigorates the Opposition forces with the great potential to overthrow the dictator. On your third, isn’t a fact that Gaddafi and his military personnel fled the compound which was a command and military control centre just before it was hit by a tomahawk missile? And on your fourth and last point that Obama breached the constitution and should therefore be impeached, is a fiction and should be rejected as such. You deliberately and misleadingly leave out the sentence of the War Powers Act, 1973, which is relevant to the current military engagement of the U.S. in Libya. “The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to notify (M.E.) Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days…without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war.” Only at the passing of 60 days, and if he did not seek an authorized extension for the military deployment would Obama be in breach of the War Powers Act. It seems therefore to me that your ditty about Obama breaching the constitution and should be impeached, is out of tune with the reality of the situation.

You have said to me before that you are some sort of a musician playing the mandolin. It amuses me therefore to see why you switch your talent from ditties to war and strategy that are beyond the depth of a mandolin player.

Further, you will find out at your cost that the land of Australia is not only the land of the kangaroos but also the land of the boomerang that just struck you.

Defection of Gaddafi's Foreign Minister Presages Collapse of Regime

The following short piece that was written on April 1, 2011, predicted the present collapse of the Gaddafi regime.

NATO in Libya Fraught with Peril April 01, 2011

By Sean Kay The Washington Note

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

Sean Kay’s NATO in Libya Fraught with Peril, is politically inept and has already been overcome by events. As we had predicted, the end result of a decisive military intervention by Western powers would be to bring the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. Now the degringolade of the regime is imminent. This is clearly foreshadowed by the defection of foreign minister Moussa Koussa, a close collaborator of Gaddafi and a former director of Libyan Intelligence to boot, that sets the example for other high officials of the regime to follow.

Who would be a better qualified person than a former director of Intelligence to read correctly the vibes and disposition of the Libyan people toward the regime, and more importantly, the latter’s inability to suppress the bouleversement against it, and hence induce Mr. Koussa, for these reasons, to abandon the doomed sinking ship of Gaddafi?

Attack on 9/11 Existential Threat to Western Civilization

By Con George Kotzabasis

September 11 has placed open societies and their democratic freedoms at the crossroads of victory or subjugation. No intellectualist quibbling or obfuscation can cover and evade this historic fact. Fanatic Muslim terrorists pose a threat to civilized societies of biblical proportions, especially if they acquire weapons of mass destruction through rogue states.

Yet the liberal intelligentsia in its necrophilous stance attempts to shift the blame from the terrorist perpetrators to their victims. In their mind's eyes, September 11 was the comeuppance of America for the ills the latter had "rained" upon the oppressed of the world by spreading its rapacious eagle's wings over the globe in its pursuit of dominance and empire. Thus the terrorist’s threat is subordinated and replaced by the liberal invention of its own "evil empire". Turning logic on its head, fanatic terrorism becomes less dangerous and is transformed into a "lesser evil". In an ironic twist, the threat posed by terrorists against the West, is turned into the threat of the "Lone Avenger". But that the latter might ride through the canyons of America, in his pursuit of punishing evil, not with six caliber pistols in his holsters but with nuclear weapons, is of no concern to them. Hence, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are all liberals. Foreordaining the destruction of Western societies by a fanatic horde of religious barbarians.

People, who have studied history in the sublime pages of Thucydides, Gibbon, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Meinecke, and Huntington, can only rally one answer to this great threat. Fight it to the death with no quarter given to it. History has transparently shown, that the greatest atrocities against mankind were committed by religious fundamentalists, and by all omniscient purist ideologues. Examples are the religious wars of 17th Century Europe, which decimated almost two thirds of its population, and the Nazi and Communist ideologies that massacred millions in the 20th Century in their pursuit to breathe life, like God, to their misplaced and displaced utopias. Muslim fundamentalist inspired terror, is also set in among these dangerous misplaced utopias. But it is even more dangerous, in that its proponents and its fanatically blind activists unshakably believe are guided by the invisible hand of Allah and that they are His instruments.

This is the reason why all diplomatic overtures in this war against terrorism and its state sponsors, are doomed to failure. It is just impossible to negotiate any set of compromises of give and take, which is the substance of diplomacy, with these Muslim fundamentalists. It would just be as futile an attempt, as it would be to argue against God.

My first paper, 'Unveiling the War against Terror' presages precisely the above. The Bush Administration would not enter into this course of diplomatic failure and it would not be lured by the United Nations' siren songs. While it was wise of the Administration to forge a notable coalition against terrorism, the latter would not be indispensable in its fight against terror. The same paper predicts the unconventionality of the war against terror, i.e., the primary role Special Forces would play in this war - and the splendid performance of the Australian SAS Forces in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq, exemplified this role - as well as the defeat of the Taliban and al Qaeda, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of most media commentators, who asserted that the American forces would not win and would be bogged down in Afghanistan, just like the Soviet forces. It was also prescient in its finding that strategically it would be a pre-emptive war, hence, anticipating the Pentagon's new strategy against terror and against rogue states. (This paper was sent to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in November 2001 ).

The second paper titled 'U.S. Unilateralism only Alternative to Multilateral Weakness', responds to The Open Letter of the former Governor General Bill Hayden, and of three former prime ministers, Fraiser, Whitlam, and Hawke, and condemns their un-historic and populist stand against America's impending war in Iraq. Their 'un-heroic cunctation', to quote John Maynard Keynes, is another monument of folly build with the debris of Munich. To await for the more and more evanescent imprimatur for the war in Iraq by the UN Security Council, would have been the ultimate inanity. The paper also predicts, that the 'missing star in this constellation of darkness' (the signers of The Open Letter), Paul Keating, would also take an anti-American stand, which soon afterwards he did, but as is his wont as primo uomo, he would give his performance as a "soloist".

The third paper titled, 'How to Legitimize the Interim Government in Iraq’ ... is a strategic proposal and was sent for this purpose to both President Bush and vice-President Cheney in late August 2003. As is shown by subsequent events, the Americans put on a fast track the formation of both the Interim Government in Iraq, as well as the arming of the Iraqis, two of the suggestions that I had made in this paper. I am confident, that my third suggestion, which is the axis of my proposal in this paper, the master plan, i.e., the Iraqi people should be given the equity of the nation's oil wealth, will also be adopted. And the Interim Government of Iraq at its formation in July 2004, will make this historic pronouncement to its people, and by doing so will confer 'unassailable legitimacy' to itself.

All the other papers emphasize that the war against global terror is a two front war, that is, one also has to fight the rogue states if one is serious in defeating this terrorist menace. As these rogue states have the potential of becoming the suppliers of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Moreover, one of them predicts that the defeat of one rogue state, in this case Iraq, will have domino effects upon all other rogue states. And the dominoes have already started falling, as the recent capitulation of Libya has shown.

'The war against global terror and its state sponsors is an existential war, a war of survival, and cannot be fought on humane grounds'. All wars brutalize their combatants and under their immense pressures 'can break the strongest of wills, the best of disciplines'. The war against global terror and its state sponsors magnifies this brutality. Its combatants are fighting, and are threatened by a shadowy enemy and cannot distinguish easily friend from foe. In Iraq, American soldiers are giving candy to Iraqi children, but as soon as they turn their backs to them, the latter are throwing stones at the soldiers in place of thanks. It is due to the heavy pressures of terrorist warfare that the American soldiers' discipline is buckling and, while regrettable and even deplorable, one can see and understand the torture of prisoners in Iraq and in Afghanistan as one result of this. It should also not be forgotten that most of the prisoners were and are terrorists who could provide vital information to their American interrogators about their networks that could save thousands of lives, as well as lead to the defeat of terrorists in the field of battle. 'In such a setting, the torture of prisoners is the tragic price of such a war that statesmanship must pay'.

The papers are not written in the suave language of diplomats nor in the smoothing words of the gentile classes. In times of war, a writer has to mobilize his words, as a general has to mobilize his troops for battle, forcefully. They are written for the purpose of rallying people behind their governments, as a call to arms. They are also written to provoke people to search for the truth and debunk all those who claim to possess it. And last but not least, to salvage the truth of the war from the politically designated distortions and fabrications of its liberal and leftist critics, that has been so characteristic of much Western thinking and so ubiquitous throughout most of the media since 9/11.


May 9, 2004 MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

P.S. The above text is the Introduction of my book “Unveiling The War Against Terror: Fight Right War or Lose The Right To Exist”, that was published in May 2004, and which is available at Readings Bookshops at Hawthorn and Port Melbourne, in Melbourne.

High Court's Decision:Triumph of Legal Activism at the Cost of Australia

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shovelling smoke. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

The High Court’s decision that the Gillard Government’s deportation of asylum seekers to Malaysia is unlawful is a devastating blow to Labour’s immigration policy and a lethal hit on Australian border protection. It’s ostensibly clear that a majority of the honourable justices of the court are not immune to the deadly pestilential virus of legal activism whose source has been a number of admirable but impractical human rights enactments by the United Nations  which can only be implemented by the abrogation of the national sovereignty of nations. But in the context of judicial activism the immigration policy of Labour would stand its trial before judges who already had the sentence of death in their pockets. The majority of the justices argued that Malaysia not being a signatory of the UN Convention to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol is not legally obliged to protect refugees and therefore is not a suitable country to deport refugees. Moreover, according to refugee advocate Julian Burnside, QC, the justices reminded the government that “Australia is signatory to a number of human rights conventions” and is legally bound to abide by them. However, “Commonwealth Solicitor–General Stephen Gageler argued that the government could lawfully declare Malaysia a safe third country even though it had no domestic nor international legal obligations to protect asylum seekers.” But while lawyers may ‘shovel smoke’ at each other on this issue, the repercussions of the High Court’s decision on immigration policy and border protection are of a serious nature and may cause great harm to Australia.

Zabiullah Ahmadi, an Afghan who lives in Kuala Lumpur, predicts than “within weeks there will be lots of boats...many people have been waiting to see this decision.” Hence, the High Court’s decision will encourage asylum seekers to risk their lives in unseaworthy boats with the hope of reaching the shores of Australia which to many of them, in the context of this decision, has become the refugees nirvana. Another refugee observer, Abdul Rahma, a leader of the Rohingga Community in Malaysia, said, the “Australia-Malaysia deal has been a useful bulwark to stop the tide of asylum seekers risking their lives travelling to Australia. Now they would return to the boats.” With the great probability therefore of an increase in boat smuggling and the attached physical and psychological risks that asylum seekers will have to take, the judges of the High Court have unwittingly, and must I add, foolishly, become accessories before the fact of this great danger to the lives of refugees on board of unseaworthy vessels. Furthermore, the honourable justices by ‘signing on’ the UN Convention on refugees, they have written off the long term interests of Australia in regard to its immigration policy that is of such paramount importance to its future balanced demographic mix. A mix that will not threaten its Western based values and the harmony of its democratic society  as it has on many European countries due to an unwise and completely flawed immigration policy that so acrimoniously and precariously has divided the indigenous population and immigrants, as exemplified by the massacre in Norway and the riots in the cities of Britain.

But one must be reminded that the decision of the High Court is a direct outcome of the foolish dismantling by the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the successful “Pacific Solution” of Howard’s government that in fact had stopped the refugee boats coming to the shores of Australia. And the serially incompetent and politically effete Julia Gillard who succeeded him to the Lodge had to pick up this can of worms, i.e., this confused new Labour policy that was kicked by Rudd to his successor with his ousting from the Lodge.

In the context of the decision of the High Court the Gillard government has no alternative other than to change by legislation the immigration laws. And it is good to see that in this task to protect the borders of Australia, the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has stated that the Liberal/National Coalition would support such legislation if the Government would consider Nauru as an offshore refugee centre. It is imperative that this offshore solution must not be replaced by the cretinous stupid proposal of the Greens and their sundry ‘paramours’ of human rights lawyers and refugee advocates that asylum seekers should be held in onshore centres such as on Christmas Island. Such a short sighted harebrained proposal would lead to a stampede of smuggler’s boats hitting the shores of Australia and would be an incentive for ruffians of all kinds to continue entering in greater numbers such a lucrative business.

Finally, the High Court’s decision is a portentous illustration of what is in store for nations who injudiciously and facilely sign international conventions without considering the serious and injurious repercussions such covenants could have on national sovereignty. No wise political leadership would be ‘outsourcing’ the sovereignty of one’s nation.                 

How to Mobilize the Tribal Chiefs of Afghanistan against the Taliban

By Con George-Kotzabasis

There is a great possibility of replicating the Surge in Afghanistan with the following economic-political-military strategy: To shift the estuary of the stream of revenue from narcotics from the Taliban’s and narco-lords’ mouths to the government mouth with the aim to feed the hungry mouths of the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan. That is, to nationalize the poppy industry and make the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan the direct equity holders of the income that accrues from the production of opium. Such a policy will create a powerful self-interest and lead to a Tribal Chief’s awakening that will be more widespread and potent than the Iraqi one, since it will mobilize the whole country, through its tribal chiefs, against the Taliban and the narco-lords.

Thus U.S. forces will not have to go to a wild goose chase of serendipity to get “their lucky break.”

This idea was floated by me in a paper of mine on October 2008.

Euthanasia of the Presidency under Obama

By Con George-Kotzabasis

President Obama is placing the vibrant presidency of the most powerful nation in the world in the hands of the practitioners of euthanasia as if America were in the agony of its death throes. Cynical about America’s global political and military power; cynical about its ability to win the war against its deadly and irreconcilable enemy; cynical about its peoples’ steadfastness and determination to wage war against the fanatical hordes of Islam that threaten America’s heartland; cynical of its European allies’ resolution--under indomitable and sagacious US leadership--to fight the same war; and cynical of the capacity of the best professionally trained armed forces in the world, i.e., the American, to defeat an impromptu organized group of terrorists, who bereft of cool strategic nous in comparison to its ‘infidel’ opponents, are impulsively fighting the Great Satan and all the other little Satans of  the West  with the fanatical cry of Allahu Akbar,  President Obama has chosen, due to this inveterate cynicism and to his guileful and odious politics as we shall  see further down, most imprudently strategically and politically and sans amour propre to retreat from the battlefield, with macabre geopolitical consequences for America’s prestige as a superpower, and take cover behind a no longer fortress America.

As we predicted early in 2009, during the long gestation of the president’s ‘new strategy’ for Afghanistan which under the pretence of giving serious consideration to the request of his senior commander in Afghanistan General McChrystal to increase the troops by 40,000, he dithered his decision not however for the purpose of how to win the war but for the purpose of weighing the political costs that would accrue to him if he had accepted the advice of his general. And when finally he made his decision, he increased the troops by 30,000 while handing to his National Security team a memo setting the strict terms that this increase included the July 2011 start date for a US troop withdrawal. Hence, Obama as Commander-in-Chief, whilst his brave soldiers and astute generals were spilling their blood in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan fighting the Taliban with the aim of defeating them, all he was thinking about were the political costs that would bear upon him as a result of his apparent greater involvement in the unpopular war. So Obama’s ‘serious’ and long deliberations before he made his decision had nothing to do with a new strategy, emanating from his status as Commander-in-Chief, to defeat the Taliban but had everything to do with his status as political shyster who was only concerned about his polls.

The increase of troops by 30,000 was strategically meaningless as it had not the aim of defeating the enemy since it merely served Obama’s political rationale of not seeming to be weak on war while at the same time placating the anti-war crowd by announcing the withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan. What strategist of any substance would increase his forces in the field of battle only to withdraw them without inflicting upon his enemy a mortal blow? And what kind of leader would place an increased number of his soldiers in danger and continue a war that he thinks is unwinnable when his main purpose was to withdraw them from such war, why would he have increased them in the first place if he was planning to withdraw them if not for his concealed ill-design to dupe the American people, to present himself as both a war president and a peaceful one? In reality of course, Obama is neither of these but a political Shylock who demands his pound of flesh from his troops fighting in Afghanistan in order to play his despicable politics at home so he can placate both those Americans who support the war and those who are against it.

From Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Charles Martel, to Napoleon all strategies had a clear and unique goal, to defeat the foe. Only President Obama, who as the most repulsive of political manipulators is wantonly sacrificing the interests of the nation to his own narrow political interests, is disgracefully and timorously traducing this irreversible principle of war and turning himself into a cartoonist mockery as Commander-in-Chief of a great nation.

Afghanistan during Obama’s political campaign was a “war of necessity” that was neglected by President Bush and a war that must be won. But according to Bob Woodward’s new book titled Obama’s Wars, this is no longer so. Obama is quoted as saying, “This needs to be a plan about how we are going to handed it off and get out of Afghanistan.” And the outcome of the policy review and its long deliberations was the offspring of “political considerations,” according to a State Department official. Obama himself reportedly said to Senator Lindsey Graham, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party” on the issue of Afghanistan. General Petraeus felt so affronted by White House demands for an exit strategy at all costs that he told his aids, “They are f...king with the wrong guy.” Another senior general said that the announcement of the withdrawal by President Obama, gave “sustenance to the Taliban.” Moreover, the policy review has engendered serious divisions within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Council, and the Defense Department and between American and Afghan officials. Jim Jones, the National Security adviser, calls the ‘bosom’ advisers of Obama, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel variously as the “mafia” the “campaign set” and the “politburo.” And General Petraeus has dubbed Axelrod as the spin artist in residence, and I would add the spin-master who can win elections and lose wars. 

These revelations of Bob Woodward are toxic to Obama’s presidency and threaten to unleash a spate of resignations of top echelons of the Administration. In short, the presidency at this critical moment of national security and war is in a state of disarray. And no matter how he is going to re-arrange the musical chairs of his sinking presidency after losing the better performers, the future ones that will occupy them will be the worst performers that he could get. No one of sterling qualities, of the best and the brightest, will have an inkling to join an intellectually, politically, morally, and strategically bankrupt administration and be branded everlastingly with such an ignominiously failed presidency. Obama by debasing the political currency of a great nation will become the victim of Gresham’s Law. The bad and base currency of circulating officials that will bid for the positions of the Administration will drive the good and golden currency of officials out of circulation for these posts. Hence Obama’s future administration will be filled by political parvenus, professional opportunists, and Cagliostro like political impostors and all ‘playing their tunes’ under the conductors of spin. Such an outcome will seriously undermine America’s prestige and éclat as a superpower. It will momentously endanger the vital interests of the nation and its security by enticing its mortal enemies to attack it, as they see that the rudder of America in the rough seas of the world is in the hands of an incompetent and weak president. The question is whether Americans will allow this to happen and whether they will have the intelligence and courage to use all means to stop it and put an end to Obama’s Directorate of social democracy and to stop at the eleventh hour the euthanasia of the presidency.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now     

Attack on Iran: two Strategic Strikes One Waiting in the Wings

I'm republishing the following piece for the readers of this new blog.

By Con George-Kotzabasis reply to:

The Lies Of Hiroshima Are The Lies Of Today

By John Pilger

On Line opinion, August 14, 2008

The historical fact is, which Pilger deliberately brushes over so he can make his intellectually disingenuous and moral argument, that the fear at the time was that the Germans might get the bomb first not that “Russia was our enemy,” quoting misleadingly General Groves, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt had an amicable relationship with Stalin and believed their two countries after the war could reach a modus vivendi and indeed, cooperation. Moreover, the head of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, and some of its other scientists, was a financial supporter, if not a clandestine member, like his brother, of the Communist Party of the USA, and hardly would have taken the directorship of the project if the bomb was to be used “to browbeat the Russians,” as Pilger claims. 

The intelligent errors of the CIA and all of its European counterparts in their estimates that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, Pilger cleverly transforms them into lies, appealing to the conventional wisdom of the hoi polloi, so he can do his own disinformation in regards to Iran’s covert planning to acquire nuclear weapons, by dubbing it also as a lie, manufactured by the “discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition, the MEK”, according to him, so he can give credibility to his own lies.

For what strategic reason would the US and its ally Israel attack Iran, whilst the former is involved at the moment in two long wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, other than the great threat that a nuclear Iran would pose to the region and to the strategic interests of the one and to the existence of the other? Whom the US would have “to browbeat” by letting loose from their silos their nuclear missiles against Iran, other than the latter?

In my opinion, if Iran is going to be attacked either by the US or Israel or both the strategic planning of the attack would be made up with two strikes. The first one would be to attack Iran with a devastating “rain” of conventional weapons that would target not only its nuclear plants but also its civilian, military, and religious leadership with the aim of decimating them. If however, its triangular leadership miraculously escapes its destruction and retaliates either against the naval and land forces of the US or Israel or any of the other Gulf States, then such retaliatory action by Iran would call a second strike executed either by Israel or the US with nuclear weapons. And it’s in this dual strike, if it becomes evident to the Iranian leadership of American or Israeli determination and resolve to use their powerful armaments against Iran, that a real possibility exists of a palace revolt among its leadership that would oust the radicals and replace them with moderates who would be prone to accept the international community’s demand that Iran ceases the enrichment of uranium. 

Over to you

America Hijacked by a Lemon

Obama’s West Point Speech Regurgitation of his Failed Foreign Policy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

America hijacked by a Lemon!  This will be the historical caption and history’s verdict on President Obama in his foreign policy misadventures of weakness. Who could have thought that the third rate powers of Brazil and Turkey would have the chutzpah and insolence to rudely supplant and supersede U.S. diplomacy on a most grave issue of our times, i.e., the attempted acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, by their own diplomacy, if America was not perceived under Obama as being weak and disrespectful? And the West Point speech clearly showed that the President still believes that diplomacy sans ‘rattling the sabres’ remains the pivot of his foreign policy despite the fact that this policy abysmally failed to deliver on his primary goals. That is, enticing the enemies of the U.S. to take the diplomatic road and repossess, by this ‘loving diplomacy’ toward implacable foes, the prestige and respect America had prior to the so called dispossession of these attributes by his Texan predecessor.

President Obama stuck to his geopolitical ignorant denial, due to lack of imagination and political nous, does not realize that a symphony, a ‘concert of peace’ having as players other powers can only succeed and be applauded if it has a Karajan as conductor. It is this role of the indispensable conductor in the realm of geopolitics that America has lost with the ‘sitting’ of Obama in the Oval Office. However, there are dawning auspicious signs that the lemon that Americans elected as president is in the process of being squeezed out. But the danger is that by the end of this process, the United States itself might be squeezed out of its strength as the sole superpower.  

  

No Misunderstanding of a Changing Taliban Front

I'm republishing the following short piece for the browsers of this new blog.

A reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Understanding a Changing Taliban Front

Post Global, June 23, 2008

By Dr. Ali Ettefagh

In an apocalyptic religious cult as the Taliban, criminality has no separate existence as all means of warfare are justifiable in the eyes of fanatics. A “conditional amnesty” follows the rudimentary stage of defeat of the Taliban in the field of battle and cannot be a precursor of that defeat “that should be traded with the Taliban promise to re-group as a non-violent, unarmed political party in Afghanistan”. This follows the logic of the Irish experience, as Dr. Ettefagh himself points out, with the realization “of Irish militants that they could not win and had to settle for a deal”.

Hence, “a changing Taliban front” must not be based on the misunderstanding that NATO and the  Americans should start negotiating with the Taliban before the ”umbilical cord” of the latter is cut from Pakistan and thus strategically weakening it. And this cut can only be accomplished by the incursion of Coalition and American troops of Pakistan’s borders and the destruction of Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries and supplies.

In a war of global borderless terror, a nation that cannot prevent, either due to a political unwillingness or military incapacity, terrorists from using its territory as havens of safety, supplies and recruitment, the principle of national sovereignty is completely inconsistent with the military and strategic goals of such war and is inherently obsolete.  

Your opinion…

War on Terror Must Include Imams who Preach their Evil Doctrine in Mosques

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s utter foolishness to fight al Qaeda and its sundry holy warriors in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia and at the same time allow the “sires” of the jihadists to propagate from the sanctuaries of their unholy Mosques their evil doctrine against the West and its Great “Satan”America. They should be immediately arrested and incarcerated by special urgent retrospective legislation passed at least in all the countries of the West.


The war against global terror should be not only against its armed contingents but also against its religious ideologues. It should be a war on all fronts. And the imams who operate in the West inciting and recruiting young Muslims to their “caliphatic” cause should not be permitted to claim any rights under the loose garments of human rights lawyers.

The Danger of Tyros Handling War Strategy

A short reply by Con George-Kotzabasis on:

Clinton’s Statement on Kyl-Lieberman Resolution

Like the two eminent commentators of the New York Times  Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, respectable in their own professions as an economist and art critic respectably, and a bevy of politicians like Nancy Pelosi and John Reid, not so respectable because of their populist stunt, all of them being  novices par excellence in the affairs of war who have attempted to pass judgment on the war in Iraq and cashier its victory despite evidence to the contrary, we now have another “tired less” tyro joining them in war strategy, the scholar and blogger Steven Clemons of the Washington Note. The latter indirectly rebukes Senator Clinton for her support and vote of the Kyl Lieberman resolution that designates the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, fearing that this will allow Bush to manipulate this resolution and use it to attack Iran.

He calls therefore on Senator Clinton to exercise “leadership in passing an explicit Senate resolution forbidding Bush from taking action against Iran without clear advice and consent from Congress”. But such action is not a declaration of war against Iran needing the authorization of Congress. It’s a strategic force de frappe on the part of the US against Iran in which the elements of secrecy and surprise are pivotal and decisive in the success of such an attack. Therefore Clemons’ call is strategically oxymoronic.     

Barbarians Inside The Gates

The following paper was written on October 9, 2004. It's republished here for the readers of this new blog hoping they will find it to be of some interest. 


By Con George-Kotzabasis 

A deadly Trojan horse has been placed in the midst of the metropolises of Western civilization and, like Troy, is threatening its destruction. Throughout Europe, North America, and Australia, the belly of this deadly Horse is already bursting open delivering and unleashing a horde of fanatic barbarians on the cities of the civilized world, whose holy agenda decrees the wiping -out of Western institutions and their open, tolerant and free societies, and the genocide of their peoples by the fire of Allah's hell.This is the nightmare scenario that countries of the economically developed and free world are facing as a result of their humanitarian and generous, but replete with folly, immigration policies that allowed such vast numbers of mostly unassimilable Muslim immigrants with 'exponential' birth rates, to become permanent residents and citizens of their countries. (In the Netherlands almost one third of children under the age of thirteen are Muslim. No wonder that the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis argues, that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century".) As inexorably, not an insubstantial number of these Muslims of the diaspora will become terrorist - fodder for the likes of bin Laden, as Mohammed Atta, the Western educated ringleader, as well as so many other terrorists who have been also educated in Western universities, as the murderous group of 9/11 has shown, whose terrorist cell was hatched in Hamburg Germany. This is especially so for many young unemployed Muslims in the West, who have been brought up within the strict confines of their rigid religion and who are therefore psychologically more susceptible to the calls of their fundamentalist imams for a Jihad against the infidels, making them therefore prone to become martyrs in this holy war against them. Hence the terrorist barbarians are not at the gates of civilization but inside its gates.



September 11 was a wake up call to all governments of the democratic world to the mortal threat that Muslim fundamentalists posed to their peoples. However, despite the exploding sound of this call, only a few governments are willing to recognize this great danger -whose gathering dark clouds teeming with lightning bolts are hovering over the cities of the world threatening their peoples with total annihilation -and stand-up against it. Apparently, only a handful of them have the intellectual capacity, imagination, and historical insight to perceive this great danger, and the resolve and moral mettle to take the necessary relentless measures and actions to prevent this catastrophe of biblical proportions from happening. America, Britain, Australia, Italy, Poland and the thirty other countries who have deployed their armed forces to fight global terror in Iraq under their politically and morally strong and historically savvy leaderships, will be acknowledged and renowned by history as the countries that saved Western civilization from this lethal attack by this horde of fanatically necrophilous barbarians. The no quarter given, relentless retaliation of these governments to this existential challenge of global terrorism to the civilized peoples of the world, will be totally justified by future historians, as has been the stand of those nations who fought against Nazi and Communist totalitarianism and who made the necessary and stupendous sacrifices to save the world from these two regimes of evil in the Twentieth century.





DESPITE US ERRORS AN WITHDRAWAL IS UNTENABLE


Even if one concedes that serious mistakes have been made by the Americans post March 2003 after the defeat of Saddam, which was part and parcel of the war against global terror, such as indiscriminately disbanding all Iraqi military units, and not dealing with the incipient insurgency of urban terrorists last April by using overwhelming force against it and nipping it in the bud, instead of ceasing their military offensive, as they did in Fallujah, and passing the control of that city to a former Iraqi general, who proved to be completely inept in disarming the insurgents. The strategic goal of the military planners against the insurgency, should have been the prompt and devastating defeat of the insurgents in this city, either by their mass capture or mass annihilation, which would serve as a deadly example to all other insurgents in other hot-bed provinces in Iraq, with the high probability that this would have led to their complete demoralization and surrender, as I had suggested in a previous paper of mine last April, which was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Canberra. (It seems now that the Pentagon is using exactly this strategy, as the capture of Samarra by American and Iraqi forces and the elimination of the insurgents, has shown.) As the outcome of this erratic implementation of the Pentagon's military plan, by starting an offensive against the insurgents and then stopping it halfway before achieving its goals, Iraq has now become "the crucible of global terror", to quote Tony Blair. This is the glaring fact that all governments who have committed themselves to fight global terror are presently confronting.



To turn tail and run now from Iraq would not be merely foolish, it would be the greatest military error against the war on terror, as it would deliver a tremendous victory to the terrorists on a global scale. It would reinforce in the minds of the terrorists, as the withdrawal of US forces from Beirut and Mogadishu had done, as a result of the casualties Americans had suffered in these two cities, by presidents Reagan and Clinton respectively, that America and other Western nations lack the resolve to stand-up to them and fight, and will induce them to be even more lethally aggressive against the 'cowardly' West. Hence the critics and opponents of the war, who blame the Bush administration for exacerbating terrorism in Iraq and call for the US withdrawal from Iraq, are purblind and cannot see that such action would be the greatest error that one could commit against the war on global terror. It would surpass by a great order of magnitude all the mistakes that the Pentagon committed in Iraq. If indeed the opponents of the war are right, that the US incursion of the country and the overthrow of Saddam has strengthened and intensified terror in Iraq, then the reasonable course for nations who believe that there is no other alternative but to fight and defeat this global menace, would be for these nations to deploy their armed forces in Iraq and inflict a deadly blow on global terrorism, by defeating the insurgents decisively. Or if they are unwilling to spill the blood of their own soldiers, they should at the least support morally and politically the soldiers of the nations, i.e., the American - led coalition, who are brave enough to sacrifice their own lives in the cause of global security and freedom.



This would be the wise course to follow, to correct the mistakes of the Americans, instead of aggravating and compounding these mistakes, by running away from Iraq, and in spite of these errors (in all wars errors are made ), to unflinchingly support America in this historic and deadly confrontation with these medieval barbarians, whom only America's military might can defeat comprehensively, among all other nations in the world.






THE ENEMY WITHIN


But the war against global terror and Muslim fanaticism will not be won, unless the governments who have pledged themselves to fight global terror also deal with and tackle the cunning and deceitful enemy that lies within their borders. To carry out this far from easy task, these governments have to realize that they can no longer be tolerant, on the basis of laws of non-discrimination on religious grounds, to the breeding grounds of terrorism that entangle, ivy-like, the edifices of Western cities, i.e., the mosques and Islamic schools, of whom a minority of, but highly influential, imams and teachers, preach hate against the mores of Western civilization and of their peoples, inciting young Muslims to enlist in a holy war against the Great Satan, America, and on all other nations that embody the cosmopolitan values of Judeo-Greco-Roman civilization.



The cardinal question therefore is, how to sterilize and make barren the breeding grounds of terrorism that are ensconced in the cities of the West whose deadly offspring are the enemy within. Since the idea of repatriation and resettlement by means of a monetary incentive for millions of Muslims, who have now made their home in Western countries, is no longer feasible - fathered by that prophet of British politics Enoch Powell, who in his Birmingham "Rivers of Blood" speech on April 20 1968, clearly and ominously predicted the deadly conflicts that would arise between Britons and British citizens of colonial background who had settled in England, and who with prescience had opposed the so called humanitarian immigration policies of both Labor and Conservative governments - one has to consider other lines of action. One of them would be the immediate cessation of funding these mosques and schools by governments, unless the former adopt in their curricula a primary undiluted course of 'no leaks' assimilation for their students to the mainstream culture of the nation that they have chosen freely to live in, and put an end to all 'traffickers' of the disastrous policy of multiculturalism, which with mathematical precision divides a nation. Another one would be the swift passing of special, indeed emergency, legislation that would make it easier for the police and for the relevant government officials to jail or deport, radical imams and teachers who propagate, either openly or cunningly and insidiously, a holy war against the West. Furthermore, to attenuate and diminish the high birth rate of Muslim families, governments should introduce a policy of negative incentives, which could stop this high birth rate such as paying to all families of the nation, children’s allowances up to the number of four children. Any children born beyond that number would not be entitled to any allowances. Nor would any allowances be paid to children born from a second marriage, whose fathers or mothers already have four children from their previous marriages. This measure would bring the birth rate as close as it is possible to the common standard of Western societies and to the ethos and aspirations of motivated modern nuclear families. It would also stop the 'racketeering' of phony separations and single motherhoods, whose deliberate purpose is to abuse and defraud the system of family payments, and whose side - effect is, the perennial continuation of voluntary unemployment among this group of men and women.  



Undoubtedly, these harsh measures will raise a hurricane of protests from Muslim organizations of the diaspora and from Muslim states. This will be followed by a chorus of international lawyers and of the liberal intelligentzia from the well-heeled countries of the West, who will denounce these measures as brutal and heartless to poor families, viciously racist, and chauvinistic, striking a terrible blow to democracy and opening the way to an authoritarian state and even worse. But this soft potpourri of legal and intelligence gnomes are unwilling to recognize, and it might be beyond their depth, that the grossly mistaken immigration policies of the nations of the West are now coming to haunt them with their destruction. And the only way to prevent this destruction is for the governments of these nations to take tragically severe measures to correct this gross mistake of past governments that now threatens their peoples with extinction, either by weapons of mass destruction or by the upshot of demographics.





DEFEAT OF TERROR LIES IN ITS LACK OF SUCCESS


 One must recognize that the terrorists are technically educated barbarians, with PC's in one hand and with the distorted fragments of the Koran in the other - who consider it to be the only fountain of knowledge - lacking the open- mind of a universal education; unread in the great writings and literature of all peoples and of all ages; mentally untouched by their rich Arab culture, literature and philosophy; unread in the great philosophical writings of Al-Farabi, who placed rationality above the revealed truth of the Sharia nor in the equally brilliant writings of Ibn-Sina (Avicenna ) and of Ibn-Rushid (Averroes ), who both placed human reason above religion, and of Omar Khayyam, who never believed in Providence or in any other World but this one, valuing the sensual pleasures of this world as the fill to the brim of life. Being ignorant of the existence of this great Arab intellectual treasure, that was an essential element of the cornerstone of Western civilization and of the Italian Renaissance, their minds locked in the fanaticism of fundamentalist Islam and its death-cult, they have no respect for any other peoples' religions except their own. Instead they zealously believe that the followers of all other religions are destined to go to hell and only Muslims will enter the gates of infinite paradise, especially if they are anointed by martyrdom. It is of such stuff that these implacable enemies of Western civilization are made.

Confronting such suicidal fanatics, who fervently believe that the West and its Great Satan, America, are responsible and culpable for all the ills that have befallen upon Muslim countries; determined to destroy this source of evil by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as soon as they are in their possession, the political leaders of the West, and especially of America, are deprived of any soft options and are forced to take on the hard option of the "unsheathed sword".

The art of diplomacy, the laudable deliberations of the United Nations for peace making, which could be effective when one deals with a rational foe, are totally ineffective when one confronts an irrational enemy, whose only 'rational' communication, in his hearing, is with God. That is why the academics who teach their students the 'management' of terrorism by a diplomatic demarche as the only rational way to counter and thwart it, rather than war, which is so costly in human and economic terms and without making certain its defeat, are not only starry-eyed, but also debar themselves from the disciplines of politics and of war strategy. Management presupposes and involves rational processes, which to the terrorists is terra incognita, and therefore with algorithmic precision is bound to fail.



But wherein lies the answer to this conundrum of how to defeat global terror and its state sponsors? History's edict provides the clear and indefeasible answer to this intricate issue. When a nation fights a swarm of religious fanatics, depriving these fanatics of the ability to launch successful operations against their enemies is the most effective way to defeat them, as the terrorists, being no longer successful in their attacks against the West and in their attacks against the American-led coalition in Iraq, will find the "mouse of doubt" implanted in their hearts (a doubt whose epiphany will reveal to them, that after all they might not be in God's favor) gnawing, slowly but surely, at their belief that they are the instruments of Allah. This, in itself, will compel them to abandon their cause.



And this is why the successful outcome of the war in Iraq for the U.S. - led coalition and the introduction of democracy to its ravaged people, is of such vital importance. The decisive defeat of the terrorist insurgents will unfold a dawn of a bright future for the people of Iraq, and also commence the beginning of the quick end of global terror.



I rest on my oars:your turn now