Left is Wrong: Deterrence Will not Work

In view of the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, I'm republishing the following article that was written on April 3, 2012, for the readers of this blog.

By Con George-Kotzabasis April 3, 2012

A reply to: Right is Wrong: Deterrence Will Work by Fareed Zakaria

The Australian March 20, 2012

The American political commentator, Fareed Zakaria argues in the above titled article in The Australian that even if sanctions against Iran fail to prevent the latter from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, it can be deterred from using it by the preponderance of the U.S.A. in the firepower of its own nuclear weapons. Therefore, such a policy, according to Zakaria is better and safer than a policy of preventative military action with all the imponderable dangers that would stem from it. And he ridicules and is scornful of the conservative right, such as The Heritage Foundation and The American Enterprise Institute, for arguing of the ineffectiveness and futility of deterrence against the regime of the Mullahs, and, therefore, proposes a major military strike to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In support of his policy of deterrence he quotes the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, from an article the latter wrote in The New Republic in the eighties—while making fun of him since Krauthammer now is in favour of a military strike--that “deterrence, like old age, is intolerable until one considers the alternative.” Topping up his argument or should I rather say bottoming it down, Zakaria alleges that a strike against Iran would only delay its nuclear programme by only “a few years while driving up domestic support for the government in Tehran.” And he sedately poses the question that “if deterrence does not work then why are we not preparing preventative war against Russia which still has a fearsome arsenal of nuclear weapons?”

Zakaria completely disregards the fact that Russia today is not a deadly enemy of the West as it was in the past, unlike the Theocracy of Iran which clearly is. Further, as a serious commentator surprisingly he does not make a distinction between attacking a country that is fully armed with nuclear weapons that would open the doors of the MAD house to both combatants as such attack would lead to their Mutual Assured Destruction, and a country that lacks a nuclear stockpile as Iran at this stage is. It was precisely this mutual annihilation hovering like a Damocles Sword over the heads of the two rational superpowers that prevented them from attacking each other during the cold war. And the Cuban crisis was a limpid illustration of how both superpowers withdrew from the brink of this mutual destruction. But in the case of a nuclear armed Iran, one would have to be highly optimistic against the grim fact that the animus of a religious fanatic leadership, whose aim is to set up the new Caliphate of the twelfth imam Mahdi, would be supplanted by the dictates of reason and would desist, either directly or through its terrorist proxies, to launch a nuclear attack.

Moreover, Zakaria is oblivious of two substantial factors that make incomparable the situation existing during the cold war and the present situation of the hot war of multi-franchised ‘anarchic’ terror, in regards to deterrence. One of them is technological and the other is the strategically unidentifiable non-recognizable enemy until the moment he acts. Advanced technological knowhow is being easily accessed through the internet by the masses giving any individual with rudimentary knowledge the ability to construct lethal weapons, and, indeed, nuclear ones once their components are provided by rogue states, and has at the same time opened variable avenues to their portability to the countries against which they can be used. The second factor is the ample supply of Islamist mujahedin martyrs, in their ardent chase of the seventy-two virgins, camouflaged in civilian clothes, has also opened innumerable strategically invisible conduits for the delivery of these lethal weapons that can be used by any Islamist regime against the ‘Great Satan’, America, and its offspring in the West. Iran therefore can use stealthily these terrorists as ‘rocket launchers’ laden with nuclear weapons against any Western country it wishes to attack without identifying itself as the culprit that would immediately trigger a counterattack by the West. In such a situation therefore deterrence is totally a futile and ineffective strategy, and most dangerous to boot, in preventing an Islamist regime to launch a nuclear attack on America or on any other Western country. How can anyone deter fanatics from becoming nuclear weapon carriers in their pursuit of God-given paradisiac boudoirs? How can anyone deter the Islamist theocracy of Iran, with its virile libido dominandi to be the dominant power in the region and the paramount leader of Islam, from recruiting terrorists, with the cult of death as their banner, and ‘donning’ them with a panoply of nuclear weapons to be used against the infidels of the West? Or use them directly against Israel and thus fulfil its Godly agenda in annihilating the Jews? Zakaria by not seeing, and even not contemplating, this changed war milieu that exists presently in comparison to the cold war, makes his strategy of deterrence against Iran a folly of unprecedented magnitude in the annals of strategic thinking.

As to his comment, that a strike against Iran would only delay its nuclear programme while lending support to the Mullahcratic regime, he is blind to the great potential that such a surgical strike, whose target will not only be its nuclear facilities but also will have in its scope to effectively destroy the hated leadership of Tehran and the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the Quds Force, contrary to his dire prediction, could bring on its heel a regime change by ushering the Opposition in power that would be friendly and amicable to the West and would accept and conform to the requests of the latter to stop all Iran’s activities toward developing nuclear weapons in the future. Another great danger, of which Zakaria appears to be unconcerned, is that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran would start a nuclear race by other nations in the region to acquire them too and hence would augment the probability of a nuclear war either by deliberation or by accident. No deterrence could nullify the calculus of probability based on increasing numbers. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by a greater number of nations would lead with mathematical precision to a first strike by a nuclear device. Zakaria’s proposal of deterrence as an effective strategic instrument against Iran is not worthy of consideration by serious policymakers.

I rest on my oars: your turn now…

Suspicion Toward Muslim Women Hidden Behind The Veil Of Victimisation

The following is a would be reply to Dr. Shakira Hussein’s talk at Readings in Carlton, on March 15, 2016, with the title “From Victims to Suspects”…, which I was not allowed by the chairperson to elaborate, as she considered my questions hostile and uninteresting towards Muslim women.    

In the mad world of the Taliban, ISIS, and suicidal Islamist terror, it is not difficult for sane people to become “paranoiacs”.

By Con George-Kotzabasis  

You are attempting to hide suspicion behind the veil of victimisation whose presumed agent is Islamophobia. The real agent, however, is your own religion that classifies women in comparison to men as second--rate beings.  

As long as Muslim women cannot attain true femininity and banish the burqa and the hijab, symbols of their absolute bondage to Muslim male supremacy and its sex morals, they will have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them. As most Muslim men, if not open supporters of Jihad, are at least justifying the actions of Jihadists, since they believe unswervingly that all actions, no matter how atrocious, against the Great Satan America and all other Western Nations that are in league with it and are responsible for all the ills that have been fallen upon Muslim countries, are justifiable. A very thin line separates justification from Jihad and it takes only one step to be on the other side. And since Muslim women are submissive and docile to their men, they have to abide to the beliefs and actions of the latter. Hence, potentially, they can become active participants in this Holy War against the West. Hence, there are solid grounds for suspicion.

Only Muslim women who have the moral and intellectual fortitude, like the brave and great Somalian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to renounce and liberate themselves from the rigid tenets of the Koran can remove the shadow of suspicion that are enshrouded in. And no professed adherence to Multiculturalism and human rights can bail out either Muslim men or women from this suspicion. What human rights would the devotees of the Koran give to the offspring of Satan? And don’t reply to me with the platitude that you can make distinctions among the people of the Western world. For how can you distinguish good infidels from bad infidels?

  

Defeat not Degrade ISIS Correct Strategy

I'm republishing this short article for the readers of this new blog.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Brief reply to: An Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) First Strategy

By Robert Bunker Small Wars Journal August 30, 2014

One has to make a clear distinction between real existent hostility (ISIS) and potential hostility (by other uncertainly defined actors), so one has to be decisive in one’s choice which hostility to confront first. Robert Bunker is correct in stating, “an Islamist state has to be considered more dangerous than a secular autocratic state.” The latter is “ideologically bankrupt” whereas the former because of its “spiritual ideological component” has “a very real expansionist potential” and therefore is “more dangerous.” According to this logic therefore, one has primarily to confront and eliminate this danger emanating from ISIS and not merely weaken the latter for the purpose of maintaining it as a force that would prevent other forces inimical to the United States from filling the “political and institutional vacuum” left by the decimation and total defeat of ISIS. First, ISIS in its short reign, other than verbally and ceremonially as true believers of the Koran, have hardly established a “political and institutional” framework that with its ousting would be occupied by other belligerent and hostile forces. The area upon which its so called Caliphate was established, from which thousands of people fled to save their lives, will once again, with the total defeat of ISIS, revert back to its original occupiers, Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis, who with the exception of Syrian supporters of Assad, the latter two groups are hardly enemies of the USA.

The defeat of ISIS by American airpower and by forays of its Special Forces and its allies of Kurds and Iraqis on the ground will be a decisive blow to all Islamist terrorists, including those of al Qaeda. And it will put an end to the flow of its recruits from internal and external sources. I would suggest therefore that to achieve this great victory one must adopt the strategy that will defeat and eliminate ISIS and not the strategy that will degrade and weaken it. 

Con George-Kotzabasis http://kotzabasis3.wordpress.com

Open Letter to Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis

By Con George-Kotzabasis November 27, 2015

A few days ago, Reuters ranked the Tsipras government as the worst ever government of all times amongst the developed and Western world. It was this government that you served with overweening pride and engendered, by your unprecedented irresponsibility in the annals of politics and quack economic policies as its finance minister, this historically ignominious rank in which Reuters placed Greece.

Strutting, in an extraordinary theatrical performance, the European corridors of power clad in the mournful colours of a mortician with a red ribbon around your neck symbolising that you were no run-of-the-mill mortician but a proletarian one (It was this red ribbon that within the short span of six months would strangle economically both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Greece) who had come to slay and bury the “Minotaur” of capitalist exploitation and save the peoples of Greece, and indeed, of Europe, from the grisly and greedy fangs of their exploiters. But in an ironic twist of fate, after the guffaws for your thespian performance on the stage of Europe by your European confreres and the kick-out from the economic portfolio by your comrades for your total failure as finance minister, you have finished-up not as a saviour of Greece and Europe but as a slaughtering gladiator. Killing the beasts of capitalism in your global performance of panem et circenses before an audience of bien pensants and nipple-fed intellectuals, AKA the lost generation, who have learnt nothing from recent history and who lack the spiritual and moral fortitude to free themselves from their childish obsession of the socialist nirvana.     

The Tsipras Government’s performance since its ascension to power on January 25 can be described by its three basic characteristics, infantilism, naiveté, and insouciant irresponsibility, which, as its finance minister, you embodied to the highest degree. Don’t expect to be treated kindly, at least by me, for the most unkind cut you inflicted upon the Greek people. Within the short time of six months you managed to destroy the economy by closing the banks and bringing in capital controls, and nipping in the bud the positive results of the Samaras Government that slowly but decisively were pulling the country out of the crisis. For the first time after the long economic stagnancy and recession, growth was recorded to be 0.8% and expected to be 2.5%-2.9 of GDP for the years 2014 and 2015 respectively, according to the IMF; also, unemployment was prevented from rising to 35%, as was predicted by eminent analysts, and indeed, had fallen by 2%, from 26% to 24% by the end of 2014. And all these heartening results happened within two and a half years under the prime ministership of Antonis Samaras. But you, like a revengeful immortal Olympian god full of envy for these mortal achievements of the Samaras Government, destroyed them with ambrosial delight. Your ludicrously eccentric policies and your barren and inflexible arrogant stand in your negotiations with the European Union brought the country back into recession and you capped this with a bill to Greece of an extra 90 billion to be paid to its creditors, which would come from the pockets of future Greek taxpayers. This was your enviable success story in contrast to the real success story of Samaras.

And yet blind and callous before this stupendous calamity that you delivered upon Greece, you proudly and insensitively claim to be “sitting on top of the world.” (I would add in your first word “sitting,” an h, so to make it a better fit to your ravishing pleasure: It must have been a relishing sensation to you, almost an aphrodisiacal one, defecating on “top of the world”.) You should be instead sitting in a dock charged with high treason for the great hurt and harm you afflicted, with such insouciant irresponsibility, upon the ordinary people, whom with unheard hypocrisy you claim to represent. And no wonder that your European confreres were not listening to the bullshit you were emitting in your negotiations with them on the Memorandum, and their justifiable rebuke of your crank economic policies delivered to them in the form of lectures, in an aura of omniscience.

You claim to be a “liberal Marxist.” But you seem to be oblivious of the dismal fact that “Marxism” with any epithet before it, is “a skull that will never smile again,” to quote the ex-Marxist Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski. You are not a denizen of the real world but a denizen of the phantasmagorical world of Marxism whose legacy left behind not the Eden of Marx’s polytropos, many-sided, man, fishing in the morning, playing the flute in the evening, and writing poetry at night, but the police state of the NKVD, Gulag Archipelagos and Killing Fields.

In a footnote of the history of the twentieth-first century you will be described as a crank economist, a cowardly chicken gamester–taking risks not with your own but with other people's money– and intellectual highjacker, who filched the writings of Marx and Keynes for the purpose of making your hybrid mulish economic doctrine, on whose back, as finance minister, you carried Greece to perfidious treasonable economic and political destruction.

Alas, after your pernicious mischiefs and gross offences toward the Greek people, you stand between the ferryman to Hades, Charon, and the butt of Aristophanes. Whom of the two would you choose, an afterlife of torture in the underworld for your ill deeds or a present life of ridicule in this world?

Zeroing In on the Enemy Within

In view of the murderous attack in Paris by members of the fanatical "state" of ISIS, I'm republishing the following article for the readers of this blog.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

I’m republishing this article written on July 2005 and published originally on my blog Nemesis as a result of a report of the Australian today that all five of the arrested would-be terrorists were regular prayers at the Preston Mosque in Melbourne where the Mufti of Australasia Sheikh Fehmi Naji el-Imam presides. Also as a result  of the violent Islamist demonstration in Sydney  on the pretext  that a video made in the USA by a Coptic Christian insulted  their prophet Mohammed. In this demonstration Muslim children between the ages of four and eight  were carrying placards that demanded the beheading of infidels.

It’s about time that Australia lost its innocence, so it will not fall a victim to the cunning, deceitful, and sinister foe of Muslim fanatics who are in our midst. As I’ve been writing since September 11, a terrorist attack by the enemy within the metropolises of Western civilization was always on the cards, as the bombings in Madrid and London have exemplified. Insightful and responsible governments must no longer shilly-shally about what is to be done, against this imminent internal threat of holocaustian dimensions that is embedded in the West.

The Government must immediately pass emergency legislation (even retrospective legislation) that would enable it, either to deport or jail fundamentalist imams, and all their suspect fanatical recruits. One must have no illusions. All bearded Muslims are potential terrorists. It’s the “emblem” by which they proudly display and flaunt their belief in fundamentalist Islam– such as Sheik Mohammed Omran from the Brunswick mosque who propagates openly or by stealthy means the ideology of fanaticism among his ten thousands followers, and praises the acts of terror as being fully justified against the infidels of the West and their governments that are fighting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, to prevent, and nip in the bud, any possible backlash that could arise among Muslim communities in support of these imams, such legislation should encompass that anyone who supports these imams, would also be liable for deportation.

Furthermore, this emergency legislation should eschew the intricacies and procrastinations that are involved in legal due process, so it could deport these imams and their recruits post haste. Additionally, the Government should immediately cease all funding to Muslim schools, unless the latter introduced in their curricula a no-leaks-assimilation to the mainstream culture of Australia, where the families of the children who attend these schools have freely chosen to settle in. Under no circumstances should these schools and mosques continue to nourish themselves on the teat of government largesse in the name of multiculturalism. The majority of Muslims do not believe in multiculturalism, as they are inveterate monoculturalists believing that their culture is superior to any other culture, and they sneeringly laugh behind the back of multiculturalism while they use the latter for their own sinister purposes. It’s timely that the Government put an end to this joke that is played upon Australians, by abandoning the disastrous policy of multiculturalism, to paraphrase John Stone. Even the most fervent supporters of multiculturalism in Europe, especially in the Netherlands after the murder of the film-maker van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic, are presently considering its abandonment.

Australia presently, is involved with its allies in a total war against global terror. Total war by definition is an unconditional, no holds barred war not only against a mortal enemy, but also against all the allies and supporters of the latter, such as the regime of Saddam Hussein was. Nations which profess to be involved in a total war, such as the U.S.A and its allies claim to be against global terror, cannot avoid from exercising the imperative and remorseless demands of such a war against their enemies. No nation can claim that it’s fighting a total war against an enemy whilst leaving a lethal fifth column among its midst. And no nation can claim that -by an even astronomical increase in the resources of security against terror – it can effectively protect its citizens from a terrorist attack, without at the same time destroying and uprooting the source of terror, the madrassas – wherever they happen to be in the East or in the West – which breed these fanatic recruits of terror.

As I’ve written in my book titled, “Unveiling the War against Terror: Fight Right War or Lose the Right to Exist”, the times are not for irresolute and Hamletinesque leaderships. Historians will aver that George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard, by their limpid awareness of what is at stake in this war against global terror, and by taking the firm and remorseless measures against this mortal foe, have entered the club of statesmen. In this historic clash between Western civilization and the terrorist barbarians, this triumvirate of statesmanship must now deal ruthlessly and remorselessly, by taking and exercising ‘the stern laws of necessity’, to quote the great historian Edward Gibbon, against the enemy, that lurks like a poisonous snake, within the gates of civilization.

CARPE DIEM QUAM MINIMUM CREDULA POSTERO