Liberals' Deficit of a Sense of Reality

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Jane Mayer and the reviewer of her book Andrew Bacevich both of them have an unfathomable deficit of a sense of reality and are oblivious of the lessons of history. Like beatific angels they descend from “a fine cloud of solicitous idealism” to critique and accuse the Bush administration of American-made Gulags. Disregarding and forgetting that the normal and complacent days of America ended on 9/11. On this fateful day America was attacked by an invisible deadly enemy whose only transparency was that he was wearing civilian clothes. In such circumstances the Administration was in the morally unenviable position to apprehend people not on hard legal evidence but on suspicion and to hold them for a long period because of the possible great danger. In the darkness of this war against global terror the enlightened civilized processes of the Geneva Conventions and due process became totally obsolete, not by the nefarious practices of the government but by the dicta of reality and history. On the latter criteria, Mayer and Bacevich are irredeemable failures. To quote the great Austrian writer Robert Musil, “to the mind good and evil… are not sceptical, relative concepts, but terms of function, values that depend on the context (M.E.) they find themselves in.”


Further, desperate to make their case against the Administration they throw the latter into the pool of the politics of fear. They are deliberately not making the nuanced distinction between the words threat and fear. While one can threaten even the fearless it does not follow that the threatened reacts out of fear. He merely reacts to a plausible threat like any reasonable person would in the same circumstances. And this is exactly what Americans are doing in the aftermath of 9/11. To claim as Mayer and Bacevich do that the Bush administration deliberately let loose the winds of fear to batter Americans for their own nefarious ends, whatever the latter happen to be, is on their part intellectual legerdemain par excellence.

I rest on my oars: your turn now

Judge Goldstone Eyeless in Gaza: No Evidence of Human Rights Violations by Israel's Defence Force

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Professor Alan Dershowitz is to be commended for exposing a ‘solipsistic’ toady of the United Nations Human Rights Council who puts his personal vain glory above the truth, that no human rights violations were perpetrated by the Israeli Defence Force during the Gaza incursion whose goal was to stop the rain of rockets on Israel shot by Hamas. Judge Goldstone sacrificed veracity to his own vanity.

Bring The Afghan Tribal Chiefs Into The Loop Of The Poppy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

There is a great possibility of replicating the success of the Iraqi 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 an Iraq like 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 traditional political potency, 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.” By bringing the tribal chiefs into the loop of the poppy, U.S. and Coalition strategy will place a noose around the neck of the Taliban and its al-Qaeda confederates.

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