kotzabasis's Open Salon Blog

Professor Proposes a Silent Axis between France & Greece

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:05:25 -0400

By Con George-Kotzabasis May 10, 2012

It’s interesting that you don’t mention one word about your one night stand with your inamorata Tsipras, the Radical Left leader of Syriza. But it’s obvious that Hollande replaced the latter in your gyrating amours, after the politically and economically inane and embarrassing post-election statements of Tsipras. And it won't be long before you will be disappointed with President Hollande too with his dealings with Germany and you will be looking for a still more exotic paramour.

You are mired in the past when you still consider that the European leaders continue to push the austerity programme for the southern European countries as the sole measure of getting them out of the economic crisis. In the new economic orchestration of Europe the ‘soloist’ austerity no longer jingles. All the major European leaders, Jose Barroso, Olli Rehn, Chancellor Merkel, Wolfgang Schauble, the top technocrats, Christine Lagarde, Mario Draghi, and Mario Monti, are talking now about economic recovery and growth without which austerity cannot succeed. Thus they have all taken their cue from Antonis Samaras who was the only statesman that sounded this syndrome of austerity and growth two years ago and had quarrelled with Merkel and Sarkozi, for which he had been severely criticised and disparaged by politicians and the media, such as The Economist. All of them however admitted subsequently that Samaras was right. Hence there is already a sounding axis between Greece and the whole of Europe due to the intercession of Antonis Samaras. Moreover, Samaras warned the European leaders that the policies of the first Memorandum would change the political configuration of the country, as they would both give rise to the forces of the extreme left as well as lead to the break-up of social cohesion which in turn would make the country un-governable. These warnings were tragically verified in the elections of May 6. And I pose the question, why Professor Varoufakis you lack the nobility and courage to give credit where credit is due, to Samaras?

You seem to be obsessed with your toy The Modest Proposal that would drag Europe out of its crisis, and not finding any other children to play with it, you have turned into a surly and cantankerous little boy. Since, as its sire along with Stuart Holland, you flagged it more than a year ago you have made so many ‘bastard’ revisions to it, that it has become difficult to identify the ‘true father’. But one thing is for sure, that in your vainglorious pursuit to persuade governments and bankers to adopt it, you will miserably fail. Your Modest Proposal was always a flying kite that would inevitably take its nosedive.

Obama's Betrayal of America through a Loving Kiss

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:08:29 -0400

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A reply to: Senator Obama vs. President Obama on Afghanistan

By Steve Clemons the Washington Note August 10, 2010

“At what point do we say: ‘Enough’?” “Exactly” at the point of defeat for America. That is where Obama’s enough ends, and presumably Clemons’s too.

A U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will be interpreted by radical Islam as a comprehensive defeat of America and hence encourage the Islamists to further attack, in their eyes, a weak vulnerable U.S. Thus the end result of such withdrawal will not be the end of war but the end of America’s “mystique,” to use Clemons’s word, as a superpower. And worse, as the U.S. will still be forced to defend its vital interests by deploying its armed forces in multiple fronts, that the jihadists will open against it, from a position of weakness. Hence Obama as a post American and a weak president will not be fighting the Battle of Poitiers that stopped the Muslim invasion of Europe, on October 10, 732, but he will be setting in place America’s Waterloo at the hands of Islamist barbarians.

This is the sweetest betrayal of America by Obama: “A betrayal through a loving kiss,” to paraphrase the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. After promising so much, during his love for all “yes we can” electoral campaign, to the American people and to the world at large, all he has accomplished were to enfeeble the United States at a moment when the latter, and indeed, Western civilization, are threatened by irreconcilable deadly enemies, and when civilized societies are seeking a steadfast and sagacious political leadership, which at this stage only America can provide, to protect them from the ravages and menace of fanatical Islam.

Senator Schumer Correct in Criticizing Obama's Diplomacy

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 03:04:09 -0400

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Would Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, and by implication Clemons, expect Robert Gibbs to say that Barack Obama agrees “with what Senator Schumer said? It is astonishing to see Clemons diverting the issue of the total freeze of settlements, which Schumer correctly criticized as a grave error on the part of Obama contra Israel, to what Schumer’s stand was to Jesse Helms and to John Bolton “few years ago.”

Clemons is entitled to his opinions but he is not entitled to his facts. The facts are that the foolish imposition of the total freeze of settlements on the Netanyahu government by the Obama administration’s lack of foresight that it would be politically unrealizable for Israel and that it would evolve and become for the Palestinians, as it did, a rigid condition for their participation with any talks with Israel, was the major factor that derailed Obama’s engine of diplomacy from its track that would bring the two belligerents to the negotiating table. It was precisely this quintessentially wrong and injudicious policy of Obama that Senator Schumer rightly criticized as being the reason of the administration’s abysmal failure in the Middle East. Another fact is that Obama’s diplomacy is inconsistent, rewarding his enemies and penalizing his friends. While he claims that his diplomacy is indiscriminate and is based on soft and smart power coming on doves’ feet and extends his hand in a velvet glove to the enemies of America, he carries a bludgeon in his hand in his relations with his strongest and most loyal ally, in this case Israel.

Throughout history there has never been a case when a nation engaged in war with implacable enemies would chastise and alienate its most steadfast and reliable ally for the purpose to placate his enemies. Obama will go down in history as the only leader who not only doltishly and doggedly opened the door of diplomacy to an enemy such as Iran which has been training in its own country members of the Taliban and supplying them with weapons--as well as its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah--to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, but who was also willing to sacrifice the vital interests of his most staunch ally against Islamist terror, Israel, on the altar of this spineless, strategically unprincipled, and totally fallible diplomacy.

The above emitted the two following responses:

Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 27 2010, 6:54AM - Link Kotzabasis, WigWag seemed to be wondering a few days ago why those posts in which you make a serious, debatable point are ignored. But can there be any doubt why people habitually turn you off, when so many of your posts consist in cowardly, third-person personal characterizations of other contributors, lamely shouted out to no one in particular?

Posted by WigWag, Apr 27 2010, 9:45AM - Link Actually why the interesting point Kotz made is never debated is rather plain. His point was an astute one, but as I am sure Kotz would be the first to admit, it was hardly an original one. Kotz was making precisely the same point Schumer was; that by offering to conduct their negotiations for them, the Obama Administration provides an incentive for the Palestinians not to negotiate at all. Kotz, Schumer and many other sage observers have also made the point that by making demands on Israel that Obama knew, or should have known, that it wouldn't comply with, it was Obama himself who was making his stated goal of getting negotiations started much more difficult.

Steve Clemons in his diatribe against Schumer never responded to this point and Dan Kervick hasn't either. Neither has any other serious commentator as far as I can tell.It seems to me that the lack of response to the Schumer/Kotz allegation is evidence of the fact that the point is irrefutable.If it's not, someone should give it a try.

Neo-Conservative's Cognitive Power Haunts Liberals and Obama

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:03:32 -0400

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The concept of the “Axis of Evil” had a politically pragmatic Machiavellian sense in the context of religious-riddled America, and not a metaphysical one. Religion can also be used not only as “glue” to societal values that binds people and commands them, as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim suggested, but also as glue to certain critical foreign policies that are vital to the security of a nation. Apropos the Axis of Evil in the context of global terrorism and the rogue states which support it overtly or covertly. Statesmanship does not govern in a vacuum; it has to rally its people, like Churchill did, by certain concepts that appeal to them behind its policies and strategies. Neo-conservatives as pragmatists are amoral, and have no relationship with any kind of Manichaeism, of good and evil.

Interestingly, WigWag’s first comment in The Washington Note, ironically as a past opponent and slightly diminishing opponent presently of the neocons, has loosened all the “demons” of neo-conservatism from their “caves” to come and haunt all liberals in their wishful thinking that Obama was a game-changer. From the “prince of darkness,” Richard Perle, who presciently said in 2002 that “we are all neoconservatives now,” Wolfowitz, Feith, Frum, the Kristols and the Kagans, Cheney and Bolton, have taken the centre stage of American politics by “winning the argument,” according to WigWag, and shattering the unrealistic, idealistic, nursery rhymed policies of the liberals, and especially Obama’s.

And presumably even the White House is presently neo-conservative turf as Obama himself has become their disciple, according to WigWag. But Obama is the bastard offspring of the neocons as he was conceived not by their spiritual virility but by the impotent idealistic policies of his own, which in a profligacy of ‘many nights stands’ on the domestic and international arena proved to be total failures, as the neoconservatives had predicted they would be. The clang sound of the chain of failures in health care, in climate change, in his toothless supine diplomacy in the Middle East, in his hope of changing the view of America’s enemies by practicing American values and asking for penance from those wronged from America’s past ‘sins’, have forced President Obama to semi-adopt the policies of the neocons. Being a ‘pragmatic chameleon’ he had to change his colors purely for his own political survival. Obama is no voluntary convert to neo-conservatism. He is perforce adopting and implementing some of the policies of the neoconservatives because they are the only reasonable policies in town and the only ones that can save his political scalp. It’s due to the poverty of liberal policies that Obama is ostensibly attempting to become politically a ‘nouveau riche’ from the wealthy and fecund policies of the neo-conservatives.

WigWag responded to the above as follows:

Kotzabasis, I enjoyed this comment and think you made some excellent points; especially when you characterize Obama as the "bastard offspring" of the neoconservatives.

At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, I'm not sure that it's a question of whether I was once an opponent of the neocons or am slightly less of an opponent now.

I thought the war in Iraq was a mistake for the United States and the West. Whether it was a mistake for Iraq is an open question. Clearly the Kurds are delighted that the United States invaded and eliminated Saddam Hussein; presumably the Shia are too. The Sunni, not so much.

I think it’s hard to argue that the War in Iraq has not left the United States and all of its allies worse off than they were before the invasion...

But opponents of the neoconservatives will be making a serious mistake themselves if they think that the failures in Iraq or other errors in judgment by leading neoconservatives prove that as a philosophy neo-conservatism is wrong.

After all, the serious tactical blunders that the United States made in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia didn't prove that containment was the wrong strategy to confront the Soviets.

What is the Message of Massachusetts Debacle?

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:01:07 -0500

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Massachusetts result showed pellucidly that the American electorate-whites in large numbers-has turned into a shoal of piranhas threatening to tear the flesh of Obama and the Democrats. What it craves for is economic and political stability, the preservation of conservative values, not the ostensibly unstable progressive left-wing policies of a picaresque president. In this context, any implementation of progressive economic policies by the Obama administration will solely employ the diggers that will dig its grave.