Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars (Great essay - don't miss this one)

The Journal of International Security Affairs ^ | Spring 2009 | Ralph Peters

[PaleoBob]

The conductor, a decent guy, turned around and said something about honoring veterans (first mistake. Memorial Day is to honor the war dead) serving “in ‘our’ behalf.”

Being a veteran, I resent it greatly when someone thanks me for serving “in their behalf.”

---

I know what you’re saying about Memorial Day. My boss wished me a “happy Memorial Day.” He’s a good guy but is clueless. I just shrugged my shoulders. I started hating Memorial Day years ago when it became clear to me that people thought it was for cookouts and wiffle ball. I have nothing against either but....

Oh well.

[Gritty]

Good article. So re the others at the link.

[Billthedrill]

Great stuff. Two tiny points of contention - Peters overstates the case for the enervation of the general population, I think, and he wouldn't be the first one - "The Americans are soft, they will not fight," is something we hear from a Hitler or an Osama bin Laden just before we do. Peters knows this, of course.

Second, the blame for the expectation of a near-bloodless war doesn't fall on defense contractors, it falls on the military that has managed to wage them on several recent occasions. The Iraqi army was the sixth-largest in the world in 1990. 100 hours. The fall of Afghanistan, a country in virulently anti-Western hands, took three weeks. The second time into Iraq, the same to the fall of Baghdad. People expect these incredible fighters to do anything because they damn near can. Only when the mission is changed from war-fighting to occupation and nation-building does the butcher's bill start to climb.

But the media, oh, my, does Peters ever hit that one on the head.

Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.

In the latest Iraq invasion the only decent, reliable press came directly to the public from men and women embedded with the troops, where the chances to filter it through a mesh of ideology were minimized. When that changed, the story changed. The international press especially, but the domestic press as well, is crippled by an institutional leftism that declares that violence is always wrong when employed by the strong and always right when employed by the "weak," even though the latter tend most to employ it against the even weaker. This is the one-size-fits-all ideology of oppressed versus oppressor, the adolescent romanticizing of butchers as liberators. It is unthinking decadence, the luxury of a class that never had to fight for the freedom it abuses.

Lastly, and despite my stout refusal to consider a draft military superior to a volunteer one (I served in them both and so did Peters), I will have to lament, as he does, the diminishing percentage of Americans, especially those in positions of responsibility, who have served. It does make a difference.

[metesky]

Great article with so many pull quotes. Loved the attack on the complicit media.

The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves.

Rousseauian "noble savage" bs that "journalists" swallow whole.

Thanks for the ping T.

[happygrl]

Another great essay on par with his (Ralph Peters) The Shah Always Falls.

[logos]

Your comments are right on. I would only add - as a suggestion - that the left has been at war for decades, but off the battlefield. We, the opponents of the left, have been fooled into a belief that if no bullets are flying, no war is in progress. If we are to win the current war (not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the one we’ve been fighting since shortly after the end of WWI), it will require a huge shift in our collective mind-set. Only “civilized” Man (civilized according to the definition from the “elite”) would devise a game called War and attempt to play it by a set of accepted “rules”.

What nonsense. What good are “rules” to the losers?

[carton253]

Utterly fantastic.

[carton253]

Why is it that when ever I begin to read a well thought-out, articulate post, at the end, I see a picture a Nathan Bedford Forrest?

[nathanbedford]

Because you are hallucinating again?

Thanks for the kind words.

Here in Germany I do not think I can get your book. How is it going?

[carton253]

LOL!

[GOPJ]

There are multiple reasons for this American amnesia about the cost of victory. First, we, the people, have lived in unprecedented safety for so long (despite the now-faded shock of September 11, 2001) that we simply do not feel endangered; rather, we sense that what nastiness there may be in the world will always occur elsewhere and need not disturb our lifestyles.

Great post. If you have a ping list - please add me. Thanks.

[GOPJ]

Please add me to your “excellent essays by Ralph Peters” ping list - if there is such a list.

[jazusamo]

I don’t have an official ping list for Ralph Peters but believe he is one of the best writers re our military. I’ll remember you asked and ping you along with the few others to his articles if you are interested.

[GOPJ]

It’s a little much for me to be a ping list of one! If you remember - and it’s a great one - I’d love a ping. If not, don’t worry - I’ll try to keep an eye out for Ralph Peters’ stuff. Thanks for the offer.

[GOPJ]

...Islam today is composed of over a billion essentially powerless human beings, many of them humiliated and furiously jealous. So Islam fights and will fight, within its meager-but-pesky capabilities. Operationally, it matters little that the failures of the Middle Eastern Islamic world are self-wrought, the disastrous results of the deterioration of a once-triumphant faith into a web of static cultures obsessed with behavior at the expense of achievement. The core world ofIslam, stretching from Casablanca to the Hindu Kush, is not competitive in a single significant sphere of human endeavor (not even terrorism since, at present, we are terrorizing the terrorists). We are confronted with a historical anomaly, the public collapse of a once-great, still-proud civilization that, in the age of super-computers, cannot build a reliable automobile: enormous wealth has been squandered; human capital goes wasted; economies are dysfunctional; and the quality of life is barbaric. Those who once cowered at Islam’s greatness now rule the world. The roughly one-fifth of humanity that makes up the Muslim world lacks a single world-class university of its own. The resultant rage is immeasurable; jealousy may be the greatest unacknowledged strategic factor in the world today.

Ping