As is often the case, I find myself aghast at the patently illogical war mongering rhetoric of retired U.S. Army officer, novelist and essayist Ralph Peters. In his latest piece for the Armed Forces Journal titled “The hearts-and-minds myth,” Peters argues, “Sorry, but winning means killing.”
As to the proper course to take in our present “war” on terror, Peters says:
We need to grasp the basic truth that the path to winning the hearts and minds of the masses leads over the corpses of the violent minority. As for humanitarianism, the most humane thing we can do is to win our long struggle against fanaticism and terrorism. That means killing terrorists and fanatics.
Peters is right to the extent that war involves killing, and that killing and “winning hearts and minds” are pretty much mutually exclusive pursuits. What he’s wrong about is that “killing” can always win wars, or that application of military force can necessarily achieve national objectives.
Peters is part of a generation of neoconservative military scholars and thinkers who are, unfortunately, stuck in a time warp. Fond of recalling the “good old days” of World War II, when America was willing to sacrifice in order to defeat an axis of nation state enemies, they virtually wheeze when they compare “the good war” to the American wars that have followed it. America’s lack of decisive success in post-World War II conflicts, according to Peters and his cohorts, has been caused by a “hostile media” that caters to the public’s “right to know,” and by an American population has gone flabby since the greatest generation defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.
This is where the war hawk propaganda description of our present “World War III” comes from, as well as the internally flawed “Islamo-fascism” buzz button.
I don’t know if Peters and the rest of the Project for the New American Century hegemonists understand just how illogical their war rhetoric is. I just know that their rhetoric is profoundly and tragically flawed.
Comparing Elephants to Oranges
When then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler in 1938 by agreeing to allow Germany to keep its military conquest of Czechoslovakia, the global balance of military power was profoundly weighted toward Hitler and his Axis Power confederates.
Hitler and his Axis cronies would have coveted in their pajamas to imagine possessing the kind of military superiority America has today. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the U.S. now spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. The Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook says that the U.S. spent an estimated $518 billion defense in 2005. In second place last year was scary old China at $81.5 billion. Scary old Iran spent $4.3 billion, which was less than the $5.5 billion that scary old Sweden spent. The CIA doesn’t list defense expenditures for scary old Russia, but that doesn’t matter. Most of Russia’s military hardware is rusting on the flight line, sinking at the pier or burning in Chechnya.
So when the ilk of Ralph Peters describe non-military approaches to the terrorism problem as “appeasement” appeasement (not to mention “passivity” and “cowardice”) they’re revealing their “moral and intellectual confusion.” To say that an American diplomatic approach to the terrorism problem is “appeasement” is like saying that Hitler appeased Chamberlain.
Ideology, Fans and Flat Rocks
Peters’ philosophy also suffers from an immature hallucination that I call “cub scout G.I. Joe fantasy.” This moist meditation supposes that once you’ve knocked down the schoolyard bully, you can get all the other kids to go along with you by threatening to punch them in the snot locker as well, and that the other kids will like and respect you because you’ve shown the same kind of virile prowess as the bully you just vanquished for them.
Here’s the problem. The “vanquished” bully dominated the other kids by punching them in the snot locker when they got out of line too, and now you look and act just like he did. And at the end of your day, some other “hero” will emerge–maybe even the old bully (Russia), or one of his sidemen (China), or a new kid on the block (Iran)–who will pop you on the snot locker, and all the rest of the kids will cheer and kick you as you lie prone and your blood spurts out your nose and mouth onto the asphalt.
Neoconservatives like Ralph Peters don’t want you to think in those terms. They want you to think like they do–not with what’s between your ears, but with what’s between your legs. Snort. Stomp. Charge like a bull hippo, chase off that other bull, and make hubba-hubba with that cow as a victory celebration. But if America listens to Ralph Peters and his like-minded lunatics, it’s not going to mount the world. It’s just going to screw itself into oblivion.
If we make two or more “terrorists” for every one we kill, we’re going to have to kill a lot of people. A sight more people than the Nazi’s killed at Auschwitz, Dachau and other death camps.
Does that sound like something the “greatest generation” would have wanted us to do? Turn into the very thing they fought and sacrificed to “save the world” from?
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
