Cross posted at the front page of My Left Wing.
I once again find myself aghast at the illogical warmongering rhetoric of Ralph Peters. Retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Peters is a novelist and an essayist whose columns appear in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. He is also a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neoconservative think tank that talked America into its present woebegone war in Iraq.
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 people is not the method of choice for getting them to like you.
But like so many of his neocon cronies, Peters neglects to mention that when you make two or more terrorists for every one that you kill, you're going to have to kill a heck of a lot of people to "win." In fact, you'll have to kill darn near every one of "them," whoever "they" are.
And what will you have "won?"
Kristol's Dogs of War
Peters is a luminary in the stable of neoconservative military commentators who are still trying to cover their sixes for getting America entangled in Iraq. Bill Kristol, PNAC co-founder and publisher of The Weekly Standard was one of the first neocons to throw Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld under the proverbial bus when things started going south in Iraq, saying in December 2004 that our soldiers "deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."
Kristol seldom mentions that Rumsfeld was onboard the PNAC when it crafted the Iraq invasion policy, and that the PNAC was on board with Rumsfeld's vision to "transform" the Army into a lighter, faster force (see PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses, published in September 2000).
Kristol, Peters, and other PNACers like Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer are scrambling to save their beloved ideology. They pictured an American global hegemony established and sustained through armed force. History's best-trained, best-equipped military's failure to achieve America's national aims in Afghanistan and Iraq should proven their vision delusional, but these guys are tenacious--the dreams of megalomaniacs die hard.
So it's no real surprise that the neocons, desperate to prove that armed conflict can yet be salvaged as an effective instrument of national power, are egging America into another war with Iran. In a saner age, by this point, the neocon PNACers would have been booed off the stage. Unfortunately, the autistic right is still listening to them, and actually taking them seriously.
Neoconservative punditry is following a predictable formula: ludicrous comparisons of the "war" on terror with World War II, fear and hate rhetoric, sloganeering, bandwagonning and, most importantly, blaming their past failures on the usual scapegoats--sissy "defeatists" the "hostile" liberal media, the Clintons, etc.
All of which masks the underlying principle of neoconservative strategy and policy: Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!...
One would think that having vanquished Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the dreaded Soviet Union, America could think of a better strategy to serve its interests than one that can be summarized in a single word.
But one has to remember that our policy "think" tanks are infested with the likes of Ralph Peters, and they still have the ear of the most powerful man in the world--PNAC charter member Dick Cheney.
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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.
Related article: The PNAC Paper Trail