In The Shah Always Falls, “military intellectual” and popular author, Ralph Peters, makes a number of interesting points:
There are certainly times when we desire stability in international politics, but in the underdeveloped world an obsession with stability means preserving failure and worse. Overvaluing stability is a heritage of the Cold War, over the course of which we rationalized our support of some very cruel regimes and we deposed elected governments we didn’t like. You could justify it in terms of the greater struggle. But you can’t justify it now.What I wrote was that the shah always falls in the end, Saddam always turns on you, and the Saudis always betray you. If we support evil, the long-term price is almost always too high. And now we don’t have to. Since 1989, or ’91, depending on how you want to date it, we’ve been the only superpower. We haven’t thought about what we’ve been doing.
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The greatest democracy in history defends borders drawn by European imperialists in Berlin in 1884 and 1885 or at Versailles — and for that matter, some drawn at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. When we say that borders are inviolable, that we always respect sovereignty, we pretend that somehow humanity has achieved this magical state where existing borders are perfect.
On American (Western) culture:
I believe that perhaps our greatest advantage is a tradition that grew up over centuries, that we inherited from England. This is our tradition of openness to new information, of respect for empirical data, and of resistance to theoretical constructs other than those generated within the scientific community. Theoretical constructs did fantastic damage to Europe in the twentieth century, and much of the rest of the world lives in a fantasy land. They do not have our ingrained, hard-learned ability to separate fact from fiction. We have our myths, but we’re not paralyzed by them, and we question them. There are many ways you can divide the world, but I think one of the more useful ways is between factualizing societies and mythologizing societies. Listen to our enemies’ rhetoric. They’re in love with their myths of themselves, both old myths and relatively recent ones, and they’re myths of self-justification.
On women in the workplace:
Rosie the Riveter is in the boardroom, she’s on campus, she’s flying jets off carriers.
On Saudi Arabia:
I personally feel that we’ve made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world’s Beverly Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic states, such as Egypt. The line about Al Qaeda that’s absolutely true is that Saudis supplied the money and Egyptians supplied the brains. So Saudi money, spent to support their grotesquely repressive version of one of the world’s great religions, has been a disaster for the Arab world.
On the historical origins of our strength:
Freedom of information originates in two things, the movable type printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter benefits everybody, irrespective of his or her religion, because it breaks down the idea of there being just one path to the truth. The printing press makes the Reformation possible, because suddenly the one true church can no longer contain heretical movements. Information travels faster than it can be suppressed. And the Protestant Reformation is the seminal event in the rise of the West. It opens the door for the last great Western religion, the secular religion of science. Without that fissure, without that breakdown in the one path to the truth, you can’t have science.In Islam the historical symmetry is chilling. Within 10 years of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, a prince, astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Ulugh Beg of Samarqand, built a great observatory. He was a genius, their Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and I take that moment as the point at which it all started calcifying.
On assassination:
Yes, we have a prohibition against assassination. We tend to trace it to CIA excesses, but it’s an older tradition, and it again goes back to the mutual agreements of kings not to hurt one another: “We’re in a fight, and we’ll take Burgundy, we’ll take Flanders, but we’re not going to depose you, we’re not going to kill you, because then you might kill us.” It was a gentleman’s agreement. Today it should be obvious that if the problem is Saddam, the solution isn’t targeting the Iraqi people, who are suffering far worse than we are. The solution is targeting Saddam and his clique. Again, you have the limits of inherited language. Assassination is a loaded word, and we don’t have a better one. What we’re starting to have is the technology to leap over intervening armies and go after the sponsors. Wouldn’t that be far more moral than plowing our way through the conscripts who don’t want to be there in the first place?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Black Hawk Down, and I’ve heard this point made before:
After the Battle of Mogadishu, which we won overwhelmingly, we made things worse by cutting and running. The failure of nerve of the Clinton administration encouraged our enemies to believe that whenever you kill a few Americans, they’ll run away. Osama bin Laden talked a lot about Somalia.
On 9/11:
Any dictator or regime happy to take on the U.S. military in conventional war is an idiot, but there are always idiots. Wiser enemies will take an asymmetrical tack. The operation on September 11, detestable though it was, was brilliantly executed: complex, well imagined, and amazingly well conducted.
As long as we can all agree that the hijackers were cowards…
He certainly doesn’t pull his punches:
Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is humane, free, rich, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture, who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at our enormous success with inchoate envy.