enlighten your mind.

[LateNiteTV]

this was posted at National Gun Forum. long, but very worth while.


The American Legion Magazine
November, 2007

12 Myths of 21st-Century War
Unaware of the cost of freedom and served by leaders without military
expertise, Americans have started to believe whatever's comfortable

By Ralph Peters

We're in trouble. We're in danger of losing more wars. Our troops
haven't forgotten how to fight. We've never had better men and women in
uniform. But our leaders and many of our fellow Americans no longer
grasp what war means or what it takes to win.

Thanks to those who have served in uniform, we've lived in such safety
and comfort for so long that for many Americans sacrifice means little
more than skipping a second trip to the buffet table.

Two trends over the past four decades contributed to our national
ignorance of the cost, and necessity, of victory. First, the most
privileged Americans used the Vietnam War as an excuse to break their
tradition of uniformed service. Ivy League universities once produced
heroes. Now they resist Reserve Officer Training Corps representation on
their campuses.

Yet, our leading universities still produce a disproportionate number of
U.S. political leaders. The men and women destined to lead us in wartime
dismiss military service as a waste of their time and talents. Delighted
to pose for campaign photos with our troops, elected officials in
private disdain the military. Only one serious presidential aspirant in
either party is a veteran, while another presidential hopeful pays as
much for a single haircut as I took home in a month as an Army private.

Second, we've stripped in-depth U.S. history classes out of our schools.
Since the 1960s, one history course after another has been cut, while
the content of those remaining focuses on social issues and our alleged
misdeeds. Dumbed-down textbooks minimize the wars that kept us free. As
a result, ignorance of the terrible price our troops had to pay for
freedom in the past creates absurd expectations about our present
conflicts. When the media offer flawed or biased analyses, the public
lacks the knowledge to make informed judgments.

This combination of national leadership with no military expertise and a
population that hasn't been taught the cost of freedom leaves us with a
government that does whatever seems expedient and a citizenry that
believes whatever's comfortable. Thus, myths about war thrive.

Myth No. 1: War doesn't change anything.

This campus slogan contradicts all of human history. Over thousands of
years, war has been the last resort - and all too frequently the first
resort - of tribes, religions, dynasties, empires, states and demagogues
driven by grievance, greed or a heartless quest for glory. No one
believes that war is a good thing, but it is sometimes necessary. We
need not agree in our politics or on the manner in which a given war is
prosecuted, but we can't pretend that if only we laid down our arms all
others would do the same.

Wars, in fact, often change everything. Who would argue that the
American Revolution, our Civil War or World War II changed nothing?
Would the world be better today if we had been pacifists in the face of
Nazi Germany and imperial Japan?

Certainly, not all of the changes warfare has wrought through the
centuries have been positive. Even a just war may generate undesirable
results, such as Soviet tyranny over half of Europe after 1945. But of
one thing we may be certain: a U.S. defeat in any war is a defeat not
only for freedom, but for civilization. Our enemies believe that war can
change the world. And they won't be deterred by bumper stickers.

Myth No. 2: Victory is impossible today.

Victory is always possible, if our nation is willing to do what it takes
to win. But victory is, indeed, impossible if U.S. troops are placed
under impossible restrictions, if their leaders refuse to act boldly, if
every target must be approved by lawyers, and if the American people are
disheartened by a constant barrage of negativity from the media. We
don't need generals who pop up behind microphones to apologize for every
mistake our soldiers make. We need generals who win.

And you can't win if you won't fight. We're at the start of a violent
struggle that will ebb and flow for decades, yet our current generation
of leaders, in and out of uniform, worries about hurting the enemy's
feelings.

One of the tragedies of our involvement in Iraq is that while we did a
great thing by removing Saddam Hussein, we tried to do it on the cheap.
It's an iron law of warfare that those unwilling to pay the butcher's
bill up front will pay it with compound interest in the end. We not only
didn't want to pay that bill, but our leaders imagined that we could
make friends with our enemies even before they were fully defeated.
Killing a few hundred violent actors like Moqtada al-Sadr in 2003 would
have prevented thousands of subsequent American deaths and tens of
thousands of Iraqi deaths. We started something our national leadership
lacked the guts to finish.

Despite our missteps, victory looked a great deal less likely in the
early months of 1942 than it does against our enemies today. Should we
have surrendered after the fall of the Philippines? Today's
opinionmakers and elected officials have lost their grip on what it
takes to win. In the timeless words of Nathan Bedford Forrest, "War
means fighting, and fighting means killing."

And in the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, "It is fatal to enter any
war without the will to win it."

Myth No. 3: Insurgencies can never be defeated.

Historically, fewer than one in 20 major insurgencies succeeded.
Virtually no minor ones survived. In the mid-20th century, insurgencies
scored more wins than previously had been the case, but that was because
the European colonial powers against which they rebelled had already
decided to rid themselves of their imperial possessions. Even so, more
insurgencies were defeated than not, from the Philippines to Kenya to
Greece. In the entire 18th century, our war of independence was the only
insurgency that defeated a major foreign power and drove it out for
good.

The insurgencies we face today are, in fact, more lethal than the
insurrections of the past century. We now face an international
terrorist insurgency as well as local rebellions, all motivated by
religious passion or ethnicity or a fatal compound of both. The good
news is that in over 3,000 years of recorded history, insurgencies
motivated by faith and blood overwhelmingly failed. The bad news is that
they had to be put down with remorseless bloodshed.

Myth No. 4: There's no military solution; only negotiations can solve
our problems.

In most cases, the reverse is true. Negotiations solve nothing until a
military decision has been reached and one side recognizes a peace
agreement as its only hope of survival. It would be a welcome
development if negotiations fixed the problems we face in Iraq, but
we're the only side interested in a negotiated solution. Every other
faction - the terrorists, Sunni insurgents, Shia militias, Iran and
Syria - is convinced it can win.

The only negotiations that produce lasting results are those conducted
from positions of indisputable strength.

Myth No. 5: When we fight back, we only provoke our enemies.

When dealing with bullies, either in the schoolyard or in a global war,
the opposite is true: if you don't fight back, you encourage your enemy
to behave more viciously.

Passive resistance only works when directed against rule-of-law states,
such as the core English-speaking nations. It doesn't work where silent
protest is answered with a bayonet in the belly or a one-way trip to a
political prison. We've allowed far too many myths about the "innate
goodness of humanity" to creep up on us. Certainly, many humans would
rather be good than bad. But if we're unwilling to fight the fraction of
humanity that's evil, armed and determined to subjugate the rest, we'll
face even grimmer conflicts.

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Myth No. 6: Killing terrorists only turns them into martyrs.

It's an anomaly of today's Western world that privileged individuals
feel more sympathy for dictators, mass murderers and terrorists -
consider the irrational protests against Guantanamo - than they do for
their victims. We were told, over and over, that killing Osama bin Laden
or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hanging Saddam Hussein or targeting the
Taliban's Mullah Omar would only unite their followers. Well, we haven't
yet gotten Osama or Omar, but Zarqawi's dead and forgotten by his own
movement, whose members never invoke that butcher's memory. And no one
is fighting to avenge Saddam. The harsh truth is that when faced with
true fanatics, killing them is the only way to end their influence.
Imprisoned, they galvanize protests, kidnappings, bombings and attacks
that seek to free them. Want to make a terrorist a martyr? Just lock him
up. Attempts to try such monsters in a court of law turn into mockeries
that only provide public platforms for their hate speech, which the
global media is delighted to broadcast. Dead, they're dead. And killing
them is the ultimate proof that they lack divine protection. Dead
terrorists don't kill.

Myth No. 7: If we fight as fiercely as our enemies, we're no better than
them.

Did the bombing campaign against Germany turn us into Nazis? Did
dropping atomic bombs on Japan to end the war and save hundreds of
thousands of American lives, as well as millions of Japanese lives, turn
us into the beasts who conducted the Bataan Death March?

The greatest immorality is for the United States to lose a war. While we
seek to be as humane as the path to victory permits, we cannot shrink
from doing what it takes to win. At present, the media and influential
elements of our society are obsessed with the small immoralities that
are inevitable in wartime. Soldiers are human, and no matter how
rigorous their training, a miniscule fraction of our troops will do
vicious things and must be punished as a consequence. Not everyone in
uniform will turn out to be a saint, and not every chain of command will
do its job with equal effectiveness. But obsessing on tragic incidents -
of which there have been remarkably few in Iraq or Afghanistan -
obscures the greater moral issue: the need to defeat enemies who revel
in butchering the innocent, who celebrate atrocities, and who claim
their god wants blood.

Myth No. 8: The United States is more hated today than ever before.

Those who served in Europe during the Cold War remember enormous,
often-violent protests against U.S. policy that dwarfed today's
let's-have-fun-on-a-Sunday-afternoon rallies. Older readers recall the
huge ban-the-bomb, pro-communist demonstrations of the 1950s and the
vast seas of demonstrators filling the streets of Paris, Rome and Berlin
to protest our commitment to Vietnam. Imagine if we'd had 24/7 news
coverage of those rallies. I well remember serving in Germany in the
wake of our withdrawal from Saigon, when U.S. soldiers were despised by
the locals - who nonetheless were willing to take our money - and
terrorists tried to assassinate U.S. generals.

The fashionable anti-Americanism of the chattering classes hasn't
stopped the world from seeking one big green card. As I've traveled
around the globe since 9/11, I've found that below the
government-spokesman/professional-radical level, the United States
remains the great dream for university graduates from Berlin to
Bangalore to Bogota.

On the domestic front, we hear ludicrous claims that our country has
never been so divided. Well, that leaves out our Civil War. Our
historical amnesia also erases the violent protests of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, the mass confrontations, rioting and deaths. Is today's
America really more fractured than it was in 1968?

Myth No. 9: Our invasion of Iraq created our terrorist problems.

This claim rearranges the order of events, as if the attacks of 9/11
happened after Baghdad fell. Our terrorist problems have been created by
the catastrophic failure of Middle Eastern civilization to compete on
any front and were exacerbated by the determination of successive U.S.
administrations, Democrat and Republican, to pretend that Islamist
terrorism was a brief aberration. Refusing to respond to attacks, from
the bombings in Beirut to Khobar Towers, from the first attack on the
Twin Towers to the near-sinking of the USS Cole, we allowed our enemies
to believe that we were weak and cowardly. Their unchallenged successes
served as a powerful recruiting tool.

Did our mistakes on the ground in Iraq radicalize some new recruits for
terror? Yes. But imagine how many more recruits there might have been
and the damage they might have inflicted on our homeland had we not
responded militarily in Afghanistan and then carried the fight to Iraq.
Now Iraq is al-Qaeda's Vietnam, not ours.

Myth No. 10: If we just leave, the Iraqis will patch up their
differences on their own.

The point may come at which we have to accept that Iraqis are so
determined to destroy their own future that there's nothing more we can
do. But we're not there yet, and leaving immediately would guarantee not
just one massacre but a series of slaughters and the delivery of a
massive victory to the forces of terrorism. We must be open-minded about
practical measures, from changes in strategy to troop reductions, if
that's what the developing situation warrants. But it's grossly
irresponsible to claim that our presence is the primary cause of the
violence in Iraq - an allegation that ignores history.

Myth No. 11: It's all Israel's fault. Or the popular Washington
corollary: "The Saudis are our friends."

Israel is the Muslim world's excuse for failure, not a reason for it.
Even if we didn't support Israel, Islamist extremists would blame us for
countless other imagined wrongs, since they fear our freedoms and our
culture even more than they do our military. All men and women of
conscience must recognize the core difference between Israel and its
neighbors: Israel genuinely wants to live in peace, while its genocidal
neighbors want Israel erased from the map.

As for the mad belief that the Saudis are our friends, it endures only
because the Saudis have spent so much money on both sides of the aisle
in Washington. Saudi money continues to subsidize anti-Western
extremism, to divide fragile societies, and encourage hatred between
Muslims and all others. Saudi extremism has done far more damage to the
Middle East than Israel ever did. The Saudis are our enemies.

Myth No. 12: The Middle East's problems are all America's fault.

Muslim extremists would like everyone to believe this, but it just isn't
true. The collapse of once great Middle Eastern civilizations has been
under way for more than five centuries, and the region became a
backwater before the United States became a country. For the first
century and a half of our national existence, our relations with the
people of the Middle East were largely beneficent and protective,
notwithstanding our conflict with the Barbary Pirates in North Africa.
But Islamic civilization was on a downward trajectory that could not be
arrested. Its social and economic structures, its values, its neglect of
education, its lack of scientific curiosity, the indolence of its ruling
classes and its inability to produce a single modern state that served
its people all guaranteed that, as the West's progress accelerated, the
Middle East would fall ever farther behind. The Middle East has itself
to blame for its problems.

None of us knows what our strategic future holds, but we have no excuse
for not knowing our own past. We need to challenge inaccurate assertions
about our policies, about our past and about war itself. And we need to
work within our community and state education systems to return
balanced, comprehensive history programs to our schools. The
unprecedented wealth and power of the United States allows us to afford
many things denied to human beings throughout history. But we, the
people, cannot afford ignorance.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer, strategist and author of 22
books, including the recent "Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That
Will Shape the 21st Century.