An unquiet American
Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
A military expert who sees the big picture, Ralph Peters is our wisest analyst
If I were czar, the first thing I'd do is resign, and hand the scepter to Ralph Peters (who, as a good democrat, would refuse it).
I sometimes think of Ralph as the reincarnation of my all-time American hero, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. A professor at Bowdoin College in Maine when the Civil War broke out, Chamberlain left academia to join the Union Army. His heroic defense of the Little Round Top turned the tide of the battle of Gettysburg, and the war. Later, while commanding the Union troops at Appomattox, he performed one of the war's most gallant acts, by having his men salute the surrendering Confederates.
Chamberlain was four times elected governor of Maine, once by what is still the largest plurality in the state's history. He left politics and returned to Bowdoin College, where he taught every course on the curriculum.
Soldier, scholar, statesman, an idealist with his head in the clouds, but his feet on the ground. Chamberlain was the whole package. So is Ralph. As an Army intelligence officer, he travelled, often alone, to the hot spots in Central Asia and the Middle East where the timid fear to tread.
Ralph Peters has guts and integrity. Fortunately, these are not rare qualities in the U.S. military today. What sets Ralph apart is his judgment. He is the smartest man I have ever met. There may be a handful of others who know as much about the world today as he does, but none who express what they know as well as he does.
I write this obsequiously not because I want Peters to do me a favor, but because I want you to do yourself one. Ralph has a new book out this month, "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy." If you read nothing else this year, read this book.
At first, you won't realize how much you're learning, because the writing is so entertaining. But the more you reflect on what Ralph has to say -- which is strikingly at odds with the bilge we get from the politicians, the think tanks and the universities -- the more you'll realize that Peters is spot on.
Ralph is not parochial. He is the only career Army officer I know who thinks the greatest strategist of modern times was the Navy's Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of "The Influence of Sea Power on History."
Only a military historian of the first rank would suggest that the battle of Diu, a Portuguese victory over the Ottoman navy off the coast of India in 1509, should be a model for U.S. strategy today, or pinpoint the intellectual decline of Islam to the assassination, in Samarkand in 1449, of Ulug Begh by the Muslim fundamentalists of his day.
And only a scholar as familiar with the humanities as with the military art could write this sentence: "The literary-minded can see the precise dividing line between the age of sweat and the age of steam by comparing the works of Trollope and Charles Dickens."
Peters breaks news in his book, as in his explanation for why President Bush broke off the first battle of Fallujah, in May 2004.
Nor is Ralph afraid to rattle iron rice bowls, as in his call to abolish the Air Force as a separate service. The Air Force, Peters says, is "a degenerative organization whose doctrine is inept, whose purchases are counterproductive, and whose leadership is interested only in bureaucratic self preservation."
The Air Force isn't the only target of Peters' verbal darts:
"Although our think tanks harbor some quality minds ... their contributions are diluted and finally overwhelmed by the awesome volume of nonsense produced by those welfare agencies for intellectuals. Ranging from the unbearable pretentiousness of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to the hucksterism of the RAND Corp., these parasites consume much and contribute nothing."
"Diplomacy is dead. Countless zombies continue to populate embassy receptions or feed from the trough at the United Nations, but as an effective tool to solve the world's most important problems, diplomacy as we have known it is finished."
"Europe doesn't have a superior morality. It has amnesia."
"It may be correct that we cannot kill our way out of this problem, but we can make the problem much more manageable by killing the right people."
I don't agree with all Ralph has to say (especially about the Air Force), but I sure like the way he says it. Read the book. Laugh and learn. |
