Very, Very Political..read at your own risk :)

[Wagner]

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.

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.



David S. Maxwell
COL, U.S. Army